The Port of Ondraise

Another test. I am getting discouraged with the quality I’m working at. It still is taking too long for the render times, tho i have doubled the quality with the same time, instead of 1 beauty shot, i have 11 passess, 3 layers, and with that, under the same time, double quality. The 3rd layer, or the one with the animation.. well I still need to work on that 

Another Pass test. Just with more plants. I am still under 6 minutes for a 720P HD frame. So not bad.

With this lot, I have 5 passess. Diffuse, Shadow, AO, Leaf Alpha, Z Depth

The DOF is weird, but I’m just stoked I have DOF like the such.

So! These are Pass experiments, to drop the render times and find ways of working around things to get thigns to look good! So here is a 5 pass render with DOF done in a compositing system in post production. it’s good to play with this stuff, the possibilities are endless!!

More veggetation! i need to learn how to do some render passess, and work on different lighting and things. Render times are too high…. still missing textures but slowly working on that!

Here… Finally finished most Macro modelling for the scene. Also, added vines (a free ivy generator, just set up, click and grow! Download free here), cleaned most meshes, and finally imported them into Softimage to run through UV’s and textures in Mudbox/Paint.net among other programs. I will add more geometry and objects when needed (obviously built in TS and exported later, it’s easy there), and will also work with Vue for more foilage. Most backgrounds are actually being made by hand/painted and will be projected through different cutout type background layouts.

The sky I will probably make a few 360 maps from Vue, and throw them into half spheres.

I will also freeze the trees, as you can integrate Vue to Sofimage, but I am not sure how the renders will be.

Tutorialwise.. I need to start cramming in knowledge of hair, grass, foilage, textures, geometry painting, etc. I also should start learning ICE in softimage, which looks incredibly powerful!! But littly by little. It’s Christmas season, and the year’s work is over.. just take it chill…….

Finally the week is over. The crazy weekend to begin. I want to go home, eat, sleep, drink mojitos and have a good time.

But Here is my garden progress so far. I think nearly all the modelling is done in TS, and now I can export to Softimage, and using Vue, populate it. I also have to make grass, trees, bushes, plantes, etc.

Things to model :

Fill the flower boxes with dirt.

Talking flower characters

Hanging flowerpots

Cacti

Sandpit stuff

House furniture

Hallway

Etc… Much to do.

I found a free IVY generator which is really cool. It does it over your objects, so it was fun. I haven’t applied the alpha textures to the leaves yet, but it’s cool. =)

I also finishedt he footpath.

In softimage I will UF and texture everything, and add the grass. That will be another challenge. The place has many elements.

I am not sure what my boss will say to the very bushy ivy, but we’ll see…. Enjoy!

This is what I’m working on now. A whole back yard/park/garden/miniature world for a miniseries of 20 minutes each. The idea is to have an awesome background, and never have to render more than a couple of frames, then rig seperate lights to the characters and render them over shadow catchers. With postprocessing, I compose the lot, thus making the render times lower. This is being mostly built in TS, cause I like the render engine with it, shadows and lights aid creativity. =) 

This is what I built today. Texures and an interior/furniture tomorrow….

Did this in trueSpace.

I finally finished the textures for this character! I did them all mostly in Mudbox, including normal maps (sculpted over the model). I also made the clothes textures in Mudbox. I tried Mari, but it kept on freezing my computer. So didn’t learn much on Mari, but it looks VERY PROMISING.. if only it worked.

I did all the UV unwrapping in Softimage, as it’s exceptional.

I made this dude all in trueSpace, it’s modelling tools with Sculptris like shaders with shadows makes the polygon modelling fun! It’s as powerful, if not equal to softimage’s poly modelling. Tho it lacks some little tools… But great stuff!

Textures and render was done in Softimage. It has a nice SSS texture in it. =) Tho I still need to titivate it a little! But it’s looking amazing!

Here is the update for this character I’ve been doing at work. The current project is really for next year, but I have yet to make a 20 minute pilot, practically on my own within the next 3 months. Which is gonna be killer…. But I’m looking forward to the challenge. This character is finally finished.

He just needs shapes and a good rig. I am not sure how I am going to transfer the shapes from each mesh detail yet, but I think Softimage has a good GATOR plugin that transfers the like quite accurately. I’ll experiment.

I made 3 meshes, one is a Low poly count with a lower texture quality. The other two are close up and and extreme closup versions so we can do shots of bugs crawling on him.. as they are his friends. The high detail mesh contains texture maps of 8192 pixels square with a level 3 or 4 mesh subdivision extraction.

Concerning render times.. it does worry me, that is why i made a lower mesh detailed character, and we kept the leaf count low. I also plan to create all the scenery as seperate renders to recycle of the television series to then only have to render the characters over shadow catchers and clever composition.

The leaves and eyes and twigs were done in TS, even UV’s in TS. I found out how to import *.X which preserve other programs UV’s (softimage’s) and used the Free OBJ importer/exporter to export the *.obj, which also preserves the UV’s very nicely. Concerning importing *.obj’s and *.x’s, use the Modelside, Workspace side is lacking on it’s import features…….

i like TS’s previews, it aids on the whole texture process, visualization and planning of the production. Instead of putting up with great old OpenGL’s lovely grey lightless schemes…. TS beats it.

I tried to simulate Parva’s leaf effect in Softimage, but using SSS or transluceny made the leaves a bit heavier to render, so I had to sacrifice that feature and used different ambient settings. The ball was an inspiring texture i did simulate in Softimage and Mental Ray.

Also realized TS does go slow when you work with texture maps of 4096x4096 pixels or larger (works fine after it loads all the maps, but can take a while between camera moves or object selection). Good to keep that in mind and just work with 2048x2048 as higher textures.. unless I work with skies. Good to know. Need a dual card…..

I did all the textures in Mudbox. Mudbox certainly is a good leanway between Sculptris and Z-brush, and it is Autodesk compatible all ways.

I tried Octane and Thea recently also. With Octane, I had trouble with Softimage’s plugin for Octane, so I could not test it… but other than that, I like Octane. Thea is more feature heavy than Octane, thus much more complex. Octane is easy (very easy) to pickup.
Concerning animation.. BOTH are lacking, tho Octane beats Thea for sure. Thea only does basic transform/rotate/scale animations. Octane can, technically freeze each frame from your parent program, exports it, then renders it, obviously after configuring the first frame’s lighting/textures. It is not Batch render friendly tho….. Which sucks, as I usually put up multiple shots overnight sometimes…. Thea was also not batch render friendly… I guess in this regard learning to script in their language would help.

I need to try other render engines. I hear ARNOLD for softimage will be a semi hybrid render system, streamlined for speed and MentalRay like un biased quality. It is bloooooody fast. But it is only beta….. As far as I know, Rainy with a Chance of Meatballs and Monster House used ARNOLD in some shots to render near realtime unbiased renders with cinema quality. It looks promising. Can’t wait till it’s released! I found a Beta version lurking round in the internet, gave it a shot, but there is no documentation, no tutorials, nothing.. so no idea how to get it running properly, but it is much faster than Mental Ray. From sneek previews of 4 trillion polygon faces rendered in seconds with GI and raytracing, I DO like the sounds of it!! and it will be also fully integrated into Softimage, a program that is up to par with 3Dmax and Maya.

I’m giving up on the Render aspect of production for now and focussing on getting this Pilot done produced, let the render wrangling hassle me later….

Enjoy the pics!