The Port of Ondraise

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 =)

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!

 

These are leaves and a twig i made in trueSpace. It has a cool realtime leaf shader I like much. I tried to simulate it in Softimage, but it’s translucency is not as cool and takes much longer for a similar result.

These are some of the things  I did today. I textured the Tree’s UV’s, or made them. It was a feat, as I never have done a UV so complicated to unwrap before. But I found Softimages UV editor and unwrap tools to be exceptional.

Later I crosswalked it to Mudbox and made a quick trial bump texture with a rough texture. I am not sure at what detail to make everything, but I’ll do it officially morrow.

For texuters I found many free royalty free textures online, it was Christmas. =)

So morrow.. I’m tempted to try Mari, but I’ll stick to mudbox for now, atleast get the textures and normal maps sorted before I continue to specular maps and texture maps maybe in Mari.

My model I’m working on currently, had to clean up a few year old model, and reference it to a plasticine model. I am now currenly working on the UV’s before I texture it and add normal maps and a bit more detail. Maybe I’ll make a higer detail displacement map also. not sure.

A Sculptris head I made then imported and lit up in TS. Sculptris has a cool GPU render engine that handles it’s models really well. It is also free (by Pixologic) and VERY easy to learn and use. It’s good for turning bits of digital clay into something cool looking very fast. This model was made in under 30 minutes as my very frist time working with sculptris..(tho it isn’t that good! lol)

Check this out, I made realtime reflections and refractions! Within a directx render engine, a 2 year old program defunct. It’s a cool program. I’ll keep having fun =)