[My go at it]

Hi! Here is what my limited imagination came up with right now. Been busy with school and swimming so.... progress is going to be slow but I'll try to make the deadline.

Very basic scene. About 15ish thom models and a basketball.

I rendered it out originally as a PNG sequence because I had a problem with the bump on the basketball and A:M would crash. That way I could figure what frame it was on. Fixed that now. Compiled in AE with a curves adjustment and a slight vignette.

PTB_RUND_low.mov

Its a hefty file but anything compressed below that looked horrible. (Uncompressed was 261mb)

Here is a extra high res grab.

 

I know its not the best but my imagination is being put on hold for a while

 

C&C Please!

 

Photoman

[render size]

Try apples new H.264 Codec it is really good for quality and file size.

 

Photman

[Step One: Make A Ball]

Wow, that is a great A:M color setup! You have just inspired me to change mine!

 

Photoman

[in betweening and key frames]

To screen shot if your on a mac just shift-apple-3 and it creates a png the same dimensions of your screen on your desktop.

 

Photoman

[Dawn at the Rocks]

Finished! Took only 4 hours to render it! (25min a pass 3x3) I rendered to OpenEXR with light buffers, depth, and all the other goodies. I also rendered a seperate depth image because the buffer in the original image came out bad... All in all this is probably one of the fastest projects I've done. Counting all time spent creating it clocks in at about 5 hours + 4 hours rendering. Hope y'all like it!

Final with a quick levels adjustment:

Screen grab of all the buffers from the OpenEXR

Sand Material (Will post later)

Water Material (Will post later)

C&C Welcome

 

Photoman

 

PS The final OpenEXR file was 70Mb

PSS Not a complaint^

[Dawn at the Rocks]

More done! I added some flocked birds (Great feature really powerful!) and weathered the chair. I also did a bunch of tweaks here and there. As for the graduated wet-dry sand... I ran into some problems when dealing with the gradients. After about 1 hour of constant change value-render-repeat I gave up, I don't want to create different maps to decal for the placement of wet sand either. I also adjusted the light so one can see more of the rocks detail and other misc details. I think Im about done with this scene so Ill hit the giant render button tonight!

This is not the current scene but close enough.

Screen shot of current scene

Render Settings:

Size: 3000x1600 (YES I KNOW THIS IS A BIG SIZE AND I AM NOT COMPLAINING OR GRUMBLING ABOUT RENDER TIMES NOR FILE SIZES! AND YES THIS IS FOR THE SIDE OF A AIRPLANE HANGER*)

Passes: 9 (3x3)

File Type: OpenEXR

Shadows, particles, fog, reflections: On (Reflections at level 3)

 

I also figured out the Villa plugin from ToonNation is a good plugin to adjust waters reflectivity and refractivity.

 

C&C Always welcome!

 

Photoman

 

*Humor

[Pass the Ball]

Im in though my animating is more sloppy than ... well a sloppy joe!

[Dawn at the Rocks]

Update. Did a lot work today. I got the sand material to look better and I modeled a beach chair for the scene. I also did some more grass and atmosphere/lighting work. I used several material effectors to give the rocks and sand a green algae look. Im probably going to change the hair underwater to a image of something ocean like (Google search....). A patch didnt render on the shot b/c the camera is too low so Ill fix that. I also took a eagle model of the AM disc spice things up. I plan to add/tweak the scene a bit more. I still think that the sand needs to look more beach like.

 

The chair, Its a darktree texture with a seperate bump map. Doesnt look great but its not going to be close up in detail.

 

C&C Welcome, I need it

 

Photoman

[Dawn at the Rocks]

The plan (at least my usual plan) is to go not for photorealism but to create something that is still beautiful, a still. It would take much longer to set things up to scale to make a animateable set.

Yes the grass is using the hair system. (Check here for a download of the hair I used in my previous project. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...4764&st=15)

The reflections are a little problematic because I have to find the balance between transparency and reflectivity. Usually for water I just shoot up the reflectivity to 100%.

 

Thanks!

 

Photoman

[Dawn at the Rocks]

Hi, got an idea for a new project!! Ill see if I can upload a sketch but it involves an ocean shore with 2-3 large rocks and various small ones as the focal point. Grass and maybe a old beach chair or fence in there too. I have some of it done (see pic). I need to work on the sand texture/shader. I really want it to look real so I'm going to be spending a lot of time doing that.... The rocks are going to be a modified version on the one I used on my previous project. The water was kinda interesting to do. I had to adjust the transparency and reflectivity to get the right look. I wanted to use the Index of Refraction, density, and transparency settings for more realistic water but I believe those only work with radiosity. So... more tomorrow (Just got back from a big swim meet).

Photoman

[Grass Foothills]

Sigh... I dont want to rerender so I guess I'll just matte it and replace the sky.... Here is a quick video I did in AfterFX using the depth map:

I had a few problems with the compression so mind the quality.

 

Hills_Logo_2.mov

Photoman

[Grass Foothills]

A small critique I mentioned earlier. The sky image is a photo right? (mountains as well?) You may want to use a higher res photo or a "better" one. It appears to have not fared well in the upscaling of the render. It looks like a small image that was scaled up. It looks as if there might be some strange blotchy pixel scaling artifacts

 

The sky is a image of course, I got it from cgtextures.com . Its a huge 8k spherical mapped image I just decal on to a half sphere for my skydomes. (They have hundreds! for free!!) I usually make my skydomes really big my scenes b/c it removes some of the spherical distortion that happens if you animate the camera, it also gives the viewer a better sense of being outside. That could the reason for the blotchy sky pixels. The mountains are actually rendered in A:M with the rest of the scene. As for the artifacts... I used the GIMP for the upscaling and the interpolation method was set to the Sinc option. It was after bilinear and bicubic so it must be better right?

 

Photoman

[Grass Foothills]

OK. SIGH.... The whole problem was solved by restarting my computer Everything would render beautifully, I even got a few passes at 3000x1600 (4hr passes) but had to hit the cancel button to do a school project. So I just rendered at 2000x1067 and used The Gimp to upres it to 4500x2400 and did a quick unsharpen mask. I had rendered it originally as a OpenEXR to get the depth map but since my scene was actually really small scaled it didnt work. So I just set fog to white and adjusted that and turned on the null shaders and I got a great depth map. (Will post a video I made in AfterFX of the DOF using the map) The image looks great!!

2hours 5pass @ 2000x1067

5min for 1pass

 

I just want to thank everyone who helped or contributed a post to this fun filled thread. It really does help (I now know not to render at 20 Megapixels )

 

 

Photoman

 

Edit-PS Looking at the depth map, the scene would look good with heavy fog and a slightly different camera angle closer to the rock and tilted up more.

 

Edit2- On the note of 1gb images, I once read a article in a photo magazine (I think it was DigitalPhotoPro) and they talked about using a 39 Megapixel Hasselblad camera to take a picture of a Ferrari Enzo for Epson as a "test" for their new printer. After the took the picture and did their magic in photoshop they had a 3gb Tiff (The original raw file was 150mb) That they sent to Epson to be printed at 3x4'. They used one of those Uber Mac 8-core towers w/ 16gb RAM.

[Grass Foothills]

Still tangled in some render problems so I decided to upload some of the materials I used for all to use ! They include the grass and rock materials with a sample project.

Rock:

w/Displacement @ 250%

w/o

Displacement alone

Grass:

Pack:

Grass_and_Rock.zip

 

Enjoy

 

Photoman

 

PS Im just going to render at a 2k resolution (2000x1067), the hair has me in a tangle.

EDIT: Going to render in parts and composite. Seems like a logical idea.

[Grass Foothills]

OK, Ill take this a lesson b/c of how much flak I am getting for my pet peeve of ultra high resolution Im going to rerender at 3000x1600 my usually medium size.

 

Photoman

[Grass Foothills]

Hit yet another render wall. Im using the AA render, ok, so after 36 hours it hasn't finished rendering the grass! It took it about 3 hours to render patches and anti-alias but now it just doesn't move at all. AND it displays weird numbers. For multipass it took about an average of 50min per pass so 50minx16pass (Equivalent of AA)= 13+1/3 hours and Im at 36 hours now. I'm render at 4500x2400px, I got a succesfull render at 750x400 the other day (That took about 30min).

 

Ideas?

 

Photoman

[Grass Foothills]

Oh, one more thing. It is a little late for this render because you are already over 9 hours into it. But a practice that will save you much grief in the future is to render a very small final image first. Just big enough so you can tell if there are going to be any major problems. There is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you wait several hours for an image to render, only to discover something didn't render like you had intended. The preview (Q and Shift-Q) renders are just quickie previews. A small "render to file" is the best test.

 

I always try to do that, It also gives me an guestimate on the final render time. There was that one time I did a 28 hour radiosity render and it just showed white ..... Thanks though for reminding me!

[Grass Foothills]

Hmm.... now I guess I shouldn't render that high My only reason is that I like zooming in and seeing as much detail as I can.

 

As for the megapixel argument. SLR's usually (should) have an as[ect of 3:2 b/c their sensors are just smaller version of the 35mm (24x36mm) slide. I once heard someone say that a proper exposed 35mm color SLIDE film slide has about 25 megapixels of detail.

 

In the end I should (will) stop using the megapixel term in CG and save it for photography.

 

 

Photoman

 

PS 9hours into render about 1-3 more

[Grass Foothills]

Im going by megapixels. I figured that the average digital SLR is now has around an average of 15 Megapixels (Medium format has as high as 40 and large format has a sensor that shoots at 61!!!!!) so 6000x3200=19.2 megapixels vs 3000x1600 is 4.8 megapixels. Though I guess I should just go for something in the 10 megapixel range and call it a day ... So that would be (finding calculator.....) 4500x2400.

What DPI does A:M render at?

 

Photoman

[Grass Foothills]

Hi! I decided to move this over here so that it would actually be in the right subforum. Here is the link to the original:

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=34739

So continuing, I finished everything for the most part. The render problem I had had fixed itself* so I double checked everything and did the final touches, tree here rock there.

 

*NOW, my rendering problem is that every 4th pass won't render. What I mean is that everyother pass is about 47minutes (3000x1600) and the 4th (4 out a 5pass) just keeps on chuggin for about nine hours. Stuck on rendering hair..... SO... I guess I'll just setup a AA render and call it a day.

Here are some more shots etc.

Screenshot of scene

No grass/hair/leaves

Here is the scene with the hair problem fixed. But is not up to date on layout.

Im going to set the final render tonight. The settings I plan to use are:

Size: 6000x3200px

File Type: Targa w/ Alpha (To composite sky later)

Render Type: AA (Anti-Alias)

Fog: Yes

Reflections: No

Particles/Hair: Duh!**

Shadows: Yes

Ambience Occlusion: No

 

 

**

Total Hair Count (w/ leaves): 24648 Hairs (Over 40k before I optimized scene )

Total Textures Maps: 7

 

I will post the materials and grass when I finish the render.

 

Thanks For The Help!!

 

-Photoman

[rendering materials quicker for tests]

Set multipass on and to 1 pass. That should render faster. OR use the raytrace preview render. Press shift-q and click the screen or right-click-shift-q and drag a box over the portion you want to render.

 

Photoman

[Newbie question]

The only use 10k+ patch models have are for terrains. (I've made some models that have 30k patches, near crashed my system to render shaded ) You can use 2-3k patch models for pretty much anything else. If you are looking for details use bump and displacement maps.

 

Photomans

[animation master]

Or if you need the scene to be complex use proxy models, or low patch models which can be later switched with the high detailed ones.

Are you running on a mac or windows? I know from experiance that the windows version of A:M is a bit more stable then the Mac version but that shouldn't make too much of a difference.

 

Photoman

[A:M 15e decal corruption]

That has happened to me when I apply 2 of the same decal on a high patch model. Though I do believe it is your graphics card artifacting.

 

Photoman

[Marble Roller Coaster]

Thanks!

The song is called: "The Contradanza" by The Planets. I got it from a 100 track TRANCE album which my friend lent me (CD's).

It's not on itunes though, I checked.

 

Photoman