Rendering 0.4 - The Breakdown

I think I can wrap this project up and finish few more little bits. I have a week to finish my report where I just need to word few things better and link the paragraphs and then render 2-3 different views. Final thing didn't come out as I planned at first, but I still plan to do it that one over summer, I was just really slacking on the fire research unfortunately. Here is my render breakdown.

Also picture of my Nuke script tree. I did no editing to the images because it came out good out of Maya I think, so basically I just connected all the passes so I could show each one in the video. It took a while to figure out how I want to do it and if I knew how to make one image overlap the last one liek gradient from a side I would have, but I wanted to get this done, and actually am happy with the results.

 P.S. I dont like the new editing page for blogger, its stupid, old was better. If it aint broken dont fix it...

Technical Animation 0.3 - Fire Frei!

Not much on this because I just didn't want to do it... but now I have project in mind and enough time to finish it I believe. I will combine this with my other project. I need the xmas tree on fire, so I will make it a simulation, I sure hope it will work. For this I will also make the room shatter, collapse or explode to have more stuff, will have less objects in it of course.

VFX 0.6 - Nuke trees

Had some trouble at first putting together the rendered passes in Nuke, but after actually looking into one of my tutorial files I saw there was a video on it too, after that it went quickly, almost too easily, which kinda worried me. But then had some trouble with showing both object over the background, either one object didn't show fully or the plate was too bright or one object was missing shadows, eventually I managed to figure out how to fix it. Instead of having two Copy nodes connected to the plate, I connected one at the bottom of the tree for first object and that seemed to fix my problems so far, will see if it still works when I start with colour correcting.

I am ready to do it with that scene, but I would like to catch up with other two projects. The extinguisher is ready to be rendered, which I am going to do overnight and the notice board is almost ready, just need to add few more bits. It makes it easier on those two that the scene is very bright, so almost no shadows to speak of and don't need to mess with lights too much. I think thats about it for now.

 While uploading I found interesting thing, when saving renders as PNG the Use Background shader fucks it over lol  it makes an Alpha and the image format makes it empty.

Rendering 0.3 - Half way there

Been a while I made update on this. I started adding more objects into the scene once I was happy with the lights. Because of rendering time I decided to take away lots of photons and global illumination, instead I made sure I have enough to have smooth lighting across the room and then added area light to the ceiling to make it bit brighter, I think it works well so far.

I have about half of the objects done, since each time I bring something I have to create textures for it, which can take a while but I am enjoying it. I need to add and texture gift boxes, a drawer, some bottles and other decoration. This is my render so far:

Render time is around 1:30 minutes without shadows (those from ceiling) and spot lights for the tree lights, with them its under 4 minutes, I forgot to check it before posting this. So far I am pleased with how its coming out, potential changes include the chimney texture, I might make it just look like a stone instead of paint over them. Also the wall texture is too flat, I tried to add little bit of noise but there is too  much of it when rendered in hull HD, so I might make textures for sections of the wall, like a dirt somewhere, bumps and peeled off wallpaper/paint to make it bit more random, but only if I have time after I finish with all object.

After some feedback and looking around the scene I noticed that the windows were hollow and had gaps between them, so photons were getting stuck between the frames and it was making them glow strangely, but it should be fixed now. Also the floor I had to change a little, some of the boards were too far from each another, making it look unrealistic, it wasn't fun moving almost each of them individually.

VFX 0.5 - Nuke start

So since last post, finished rendering the planter and barrier on full HD and all passes as TARGA, it took 14 hours. Next time I will render everything as EXR already or half resolution and TIFF and less frames. It had 250 frames and I ended up with 3000 files, 60GB. In Nuke I built my EXR out of it and it went down to 1GB, so all good. In Nuke I started putting it together and got myself confused with some passes and how they need to be merged together because I didn't manage to make it look like beauty pass, but will have to sort it out soon. Other two objects are almost done, the Extinguisher needs specular map and be rendered. The notice board needs lights set up, specular map and be rendered.

Render test of the barrier and planter:

VFX 0.4 - Alpha Bumps

Due to lack of time today I only had time to work on bump maps for the models. I wanted to do Normals maps as well but they always came out kind of blurry and didn't look good on the models at all, and I am not sure why. I don't think I have the time to learn everything about normal maps so I will stick with Bump maps that I know and can get the look I want. Tomorrow hopefully I can finish specular maps as well and sort out the models in the scenes, so I can start rendering and working in Nuke.

VFX 0.3 - Alpha textures

Seems like the more work I want to do the less time I have do it, but started texturing and so far seems okay. The extinguisher was taking bit too long and still needs few more maps, but its almost ready. Only thing I am mostly worried is how long multi-pass rendering will take, but fortunately I don't have many things in the scenes, so should be okay. Starting to be confident I can finish this in good quality on time.

I made a test render with the extingusher where I am using the HDR image as lighting source and it seems good, just need to add shadows, fix the brightness of the sign and of course remove the reflecting wall.

The concentrate planter and barrier shouldn't take long, from quick texture test I can see everything matches up all right, just need to play with the textures more to fix them up. The planter needs to be bit more cleaner, as does the barrier. And then needs fixing on the inside faces that can be seen above the dirt. The barrier needs the sides match the front and back where they connect, right now it can been seen, but that will be fixed with less dirt on it. I will also add some small cracks to it, with bump/normals map. I placed them over the actual footage to compare colours and I think if I make the grey little brighter I will have no trouble setting up in Maya/Nuke to match it to the scene.

The notice board was kinda easy, only two pieces, but also disappointing because it doesn't look like the notice board in the footage. But it should be okay. I might make the wood texture more random, like so its not all orange, but I think it can be done with soft bump map. I will also add some images and papers onto the board itself. I think the texture might have to be little brighter to match with the scene, but shouldn't be too hard to do with lights and in Nuke.  

VFX 0.3 - My First HDR Lightprobe

Because the HDR thing can be pretty useful for more than just reflections on the object that match the scene I watched a quick tutorial and then did my own. It is also part of our assignment to make one. I am pretty happy with the result actually, will see how it works in the scene itself tomorrow. The original images are huge, so below are just smaller PNGs for preview, one is the final result and the other 4 HDR images I worked with to make it, those are already 6 original photos forged together in Photoshop before they were unwrapped.

It was quite fun to make, I enjoyed it. The final image is seamless panorama, so the ends connect perfectly.

Rendering 0.2 - Basic Lighting Setup

After doing some research and tutorials it was time to actually start doing some work on my assignment scene. It took a little while to get to where I am now, but I have almost clear understanding how it all works, at least about final gathering, global illumination and shaders. I really like how little things can affect the whole scene and the colours, its pretty cool.

Global illumination was fairly straight forward, nothing crazy about it once I figured out number of photones and all that. After playing around I eventually settled for this:

Render time: 0:19
Objects: Floor and walls
Lights: 1
Photones Intensity: 3,000,000
Gloal Photones: 50,000
Radius: 15

My first problem first Final Gathering was that it was making the scene way too dark for some reason. After looking around for solution I began to change the photon colour bounced from the floor and walls to something much lighter, which helped to brighten the scene. Also adjusting accuracy of final gather and using Radius Quality Control helped. Not sure if its best practice but so far I am setting the RQC max to 10% of the scene size units and min to 1% of it, so in my case it was 46 and 4.6, the scene or at least the main room is around 460 units. Below are some results of trying around different settings and position for the photon emitter light.

At the last picture I do like the "sun" reflection in the window, which I might revisit later, but there will be big ass tree in front of the windows so shouldn't worry about them too much. I have also took down diffuse of the windows frame for photons which made them much less shiny. I might turn it off or make it bit more less later but as I said, they wont be probably visible with all the objects. This is the final image for today:

Render time: 2:18
Objects: Floor and walls
Lights: 1
Photones Intensity: 4,000,000
Gloal Photones: 50,000
Radius: 15
Final Gather accuracy: 250
Radius Quality Control: Max 46, Min 4.6

And for the end, I changed the wall material a little and used spheres for my tests. In the scene there is no bump for the walls yet, not sure I need one. I am happiest about the wood material so far, I really like how it looks in the scene, especially on the floor. I like the marble too so far but will see how it will look in the scene itself.

Technical Animation 0.2 - Burn Baby Burn

More fire stuff! This time we were doing particles system in Mata, more specifically nParticles and fluid smoke. Which is actually quite fun, just need to play with the smoke more to figure out how to optimize it so its faster to cache and then render, it was taking bloody ages and then it also stopped simulating towards the end, the smoke just stopped while the particles kept moving, not quite sure what went wrong there.

Rendering 0.1 - Texture Test

So in this module we are learning how to make photo-realistic renders, sort of, its mostly about how to set up lightning and how it all affects the scene, which I find very interesting. Not sure I wanna do it as career, but the things you can do with lights is pretty cool. Anyway, as my project I am doing Xmas scene. I want to make three renders, or attempt to. First with day light, one during night and one where three is on fire with a shadow of a little girl in the floor coming from doorway.

I started with the colour scheme and thinking about textures. Thanks to MEL scripting I have learned to work with something I personally enjoy, as in colours and theme so I went with purple-brown, mainly, also black, yellow and white to break the colours.

My inspiration:

 

 Test textures; black metal, purple wrapping paper, purple wall, brown wood floor, white marble. I am considering adding basic colour textures to the scene itself to see how colours will go together, but I think I have pretty good idea. Soon I have to start setting up lights, by end of the week I want list of texture tests and lit up scene.

 

VFX 0.2 - Let it burn

Started doing texturing for the fire extinguisher, it is really detailed so there is few texture maps for it. I went 1k square for the textures, should be big enough for HD, the camera is close to it but not extreme close ups. Making the colour maps took big longer than expected, but I am happy with them so far, next I gotta do bump and specular maps. Probably will play with the colours bit more too. By end of the week I want to have all 4 objects textures. The others wont take as long because they are in distance and quite simple, where the extinguisher has lots of details. I think I spent the most of making the instructions on it, it was images at front and both sides. Since I want it to look realistic I took time to get it more or less like it is in real life for CO2 extinguishes.My work so far (only colour maps):

VFX 0.1 - First Test

The lack of posts it due to not having much practical work as before. As much as I work on project its mostly research so far but I will be starting to update more often again as I will be starting doing actual work can show, starting with Visual Effects.

First I wanna say I really like Nuke, its like PhotoShop but for movies, which is awesome. It even works better than PhotoShop in my opinion. In the course we are learning how to use Nuke and NukeX for tracking and composting, which I really like as well. Tracking is so much better with Nuke, I love it.


For my project I have to texture 4 object and then places them into a live action scene so it looks realistic, its exactly what I'd like to eventually do as a job. Today I just did a test of exporting Nuke 3D scene, importing it to Maya and adding an object into it, its not perfect but I think it shows it can be done.


So over the next few weeks I need to, texture all the objects, track the scenes (or use already tracked ones) and composite them. I will be starting with the texturing so I have the models ready and need to figure out if it will make difference if I track myself, if not I will track just one scene so I can add it to the show-reel.


Here the video I have made today. The scene is actually something I will make look much better for final assignment.

MEL script 0.5 - Marks

For my graveyard project I got 80.5% which pleasantly surprised me, it was way more than my animation (67) and about the same as my matchmoving (79). Apparently I could have improved it by adding animation to the bats' wings, which I probably would have if I had more time, should have started a lot sooner on it. Hopefully I learned not to leave stuff to last week or so this semester.

Technical Animation 0.1 - Rigid Body

So after two weeks of university I got around to post stuff here. As my optional I have chose Technical Animation, which I thought will be scripting but it turned out to be all about dynamics, which is awesome. We started with rigid body basics and how it works, first lab tasks were to make domino effect and then collapse of a building like geometry. I enjoy doing this, look forward to do more.

Domino - no real problems with that. I used a curve and then a script to duplicate the domino geometry along the curve. It always made a lot more than I needed so I had to delete at least half the pieces so they would be spaced like that and then so I can run the simulation more or less smoothly.

Collapse - No problems making it, only found out that at the start it goes slow, I think its because the geometry doesn't just stand still when stacked on top of each another like that. I will need to look into it more, when the ball crashed into it all goes smooth again. I like that it is different each time, sometime the second building collapses quickly, sometime not at all.

MEL script 0.4 - Grave Animation

Fucking blogger is too bloody slow with uploading and editing, idiot thing.Anyway, I just wanted to add that the grave in middle has an animation in it.

MEL script 0.3 - Graveyard Generator

I will never learn to do my assignments on time, well start them on time, I always meet the deadline. Now I have like 3 days to finish my MEL script assignment, which is not the easiest, but I am sure I can do it. I did lots of progress today and day before. I think the longest part was to make all the models I need. I am 99% finished with those, so all good. I have some of the procedures and interface elements written down too. It took a while to design stuff and then figure out how the script is going to work and efficiently.

Tomorrow I will be finishing off the interface code and all the procedures as well, it shouldn't take too lonf if I wont fuck around. I would like to be able to render everything and make a video about it that day too, so on Sunday I can just write my report and on Monday finish it off.

Hardest things so far was to find out how to enale button that starts un-enabled, took me like hour on the net to find out. And then designing how the graves will be layouted, but that wasn't too complicated.

Here are some images, grave models, textured models, layout test and then with fences and gate.

Blitz Games Open Day

Didn't do much for a while since I am trying to rest over the holidays, which isn't really working out, but meh, watching Battlestar Galactica is kinda fun too. Anyway, I hope to get into Open Day for Blitz and they asked for some work as part of the registation, since I'd like to get into enviroment art and texturing if I go to Games Industry I chose to make low poly enviroment. The brief said they will give special consideration for models suited for games, hence why low poly, hopefuly they will get it.

I did a gate because I wanted to do something with textures rather than polygons, and since I saw in Hitman how they did fences I thought it might be fun to do, which it was. It looks like it has lots of details, but in fact its only like one place with transparent texture on it.