cfree68f
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Posts posted by cfree68f
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Me to.. I like the green number 1. The others are to plain and similar. I like the blend from gold to green. I doubt he'll be to much like Green Monkey since Monkey has his own flourescent green color that sticks out pretty well.
Great stuff as usual. This guy really reminds me of the owl Athena gave Perseus in Clash of the Titans.
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Make sure you capture the uber funny bloopers that resulted from this.. like this one.. you cant buy humor this good...
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Very Cool John,
I can actually use that technique on the project I'm working on right now. How did you do the noise in the sphere?
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I think we will need to think about tweaking the hair density if we want lower render times.
Amen to that. My witch example has fuzz on her clothes and some hair added, but I went sparingly on the density and thickened the hair enough to compensate. 16 passes at 1024x768 with raytraced shadows (2 rays) and SSS on, only took 20 minutes to render.
I think we could cut over half of Woot's individual hairs out and get results just as good or better. That should cut the render times down a bit, same on any character with hair.
My rule for whether to use multipass would be if the scene has hair in it, I'd go 16 passes, if it has no hair but fine detail, I'd go 9 and anything else would be open season depending on the shadows and whether it needed soft reflections or not.
The lighting is looking much better Kevin.
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Um yes there are. But they aren't permanent like other apps. Try out material effectors. and there might be another way to do a boolean but It escapes me right now. Man I'm getting old.There are no booleans or other tools like that -
AO will surely increase render times beyond what a single machine will do reasonably (given this is an animation).
We have a render farm and don't use AO for animations because of that reason.
We use an eight bulb light rig, to get comparable results in a much shorter time.
AO is great for stills.
Depends on if you know how to tweek the AO.. I've had lots of success rendering it for animation. You just have to know where the shortcuts are.
I've yet to come accross a situation where you couldn't avoid the need for a render farm with a little tweeking. Radiosity.. thats a different story ;-)
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more to the point.
AM does do Hardware acceleration of realtime renders, just like maya and 3d games and everything else. So your card will work most likely with AM, you may have driver issues.. I've never had any, but I've seen threads where a user says they have problem untill some driver gets installed.
Like I said before.. you have to change or "unlearn" some preconcieved notions you might have from working in a "Polygon" based app. Splines require less Mesh control points to create a surface that appears to be infinately smooth.. more similar to nurbs than poly's in that respect, but much easier to model with.
A model done in Polygons would need to have a mesh 15 to 20 times more dense to equal the smoothness of an AM model.. especially if you will be zooming in close on the model.
So in some ways AM splines are the best low patch/poly option you'll ever find. But they are nothing like Polygons except that they can be square or triangular. Preferably square (another opposite to polygons which lean toward triangulation for optimal use).
I'm wondering why you seem so concerned in purchasing a $300 application when you have laid out $7,000.00 for one which you seem to not want to use. Seems like a no brainer to me with the information you've given and recieved in this thread
I'll lay off the input at this point. I'd only be repeating myself.
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scene 1_03_01 as a benchmark where I replaced the multi-klieg-z-buffer-shadow lights on the chandelier with a single-bulb-ray-trace-shadow light and other klieg lights arrangements with a single klieg. So far, I'm getting good results.
lol.. thats the setup I had when I was getting the 4 hour renders. I'll be happy to get back to raytraced shadows as well. zbuffer is cool in a pinch but raytraced just looks better to me.
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Hey Kevin,
I havn't changed the camera settings much yet. thats a todo when I get some free time from work. the only things I changed from the original chors I got was the depth of field and the final render sizes.
I agree with the AO stuff.. it does add a nice effect.
For the record.. you don't have to delete the materials and the roof. You can turn off cast ambient occlusion for individual objects. Might be slightly more complicated since an action builds the set, but still doable, perhaps in the individual objects or even just create a plane as the only thing that casts occlusion for walls and floors.. somthing like that.
and you should be able to set the render ambient shader plugin to Ambient and a white color which will give you the black and white shading without disabling the materials.. then just turn off the lights and render ;-)
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Maya Unlimited can do certain things programatically with dynamics that are nice. Per particle control comes in handy. Fluids is nice.
Other than that.. AM does it all and beats it hands down.
Maya wishes it was in AM's ballpark when it comes to animation and constraints. I wish it was in AM's ballpark, because then it wouldn't be so painful when I have to downgrade to Maya.
And I can tell you another thing. Maya crashes on every machine I run it on about 4 or 5 times a day. Even AM alphas give me less trouble.
Like Rodney said. use the two together and composite.. don't try and take objects back and forth unless its poly's from Maya to AM. You can convert Splines to Polys and AM's modeler is definately funner and easier than trying to model organic stuff in Maya (mechanically its a toss up).
Everyone has their preferences, but every person I've introduced AM to that actually bothered to give it a try stuck with it and liked it much better than Maya.
There will be a learning curve, because AM does things the right way and Maya does them the complicated way. In some respects you'll have to unlearn what you assume with Maya, in order to clearly grasp AM, but when you do? Welcome to Nirvana :-)
ohhhhmmmmm....
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I wonder how you guys are doing the lights. Are you doing every shot individually? Do you not use a "Light model" that only has lights in it that corresponds to the lights in the throne room. Then you can just drop that into the shot chor. If it needs tweaks, just save it out as a different name. Or am I thinking it through wrong?
You'd think that wouldn't you ;-) Martin said in an earlier post that he wanted to see different takes on lighting in the beginning. So we're all doing it "our" way which was pretty different in the beginning. Now they're starting to be similar. Who knows how it will end up.
I did light all my shots that way so far.. I worked on one scene till I got what I wanted then replicated that same light set up with the ability to modify slightly out to all the other shots. I've had to go back and tweek twice now and its fairly easy to replace and redo... so I'm happy with working that way till someone shoots me in the head.
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I use both.. one for work, because the other idiots at work insist on using it and one at home and sometimes at work because I love to use it. Guess which one I love to use ;-)
That said with 14 years of experience in 3d modelling and animation and 10 years of AM and 7 or Maya.
Easy to use, fun to use, fantastic to use, I could go on and on.
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The lighting looks beautifully crisp and well balanced.
I agree with Yves second comments. I'll have to check on my machine at home as well, but the lighting looks to even. There are probably only two main sources of light in the room.. the chandalier and the window. The side lights could be main sources but if so the room looses all atmosphere. Give it some dark corners and try adding color in the ambient areas by adding a light you can move around to point from one side or the other. I did this with the window light but I moved it around allot in order to give a slight blue tone to the dark side of the characters.
the thing I do like about these shots is that we are finally getting closer to similar lighting between our scenes ;-)
Perhaps its the camera angles, but I don't remember seeing the detail you have in my shots, maybe its because I had about a 15' to 20' depth of field on all of my shots, except for the outdoor scenes.
cool stuff Kevin. I'll let you know if the washed out look was just my monitors at work or not.
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Now there's a business idea! Virtual neon light
lol.. yeah you could sell it on 2nd life and make a killing... in linden bucks ;-)
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fanboy says "Rock On"!
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try setting the initial velocity to 0 or something near that. That should let them stay close to the hand and fall from it.
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AMAZING! Great lighting to. Color me more impressed than I have been in a looong time!
Great work.
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Hey Karl,
Actually the mouth and chin arent far off from his royal highness's. You could push and pull a few points to get a good likeness. I'd love to help you out but I'm slammed, and I don't think I could look at his likeness to long. I have enough issues with pictures. I'll ask around and see if anyone I know using AM is up for it.
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You liked it? you really liked it ;-P
looks good.. I like the straw eyelashes to, but either is great. I think he needs a little eyeshadow eventually. I'll see how he looks in the lit scenes.
That dance is great. Scarecrow does river dance. For the sequal to Two or Prequal maybe.. we should do The wizard of OZ. and have Scarecrow do a dance number with the Wicked witch's Winkie Guards ;-)
I like how the spin shows off the gold hilite on the hat to. Great work Nancy!
C
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Hey Nancy,
I like this collection allot better. The patterns look great and I think the colors will make SC stand out from the crowd more.
I liked P3 allot then I realised he would be just like TM and that wouldnt do.
I liked p4 allot (very Cosack which I really like.. in fact they all have a very cosack feel now which I think is good
but the pattern wasnt my favorite.I liked M2 as the best color balance and combination, but I didnt like the hat as much as others or the pants.
I liked something about everything, except for maybe M4 and P1 (only because I'm not a fan of yellow shirts even if it is my favorite color)
I took the liberty of making a hodgpodge of my favorite parts and colors. (you can shoot me later)
oh yeah.. I was going for something like black pants with the stripe pattern and a purpleish highlite.
C
11.5 - Making a Face
in TaoA:M and the A:M Technical Reference
Posted
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