United3dArtists Archive

First steps of modeling!

I have made a concept sketch on my handy phone. I had a good quick colour sketch too, but I forgot to save it when i closed the app by accident and lost it.... bah. Problems with highly sensitive touch screens....



Try not ask too many questions as to know what it is, but you'll see shortly! Something... "out of this world". The pixlelization is due to another app of mine.. ehm.. not the best of ideas, but it's there. I will be playing a lot with textures, my lighting using WS and compositing of Blender. Maybe effects there too. But for now I have to rush and get some models out!!!! Then UV them.... and paint them, probably in blender and Sculptris.

Wish me luck!

Made the elements of the tree.. maybe will quickly make something for fruit holding apparatus of the plant. This will glow in the dark.

With cool glow effects, you can make false GI quite easily.

I had a brilliant idea to connect the camera or eye position data to a LOD control to control an objects LOD based on a camera! For faster realtime rendering! Not sure about the UV's, but it should work.. if I know knew how.

hehehe, my asteroid (the scene) has a mad geometry, so I am auto UVing it from Blender. Eats up my dualcore machine for a moment, and look at the result! I have to have Island Spacing because in TS, the UV's need about 3 to 6 pixels bleed from Blender to look good (no seams).

This is... what I finally sorta did today. I am still trying to figure out the style of the world, but I think these trees should go on the dark side of the planet. But I was learning how to light this world a little, using my AO light rig 2 that I gave out as a prize before.

But I did the tree, roughly, and I haven't cleaned up the meshes yet, nor finished their textures, but you get the idea. The world is very featureless at the moment, no me gusta, and I'm thinking to either make it more detailed with shrubs and rocks.. but I'm not sure.. maybe some pod like flowers and other things. I may make the image in the dark side of the world lit up with the glow of the plants and the ambiance of the gas cloud the asteroid orbits in... not sure..
I will have to play with it more, and well..... time has cut me short today.
I had a bit of fun though, learning about the, though learning how directional lights work was a little annoying. Unfortunately they are like sky lights, they get dimmer exponentially when they are closer to the horizon. So to get this image like the sun was up there, bright, like midday, but with long shadow (like the moon, or some place with a thin atmosphere) I had to rotate the whole scene with the camera to it's side.....

But I'm liking the translucency of the fruit, the terrain also has some translucency, as the yellow is an algae of a sort. Not sure.

This project should be fun. I am thinking to work more in composition in Blender to get my final image, because there are some thing and looks you can't achieve even in the best of renderers.

Now.. for some sleep. It's late, and I have a hard week's work in front of me..... I am not sure where I'm going to find some time for this......

I need to make the table, the chairs, the platters, the other detail of this strange world, also work on the composition. Find a good spot for the composition on the asteroid.



Also...... I have to learn to get my "game" tricks of the trade for better handling of information, LOD's, clever lighting rigs, maybe some texture baking, and other shader switches for composition later. Once I have the workflow and world, I think this could be used for animations later with my character Minlis or Krahli.

Onwards!

THE WEEKEND IN NEARLY HERE! No drinking, not too hard partying, and some good old nerdy fun to myself.

So the plan is to rebuild the terrain as I want it, because the asteroid is prebuilt, that's a no-go.

I will probably be able to compose the world a bit better. I am thinking to use sets a little more often on the shots, get more detail and fun out of it, but the asteroid can be a base for the composition for sure. Thus this will give me a little more freedom with the lighting in realtime.

I wish I had unlimited time and the super human power of "sleeping very little and not getting tired" power.

I see lot's of competition going on. And my entry probably isn't going to be a room, and it's rather out of this world, literally.. So I'm not going to put in much effort. But here goes the development! I have decided to compose the image on the otherside of the asteroid. On the dark side, get some cooler lighting setup, so far I'm just working on the props.

Later today I'll give you more updates.

Getting closer to what I want.

It does feel a little empty though, not sure what to put into the world... more rocks? Utensils? A thing for drinking from? More details textures?

I have to hide the lights, that's for sure. Will probably make a depth pass, a mask pass, and not sure.... maybe more random stuff on the table might work.

This is the dark side of the asteroid, so I can have more jagged detail I suppose.

Final Beauty Pass.



Final Depth Pass.



A Blur and glow pass, let's see what I'll do with this... Now switching to the composite nodes of Blender.

Decided to up the texture detail, but not much on geometry. Played with the lighting and got what I wanted. I think I need to finetune my shader switcher pass workflow for TS. Also I need to think of my final composition and production for the web series... Also the final look. I like the translucent textures, but sometimes you loose it in the textures. I like the bumps TS uses and things, but that too takes away from the translucency. I need to work on some look and feel development of the series, or short film. Also, need to finish rigging the morphs for my characters.. But I think for the competition, this is good enough.

Onwards.

Realized the post process doesn't scale with the image scale, so the algorithm that calculates the blur remains the same as the image scales larger, thus making a sharper blur and the like, not what I wanted. But I think I can live with the low quality blur, as it will be composited on top.

There, this is the node setup I have to composite the images together for my final image... I did exaggerate the DOF, maybe because I am a person with short sightedness or something, it appeals to me. It also give's it a small feel to the scene. Like it's in miniature. I just need to figure out how to make a forward and back DOF in Blender.

Here is the final image!!


I found a good tutorial on DOF here. Just need to practice.

All in all, future tasks for this is learning a clean workflow for texturing shaders for different passes, making clean scenes, and working on my look and feel of my series. Personally I love DOF, and it's funky awesome. The stars and clouds in the background is also beautiful, but the rest, not sure. Also not sure on the lighting. I need to work on that a little more..... But there you go!

Added a vignette in Paint.net and there you go! I wonder how you would composite a vignette into an animation.. hmmmmm... maybe with a mask and a multiply or something.

Alrighty, I'm back in the game. I'm really late. And I probably won't have an amazing animation, but we'll see what I can do with whatever I've got.

he's ready. The key templates, as annoying as they are that you can't save them, load them and use them on demand... The system can be fixed later. I am going to now start drawing up a storyboard, make the animatic, then.. maybe just make the animatic and enrich the animation as far as timing goes. I think my time is up.

Just a thought.
Add your Attribute.
Record something with it.
Rename the Track same name as the Attribute.
Disable it until needed.
Save your object and or RsClip.

@trueBlue: So.. the attributes that are to be recorded are kept in memory within the track?

Example:

Track1 = shape1 key attribute
Track2 = matrix key attribute

Selecting Track1 will activate the shape1 key attributes within so when I hit "record" it will write to shape1 keyframes in that track??

Is that what you were referring to?

I will have to see... and check out the animation workflow..



Meanwhile, I haven't had much time to work on my animation in general, and we are already a week into December, I am not sure if the competition is over, or not... but I'll keep on doing my animation, just for the hell of it. I will make it into a TV series, but first I need to perfect my workflow. Currently my Dual core CPU is SLOW at everything, or is it just the free software? I don't know, I guess I am used to the 8 core machine at work....

I have learnt a little more in Blender as to what I want to do. I also found another cute little free program good for post process stuff Virtual Dub. With this I can add the motionblur TS does not. For compositing I have learnt to make a matte pass for the alpha channels, and using some tutorials I figured out how to use color keys for the rest of it. I also learnt, painstakenly how to do some bloom effects using a luma key. Added a background also. I was meant to animate it.. ergh.

At the current rate I am doing 1K renders, in 1080P.. but I am finding that for time's sake this is not ideal. Maybe for short film specials..... but for a webseries maybe I will go only up till 480P or 720P.

I like not having to wait days for a sequence of renders. But the process of changing the D3D shaders (using buttons and scritps, I'll share that later) to create passes for the composite in Blender and the slow Blender composite render and then the Virtual Dub motionblur on other post process stuff.... For the final image it still is a waiting game with all the rendering, unless I do it smaller....

I also have to watch the AA of the realtime renders from the WS of TS. I hope the animation is quick and easy in WS.....



But once the workflow is set, the idea is do an animation every other two weeks, or every week.. just for fun and fame.

But time is what I lack. And a decent fast computer. If only I could upgrade this to 6 cores.... or build another computer...Time is against me. I am 5 months behind schedule on my TV series, and now a week behind with this small project... ergh........... But now it's holidays phew. It's not the end of the world.

EDIT: that's the opening shot of the animation.

This is the first shot, could be much better, but with time I will make it better, and instead of using a free stock image as a background, I'll actually have some cooler styles to it! Done all in completely free software, even the editing (WAX). Composite in Blender, and.. so forth.

I am working on the second shot!

Trying out some animation errors. I quickly ran into a few.

First thing is that you can't have morphs in additive tracks. You also can't have morphs AFTER additive tracks. If you want multiple morph tracks, create your default 0 value track, then some extra tracks that are empty for morphs later. THEN you can add your additive tracks AFTER the designated morph tracks.

If you don't do this, the morph animation will corrupt your rig and make it go bonkers and there will be no fix unless you load the scene again.

I am also thinking on how I can work on the animation. In Softimage, I have animation layers (additive displacement) and animation clips and fcurves that are easy and highly customizable. The tools for Fcurves are intuitive and quick, and very very handy.

In trueSpace the clip animation and additive layered animation is already included in with the storyline, with the only weakness that Softimage has over TS is clip blending and transitions, I just need to learn how they all work and influence each other.

But the Fcurves in TS are only good for viewing curves and changing the style (pose based or linear or default bezier). They are NOT good for changing or editing, and I can view future problems later because of this (I am used to animating with Fcurves and clips very much so)

So to get fluid animation, either I learn how to create very good layered animation and dopesheet timing, and forget the curves....... or I spend A LOT of time editing the hundreds of Fcurves in the hard buggy UI of the fcurve system.
I will have to go for the first option.

But it looks good. I may also loose the textures for animating, have an animation pass (double as a shadow/ambient overlay pass?)

Working on it.. working on it. it just takes a lot of setting up for the textures.

For the texture setup, I am using scene textures (global) with a script that disconnect a shader, and reconnects another shader accordingly. It works fine for 2 states or shaders... but to think of it, how would it work with 3 or more?

More work and experimenting.

Added another shot, found some good free software for the editing and video conversion, also a good lossless codec for AVI's.

Coming on! I am not convinced about the whole timing of the two shots, but it is my first animation of the sort from trueSpace. Animation has been alright, but not that much quicker than from Softimage. I have yet to work on the quality. I think any animation is time consuming...

I am also working on how to make the channel grow, the whole product grow and make it more of an interesting concept for people to become fans of and later support.

It's a social experiment and my little project on the side that I am using for the love of art and free things in an open world.

He should be eating like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCEB_23fvaE"

That's wicked! I'd love to do it like that, but I'm not sure how much i can play with his rig like so... But all good! Thinking to animate the whole sequence and punch cameras when needed later, color grade the whole thing all at once. I need to be more efficient.

He's not sure what to think of the end of the world that the mass media yet again proved itself silly.

EDIT:

This is the third shot, decided to test new layering/animation techniques. Found out that you can't do layered matrix animation over enabled morph animations. It is better to chill with the matrix animation first, then do the detail morph animation later.

I am finally getting happier with the final composite image. Trying not to overdo the blur, decided to do it in compositing instead of with the internal bloom engine (though the internal bloom engine IS good).. I have yet to think about it and experiment.

I also am rendering from the GPU engine (like a game engine) but at twice the size then batch shrinking the images with a bilinear algorithm to get x8 GPU AA x2 or x4, depending on the size. I have yet to try other resize sampling methods, but generally they work well. I'll put a link to that free software shortly.

I really want to make tutorials on all this stuff, as I'm using heaps of programs for this final image, be it all free software, it's fun nonetheless.

Due to TS not having motion blur, I have been using a post processing software to get the blur, using Virtual Dub. I may also see how Wax does motion blur, as it also has a direct X plugin for motion blur. I will play with it and see how they work! I do like the potential of Wax's motion blur as you can change the settings, Virtual Dub is automatic and you have no settings, unless I find another replacement filter for the post processor.

The only problem with WAX is that it only works with AVI's, but I've found a largarith lossless codec... which I think i mentioned above! I LOVE THIS HOBBY! Pardon the excitement.