photoman

Update! First off, THANKS! for the feedback, it expands my knowledge and gives me a better perspective on what I am doing!! Textured the Barn, all using 2 different textures with a bump map for each and a displacement map on the roof (Still tweaking all of them). I dont know what else to model right now. I have been enjoying the modeling for I rarely ever model. The next step (if the modeling is finished) is to create the terrain (Valley) and set the scene and atmosphere. Add some grass and misc textures in there and Im done. The hard part though is getting everthing to feel in scale. Im going to spend a lot of time with the skydome and fog settings as well as using a single sun light w/ shadows and the global ambience settings. More coming! Photoman PS Please C&C

Quick Update Rigged the windmill (Yes it was a hard task for me so go ahead and laugh).Took me about 5 minutes surpisingly, I even managed to add constraints on the rotators. Windmill_Rigtesta.mov Texture Time for the Barn! Photoman

Update! Modelled the barn. Very basic, no interior at all just the roof and walls. I plan to decal texture it all so that'll be easy to render. Im thought that I should rig the windmill so that it can turn and spin. So.. theres going to be a lot undo'ing and cursing for I have never ever rigged!! More off the machine soon. Photoman

Update, finished modeling the water tower as well. Connected the two models in a action and rendered them. The ambience occ./wireframe render is slightly not right, the water tower is now at a different scale but the splines are the same. I also textured using darktrees. I tried using bitmapps but wasnt getting the right look. More on the way, Photoman

Thanks for the feedback , I just checked the patch count and there is only 1906 patches! For the texture Im going to probably use a bitmapped based procedural texture using a lot of GIMP work and tweeking in A:M. Just noticed, Should I add a pipe or something coming from the top? As well for another point of interest, what about a water tower and a small shack of some kind? Just brainstorming Photoman

That patch was the blade I used for sweeping the other ones. I'll remove it when Im done. I finished the modelling aspect late last night and set a couple renders and here they are: More comming, still have to texture the windmill, then model other points of interest. Photoman

Hello y'all! Been inspired recently to pickup an old project of mine. So imagine a summer day, a breeze whispering to the trees and creating paths through the grass on the hills, gently spinning the windmill that time and nature have left behind. Thats my scene in a sentence. Ive gotten started on the modeling of the windmill. I plan to "try" and create my own procedural rusty metal shaders but may resort to decals or a darktree shader. I will also use hair for the golden grass and leaves on the oaktrees. I may model a barn or some other point of interest too. More coming Photoman

My god the details! You really do have a talent for splining! Keep going! Photoman

Thanks for the comments ! I plan to rerender as a quicktime movie rather than a uncompressed sequence. I dont know too much about clothe and stuff that seems to be Vern's territory The ball is just hash's built in basket ball material (materials->plugins->hash). I added a noisemap for the bumps.

The "master" bone (For lack of the right word) is set at the feet instead of the center of gravity. I thought it looked cool

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

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

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

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

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^

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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