The Port of Ondraise

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!!

I had a bit of slow progress, as my work hours are much less and it’s the holiday season. But I have learnt enough of vue to make some cool cartoon looking skies and some plants.

I am now past the million polycount.. But I’m not worried. I set up a whole bunch of plants and textured them in Softimage and each render is under 20 seconds on my quadcore.

I am avoiding AO on leaves, and I haven’t added lights, the rest of the textures, grass, other plants, other geometry, etc. But with time the wrinkles will be ironed out. Slow progress, but it’s looking good.

Most of the trees I actually found included with trueSpace and the Parva texutre Pack. The other half, including the vines, I generated/made in vue or that free Ivy Generator.

Some of the green textures of the trees are a bit weird, and according to the art director, I’m still not sure how saturated I should make the scene look. I assume lots cause it’s a kids show.

I will be rendering in HD 1080 16:9, so that will be fun. My prior work only was in NTSC 4:3 720x486. So that will add to renders. But the idea is with DOF, all of this will only be still or small camera movements with characters composited over. Production times will be cut. But not sure if we have a computer that can edit HD……..

For the sky, I made it in Vue, and did a 360oX180o render, or a sphererical render. Then on a sphere… placed the sky. It looks quite convincing. I might play with displacement later to give it a bit of volumetrics… hey.. that’s a good idea!

But for render times, poly count, and the amount of plants i’ve got, I’m quite happy. I don’t know Vue enough to impliment a full scene with textures….

I had a bit of trouble with MentalRay’s ray depth (due to leaves alpha layering up and blocking the rays).. but I figured it out, increased raydepth and fixed it. Didn’t really change render times, just fixed the trees alpha textures.

I had an interestin talk with my boss on lighting. I love Pixar’s lighting, and hope to implement suttle DOF, and charachter highlights and light rigs like they do, also different emotional play on shadows, colors, highlights and the like. I need to be very smart with it. My boss wants to keep render times below 3 minutes, but I would prefer 5 to 10 minutes a frame. Sucks we don’t have a render farm yet…..

But so far the render times, for HD, are low. with composited characters and other things, it will look good and be fast considering the production.

BUUUUT… I have yet to create the toy house interior (expanded and unexpanded
Large house hallway
Talking Flowers
Other Flowerplants
Veggie garden plants

And textures…..

But I’m looking forward to the lighting and the compositing once I have everything built and textured!!!!

So here is a preview of the plants so far (not subdivided, yet, as to make them just a tad more organic). Sorry for the small tumbnails. Below you can check them out at larger sizes (not in order). Light is just 3 infinates. One main one with ambience, a low back fill and a rebound light from below. My boss liked it, but I thought it dead and sterile. Will work on it later =)

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…….

Esto es una banana que hice para mi nuevo pasantia que estoy haciendo. Me dieron un gran tarrea de crear 5 personajes para una serie de television para niños desde las 0 - 5 años. Me dieron la tarrea de aprender Softimage, enfocando en las texturas. Por falta de tiempo, empece con una programa que conosco bien, Truespace 7.6. Con eso hizo las maquetas iniciales, y los importe como *.obj’s a Soft image para crear la maya y texturas. Aun me falta crear una “template” de una boca y aprender como usar las texturas para armar y finalizar las 5 mayas de los 5 personajes. Pero hasta ahora ha sido divertido! Y pasado.. hmm…. 3.5 horas trabajando en los personajes. Me demorre mas en hacer la textura del ojo.