cfree68f
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Posts posted by cfree68f
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the way I said will allow any object on the plane. It should be accessible to anyone using any version of AM.
C
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Hey Mage..
try this.. it'll get it perfect and he'll never know.
See if you can get a hirez shot of just the background grid. Then use that as your camera rotoscope (ie. backdrop.
Then set up a plane as a reciever for the front projection and voila.. you'll get shadows and the background grid will be perfect.
C
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ok.. its to a point now where I can comment. Looks good, but I agree with some of the comments about anatomy.. Number one.. his legs are to fat at the knees. Taper them into the knee more and you're right in your drawing.. carry the muscles down around the knee.. don't end them above it. Same with the elbows.. very important to bring the muscles from the forarm up and around the elbow joint.
His shins are to short.. add about two or three inches to his height by elongating his shins.
As muscular as you have him.. I'd beef up the shoulder joints alot as well. they actually taper in like a skinnier arm would, when they should be thicker than the bicep.
I'm really digging the costume. I'd just work on the anatomy.
Here's some links to stuff I've posted for reference before.. I think I may have even done parts for downloads.
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=A...st&id=15498
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...20167&st=45
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9642&st=0
an arm model http://www.colins-loft.net/free/parts/Arm.mdl
a torso model
http://www.colins-loft.net/free/parts/trunk.mdl
here's an example of what I'm saying about the elbows and knees...
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=A...st&id=14424
Keep it up.. its looking awesome.
C
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ok.. I'm with you so far.
I went back and realised that I had the main light on TM turned off for specular. Now I'm more like Kevin's. What I did notice was that his eyes got lost with the specular.. so I took Nancy's toned down face group and changed it to just his eyelids. Then tweaked them to make them Darker. worked pretty good. I'll post a render later.
I guess for now.. I'll do it my way and you guys do it your ;-) We'll see where we end up.
for the record my way is still being refined. I do want to light the whole set and let it go, but I need to get faster results so that I don't need to turn off backgrounds and stuff. I like all the reflective goodness, and I see now that its possible to get it with short render times. I just need to figure out how to do it and still light the whole set.
Your hyposthesis can't be the reason either Yves. I turned reflection distance down to 200cm.. and Kevin's overall set is darker than my half one (since I'm using the camer back color to give a general luminance and tint to the reflections. I think the reason is that Kevins lights are cranked up a bit and far away from Tinman which lights the scene better but really lights the heck out of him. My only concern with the hot specs on TM was the potential loss of tonality.
For now lets all be different.
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Ok.. so I'll be second on this post, because I see it as a biiiiiig issue, for many reasons, but I'll stick to the obvious.
first some examples.
My latest render... no touch up..
[attachmentid=22915]
and for comparison Kevin's scene.. The models are the same as above, and of course the lighting is different. Now it could be that something is wrong on the project I loaded. It did report some missing light lists that could explain TM being overlit for specular, or it could be that I punched up TMs specs in the materials to work better in my scene and in Kevin's the mats are to hot ;-) But it illustrates the points made below.
[attachmentid=22916]
Now I see allot I like in Kevin's as far as color of lighting, but his specs come off way to hot on the same model where my diffuse is so dark, I need brighter diffuse lighting and he needs less spec in his. I'll copy his light colors, but even then our lighting styles where very different. He lit the scene like a stage set where lights are set for the particular camera angle. Mine is lit so I should get the same lighting no matter where the camera is pointing. His with all of the model data on renders in 30 minutes roughly. Mine renders in 18, but I have to turn off the model data except for TM and the throne and use a rotoscope as a backdrop (something he could do as well and probably have 18 minute renders or less).
My concern is that "continuity of lighting" is going to be difficult if not impossible to achieve at the rate we are going. If thats ok.. I'll stop talking. If not then we all should try to get in the same ball park.
Nancy textured TM to go in whichever environment and lighting she was using. I tweaked him to work in my environment and lighting, and he renders different yet again in another scene. And I'd also like to point out the depth of field differences while I'm at it, Whats the rule gonna be on that?
ideas? suggestions? cursing hurled my way? its all good at this point.
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Well, it's my eyes too because it fooled me the same way even before you mentioned it.
Lol.. yeah I really picked a bad frame to use as an example. I'll check the textures Nancy and see, whats going on.
When we've gotten the textures straightened out, should I post the modifications back up to the forum making sure I backup the original for the other lighters to try in their scenes?
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Nancy, you are a very talented, artistic person and you do incredible work but when I picture the Wizard of OZ's main characters or more appropriately, the Tin Woodman of OZ's characters, I don't see Cirque De Soleil. Yes the costumes are bright and colorful but I agree with one of the other old guys in that it's too distracting.
Coming from a guy with an avatar of two guys kicking the shit out of each other, I think you're right on character ;-) for you! But who's to say what is normal in OZ.. who says Scarecrow has to be a guy, what if as a kid he felt like he was a girl in a man's/scarecrow's body?
The point is that all of this stuff is up for interpretation, there is no bible of OZ. Nancy's take is as valid as anybody elses. I would argue more valid than a bland one since we are talking about a magical country with witches and wizards.
I'd like to push every possible boundary with the preconceptions people have, but thats just me. We'll all meet in the middle at some point, but I hope that middle is square in Nancy's comfort zone, otherwise this movie will lose alot of heart.
one last thought. Its better to push the limits on the front side and come back later and say, "no, that is to distracting or doesn't work, than to assume something won't work before you've even tried it". To assume that a blander take on Oz is the most appropriate take before you've even seen a movie with some flare seems like a recipe for making a very bland movie.
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actually Deejay, motion will help the characters pop more since they'll be one of the few things moving in the scene. The colors help to make the characters stand out IMHO I've lit scenes with both types and the new tinman is much better in terms of lighting and foreground background seperation.
Its a balancing act, but I think Nancy is on the right track.
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I notice that he's missing the coppery/bronze color trim on his belt border & logo, as well as on the elbow, knee, jaw, and shoulder pivots. Did some materials go missing in your directory cleanup process? Or is that a result of the lighting and reflection tweaking?
I noticed that as well. It must be on my end, because I didn't touch those that I know of. I'll check that out. as far as the tweaks for blend and stuff. I noticed that on some materials with reflection you didn't have blend and filter turned on. Which is fine in some situations, but in this situation where I was using the camera background color to tint the over all metal color ;-) it wasn't good and everything was coming out green. Soooo I cranked those things up and it worked out. Some of the other tweaks where just desaturating some of your spec colors so that they wouldn't come out so dark in my environment. The big test will be to make sure these tweaks work in all environments.
The 18 minutes was at this HD resolution.
Now I must say you've inspired me so I went another direction on the windows. Here's the results.. shoot me or don't.. I'm calling them finished. I'll leave it up to you guys as to which you'd want to use or whether you want to use any of it. The larger targas are up in the throneroom directory on SVN. They'll need a transparency map and maybe a bump which I havn't done yet if you guys approve them.
[attachmentid=22775]
[attachmentid=22776]
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Yehawww! I'm back in business. did a little cleanup in my directories and boom, back in business.
So I finally got to see Nancy's wonderfull scarecrow in my lighting.. a few tweaks.. well ok allot.. I added soft reflections, more speck to make them soft and tweaked everything with reflection to have the right blend, filter, and falloff settings.. Right meaning per Yves instructions, with some personal calls on one or to things to make it work.
I love your TM wayyyyy better than any other I've seen so far Nancy. His colors and settings make the reflections work much better than just plain tin.
My only gripe about this particular shot is the throne matches his torso to much. I'd rather change the throne and leave his torso to be honest.
This shot rendered in 18 minutes thanks to using a roto for the backdrop and only using tin and the throne in the shot for reflections. If I can get the time to do up a feature request per my earlier comments, and if it actually gets implemented, I think we'll have every thing we could hope for to get the best reflections with the fastest renders.
anyway.. yada yada..
[attachmentid=22756]
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Dude post it... I may have to do a flash game out of that! Awesome penguins by the way.
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Love them all Nancy. I'd echo what Yves said about the saturated colors. My least favorite tend to be the darker ones. the black and whites. All of the colore ones are superb. The reason I don't likethe dark ones is that they'd be hard to light in dark settings ;-)
I also think theres to much green.. how about a purple scarecrow hat? or orange? kinda fall like.
I agree you should be let go to do as you wish. You've proven yourself capable and I'd like to see what you could do when you cut loose
Keep up the excellent work.
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no luck with the problems so far kevin. The guys at Hash say that its fixed, but I'm still crashing. They've got me doing 1 or 2 things to try and figure it out, but I'm slammed at work for the moment so I havn't gotten to it. I'm almost done with the window. I'll post it tonight or tomorrow.
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What kind of errors were you getting Colin? I just updated and saw what appears to be your changes, everything seemed to open fine on my end...
really?... I updated my whole data folder and still got errors. I'm getting an 004 error that has to do with groups. I think on TinMan. I'm not sure.. but I get it when I load your scene 1_03_44 and my scenes. Actually any scene that has TinMan in it.
It goes through the motions then toward the end of the load crashes.. It says I have some conflicts in the files I open, but I don't know how to fix them.
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I think the hair density on all the Hairy characters is to high. I first noticed it on the green monkey. We should use a thicker hair and go with much less dense hair. It'll look and read better and render much faster. I can play with this until my issue with loading Castle files gets fixed if you want me to.
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Well I tried to update my SVN directory and upload my stuff (hopefully not overwriting anything) but now I'm royally screwed. I can't open up Kevin's Projects or my own because of group errors that shut AM down.
I submitted a report, so hopefully It will get fixed, but I'm dead in the water until I figure out some workaround or resolution.
Anyone else get this?
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good point about the number of shots Yves. I'll try to keep that in mind. After seeing a Normal Church the other day.. I've got an idea on how to proceed with the top. that matches the bottom better.
Al,
I don't like the idea of opening the windows.. It overly complicates the scene and probably muxes up the lighting a bit to. With the layout of the throne room and the shot angles that have been selected.. it would be hard to make the throne room look overly large anyway. Over lighting the room with torchlight will make it harder to seperate TW from the background as Yves has pointed out before.
The lighting probably appears to dark do to the differences in Monitors and other things. Once I calibrated my monitor.. I went back to most of my shots and they seemed much brighter than I had percieved them being when I created them on my uncalibrated monitor.
I think Kevin has done a good job of bringing out background elements without over lighting the scene. I do like the notion of a reflective floor though.
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I'm already thinking along the magic lines. I was thinking that there should at least be two maybe three slightly different windows that reflect the time of day. sun in the day, moon at night, etc.. or if they actually had seasons, which I think they don't you could do winter, spring, summer, fall.. maybe the seasons where trapped in the window by the magic that created it?
I also thought if there where any flashbacks in the scenes in the castle.. you could animate them and run a stained glass filter on them to make them happen in the window.
I had done William's poster in stained glass but I thought it odd and to pompous for Tinwoodman to have stained windows of himself.. and it only fit in one window.. I didn't want to do 4.
The thing that seems odd to me is that the top is illustrative, but the bottom is plain. they don't match. I think the style should be the same across both sections.
I'll keep thinking on it. I've got one last medical procedure tomorrow (hopefully) so I might not post anything for a day or two. We'll see how it goes. I might have to scout some churches. Martin, are there any good shots of the hash windows? I know they reflect religious iconography, but I might get some ideas for scenes or styles that can be converted.
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Thanks Kevin,
I'll backup my stuff just in case ;-).
I've been working on the throne room window. Here's a wip (not sure if its to odd. I like the oz in the center but the styles don't quiet match, not that they need to I suppose. Can I get some oppinions before I do much more? I went warmer on the colors to try to add some reds, oranges and fuschias into the lighting. for night shots we could tone it down to blues and greens.
[attachmentid=22314]
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Thats a good point Jim,
we should give TW some eyeshadow.. ie make his eyelids a group with less speck or darker metal. It'll make him look more like the makeup from the 30s and 40s which could be good and definately made eyes pop ;-) Personally I think his iris should be a darker green as well.
I found the problem with the flashing light and fixed it.. I'm moving on to the next scene for now ( I know I've said that allready but I mean it this time ;-)
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Ok... ta ta da!!!
Heres the render with faked reflections. There's a light popping at the end.. have to check that. Sorry for the Ginormous download.. I couldn't get it to compress much more and still look good.
[attachmentid=22296]
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Hey Kevin,
when I uploaded the throne the links to the bump map where broken. Just click on the image and reset it to the full bump map in the textures folder. That'll know back the throne allot. I'm liking your lighting allot better than mine. Can you upload your set so I can check it out?
I've got my render times down to 3.5 minutes per frame now, so I'm rendering an animation overnight to see how those faked reflections look.
You're right though.. 17 minutes for soft reflections isn't bad at all. It was probably all the omni lights I had in the scene. I reworked them into spinning kliegs (not optimal) and the set render time came down to 40 minutes. I guess I was just trying to use a sledge hammer to pound a ten penny nail.
I think we're cooking with gas now ;-)
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I like the soft reflections as well, except for the face.. the beard looks to tinsel like with them. The straight reflections are even more unreadable.
Kevin,
The throne is up on SVN now as well as the window with textures instead of geometry. If you have the top of the window modelled or textured in some form let me know otherwise I'll finish that.
What are your render settings? I'm having issues getting shadows as soft as yours and my render times are still no where near yours. Not sure why.
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Thanks as well Richard,
I'm like Yves. I don't really care how much like his monitor mine is. What I want is a good tool to keep my monitor steady so that when I work.. its relatively the same. I've struggled with this for a long time. My office gets tons of sunlight during the day and has a totally different setting at night. Factor in twilight and morning and I average about 4 different lighting conditions per day.
I've tried forever to calibrate my kickbutt printer to my monitor, but one factor is that even the prints look different depending on the light you see them in. At least now, hopefully, what I see on my monitor won't be as different as it was before. That'll go a long way toward simplifying my ambient lighting monitor color issues.
Thanks also for the links to the open source stuff. Even though it doesn't say it does printer ICC, I might find a use for it still.
Wolverine
in Work In Progress / Sweatbox
Posted
Nah.. don't give up on it Lee.. it'll turn out in the end... Its already excellent.. I'm just trying to help you make it perfect ;-)
keep it up.. it'll work out.. you'll probably end up resplining half of him 3 years from now and making him even better. I do it all the time.
What do you plan on doing with him.. Animation or stills? if its just stills rigging him in the short term doesn't half to be a huge nightmare.. you can just rig him enough to get a pose and clean up the mesh for the still. If its animation, you'll need more "rig" so you don't half to do a ton of cleanup on each frame. If you just rig him for still shots, you can always come back later and rig him for animation. Think of it as an iterative process.
I think everyone wants to see you finish this guy. Don't think all the comments are tearing him apart. Its all opinion as well. I'll post wips sometimes and get tons of comments, half will be subjective. Some I'll use.. some I won't.
keep at it.. its all good.
C