cfree68f
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Posts posted by cfree68f
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Ok.. I know this is possible, but I seem to have forgotten how to do it
Its the same concept as the spinning GI rig, but I want to make the light spin on its own access and shine outward. I can't seem to figure out how to keyframe it so the light will do 16 spins in one frame. I know this is doable.. I've done it with hair, etc, but I can't remember how.
Any clues?
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Did you ever upload the throne, Colin?
I tried to last night but when I tried to commit the changes to SVN it asked for a name and password, which seem to be different from the ones I used to download the repository in the first place.
Does it require a seperate password and login to upload files?
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Hey Kevin,
Is your scene day or night? I thought it was day, but I may have been mistaken. I'd put some ambience on the windows or shine a light through them to brighten the back sides a little. I do like the softness in the scene and you can't argue with the render times ;-)
Whats going on with reflections on TM? I can't see to much in him. It also seems very warm.. almost monchromatically warm.
I'll try to post the throne and the textured windows tonight.
(edit)
I looked at the image again and wondered what was going on in the base of the dias. There's some banding in it. Could that be the shadow maps being to low res? I wonder if that would flicker in animation.
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I like the last tinman as well Nancy. Although I might add some gold lacey fractals to his pants. Just to add some noise. It'd be way over the top but large areas of flat color bug me. We'll see how he renders in the different environments and adjust down the road accordingly.
I'll bow to your choices as well, because when it comes to whimsy.. you are the Queen and I struggle. Whimsy is what this movie needs (as much as we can cram into it IMHO) I think it will balance out in the end, but we need more people like you pushing the limit to get it there.
Kevin.. in the next shot I'll light with kliegs and shadow maps to see the difference. Whichever renders faster and looks good is fine with me.
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What Yves said is where I was going ;-) Cubes are the way to go for better fake reflections and environments.
I'll post examples when I get them.
The distortion in the top of the sphere is just the usual lathe distortion of points being to close.. it could be easily fixed, but since the probe would be blurred in the end.. I didn't bother. Obviously for Will environmenta solution, we'd have to be much more precise.
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Hey Kevin,
Yes I'm using area lights with raytraced shadows and 2 rays per light. I could've used Kliegs, but I figured bulbs would be the quickest way to get a good lighting, since you can just put them in the actual light models and tweak their individual settings if need be. I've also got 2 klieg lights shining through the stained glass window with 2 ray shadows for those as well.
I cheated on the chandelier and just used one big bulb there. I have a light just for TM to help light him (again a bulb) and one klieg on the floor for bounce lighting. Considering there are about ten or so "modelled" lights in the room There are allot of rays getting rendered.
I'm rendering 16 passes as well.
I took the direct approach in lighting the scene since I thought I'd just be able to transfer the finished choreography to the other shots. I'm not sure if that was the best approach now. What method are you using?
The throne is a Darktree texture and I'll put it up on SVN when I get the spec back.
(edit)
since I was already rendering a probe.. I thought I'd post it to show the setup.. its a little more obvious I suppose...
[attachmentid=22145]
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Thanks for that comparison shot Paul.. I hadn't realized I screwed the throne up so much! I'll have to look into that.
Thanks for the comments guys. One nice thing about this way is that it does open up some possibilities for hand painted backdrops and other coolness like that. And we can tweek the foreground and background to our hearts content without having to re-render the other part.
For the record.. That background took 4 hours to render, so thats a good chunk of the 7 hour render time gone and good riddance! Half or more shots seem to have a fixed camera, so we should only have to render the background once for any of those.
One thing came to mind that might improve this shot and others allot. If there was a way to designate an object only render in reflections versus rendering in the scene (like that first floating TM shot I posted) We could construct boxes similar to Cubic Quicktime VRs that would better simulate the reflection of the room, sort of like a low/spline set. These could be blurred and reflections could be added without the need to have them softened, and we could do something similar to this shot. The reflections would be almost perfect then.
The only barrier to doing this now that I can see is being able to turn off the reflection object, but still have it reflected, so that we can have a rotoscope for the back drop. Obviously you could construct a half stage, but thats cumbersome and time consuming compared to just swapping a box for one render with the final set.
Hey Noel, I'll submit a feature request for the QTVR solution in this post instead, its a better workaround and probably much easier to implement. I'll build a scene to show what I'm talking about and post it with it.
Thanks,
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Well here is the culmination of my experiments to get the render times down. Obviously their are issues with the reflections, but its as far as it can go, or as far as I can push it and still have a life ;-)
Render time 45 minutes (its Will's light probe method an environment map and a Camera rotoscope of the background)
[attachmentid=22135]
This method approaches being doable for every shot but you have to tweak the lighting twice! That or we come up with light rigs for the characters Jimmy Neutron style. The method is Light the scene. Render from the Camera without the foreground elements. Then do a light probe from the point of focus. Blur the light probe in something and unwrap it per William's instructions. Make that your reflection map and apply it to all the reflective surfaces (because you'll need to tint the surface with another attributes specular color, and each metal type will look slightly different, alternatively we could tint the reflection map and have multiple reflection maps). Then render the foreground elements.
In the final run we'll probably want to render foreground and background separate, so that if either needs a change.. we don't have to go through this process later. We can composite the elements this way.
Its nuts, but its the only way I've figured to get the render times down and have anything that approaches a metallic surface. One other idea I'd thought of was some sort of faked gradient reflection, like the toon render gradients, but one that would behave like reflected environment.
It'd be cool if someone could program a widget to automate the creation of the reflection map. Something like an action in photoshop, but in AM which goes and takes probe shots from Tinman's location and applies them to his materials. Then it'd all be lighting the scene again. I'm done experimenting on this shot. I'm moving on to other shots until we figure out the solution to our metallic problems ;-)
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Vern.. are you seeing this Vern.. we have a convert. the Cult lives!!!
Good one Nancy!
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I just ordered mine.. we'll see how it works. Thanks for the info Yves, I've been looking for a colorimeter under $100.00 for years now and couldn't find one worth the money. If pantones making it, you know its good.
We'll see how it goes.
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for some reason light buffer objects crashes my render (probably because I have so many ;-) I've tested some myself and had some interesting results.
The problem with Will's solution isn't that it doesn't work... its that it requires allot of manual setup in the scene for every shot. More time than I'm willing to spend on every shot I work on. The hope is that by lighting a set. You can then render every shot in that set accordingly with little or no tweaking. By doing that.. many many man hours will be saved.
Javier. I liked your painting, but achieving that dark background becomes hard with reflections. The darker the scene the darker Tinman gets. The only way to brighten him is to tone down reflection which makes him look less metallic. I did like the colors in the picture though and I'll try to put that in with lighting.
[attachmentid=22111]
More to come.
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OMG. This is soo OFF. Look closely. There are soft and anisotropic relfections everywhere on this character. Blue Sky is bragging that they use exclusively ray-tracing and uses no textures maps at all. All the textures are procedurals.
lol.. I could've written that post for you.. I knew you'd chime in on it.
I've thought some more and I'm going to try a few things.. like camera projections for fixed cameras etc.. and William's trick for the reflections.. we'll see how it goes.
My thing is this.. I won't do something half-ass. If these "tricks" hit the look to much then maybe I'm not the guy to light some scenes. we'll see. I'm sure I can get the render time down, but we'll see what that means in the end.
Whats been said about reflections and other things.. I agree on to a point, but we know the movie might take a hit with animation and consistency of style. Shouldn't the render quality be the best we can achieve? I know.. I know.. it can't take 3 thousand years to render, but I'd rather cut some scenes than cut the quality of look. If this gets put out there and it looks like crap thrown on a shiney ball, it won't do anything good for AM's rep or anyones morale.
I'm off to experiment now.
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Heres the latest with the velvet fixed and the windows fixed. I'll end up adding modelled buttons on the chair back but for now this is good enough.
[attachmentid=22064]
As far as the render times.. 7 hours isn't that long by motion picture standards Pixar goes much longer on average, and again thats 1280x720 output. What's two going for in its release (Mpeg2 D1 ?).
It is the soft reflections that are hurting the render time, but TinMan won't work very well without them. We could put an environment map material on him, but that might look bad. Wait till you add multiple characters into a shot. With the darktrees and Tinman's reflection? we'll be lucky to have renders under 10 hours per frame. This is of course my two cents.
In addition.. Yves mentioned that he has added code to reflections for optimization in certain conditions. Hopefully that might help out some... Yves?
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Its all the geometry reflected and the lights. I could do less lights, but then I'd have to light every scene differently, at least for the castle. I've made the window into maps and it still takes just as long. The main issue is soft reflections, and transparency. If I can get rid of transparency on the windows and soft reflections on TinWoodsman.. the render time would go down. Another factor could be some of the materials.
Martin, Yves, chime in if 7hrs is to long and I'll keep working the scene to make it render quicker. Remember.. thats 7hrs for HD output. probably 4 for DV.
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take your time Nancy. I'm moving on to lighting for some other shots. Do let me know when you have something you want to see in a scene though. Or... I'm going to try to get the shot I'm working on up to the render farm. Maybe when you're done we can just swap out some tin men and do a couple of renders for comparison. Either/Or is fine with me.
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Yeah I'm thinking the same thing Paul. That render took 7 hrs! Its 720 HD though. DV would be a little less. I'm rendering one more check of the velvet and the windows (their textured now and I'll see if I can get it to the render farm) I also want to try the same thing with one of Nancy's versions of TW.
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Here is another render with a narrower camera angle, some fixed reflectivity (still don't have a good grasp on this guy) and my first attempt at tufting on the back of the throne. I've got a much better velvet in the hopper right now, and will post that when it renders. Oh and its HD for real close nitpicking ;-)
I still need to turn the windows into textures (they take forever to render)
Once thats done I'll start the other sequences in this scene. Oh and hopefully we'll try some of Nancy's cool renditions of Tinman in this shot.
[attachmentid=22050]
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Hey Nancy,
If you want can you save some of the iterations and send them to me.. I can try them out in the shots I'm doing inside the castle. We'll do a comarison in scene and see which looks the best.
my email is cfree68@earthlink.net
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but I do like the deep green/gold toreador outfit (#14) - as green says woodsman, and gold says Emperor.
A very interesting point I hadn't considered. You are right, a forest man would wear green unless there where hunters around.. in which case he'd wear blaze orange ;-)
I will add to the above that I'd also rather see criticism that says "too far out, too over the top, too weird" rather than "too boring, too tame, too 5 years ago"Exactly! I say if your going to swing.. swing for the fences. At least then they can say some choices got made. I fear that movies that get made by committee may be doomed to a generic look and style. Its my main complaint with the tripe hollywood puts out these days. (the need to appeal to the masses)
I'm all for compromise to a point, but there are valid, viable reasons for a more colorful tinman with a little less reflection. And if you asked kids.. I bet they'd pick color over chrome every single time.
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I'm feeling lost ... and .. left alone ... sad.gif
Maybe the secret is inside what you're eating! Talking about some colorful mushrooms, maybe that's a hint ...
Its called personal preference. Your's is slightly different from ours... and thats ok. No mushroom consumption required ;-)
I like what Nancy has done, and I also like the fact that what she has done is nothing like what anyone who has read the book or imagined the character of tinman would come up with. To me that means that they won't see this guy and think "seen it... done it". If this movie is so bland and generic and predictable that every one feels comfortable, then how can we say we've made anything different or new?
The comments about him being a tin woodsman and therefore a macho guy who would only like plain tin seem prejudiced by some predisposition to what a lumber jack would like. But we are talking about an entity made of tin living in a land with witches, wizards, magical tinsmiths, hippogiraffes, talking scarecrows and green monkeys that used to be boys who don't grow old. Why should any of our prejudices or preconceptions be more write than Nancy's? If Oz was real, I wouldn't be surprised if Nancy's vision turned out closer to the truth than MGM's or any other closer to our reality.
Keep up the good work Nancy.. hopefully we'll all meet somewhere in the middle (though I'd rather see it land a little closer to your vision :-)
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I like them all.. and I find it interesting that William, Yves and I have similar choices for our first 3. I'd recommend against greens since they'd clash with outdoors colors and also make the throne room seem a little Christmas-like. I really like the cirque de soleil stuff though. We should come to an agreement about a style for the throne room and I can through him in on my test renders.
Awesome work Nancy! I'd like to see KuKlips work shop take on a more psychodellic look in spots if we choose one of the wilder looks for TinMan.. maybe we could stick some colorful mushrooms outside of his house ;-)
I like the way this is going. I've always thought Oz should shy away from conventional and be as colorful and fun as possible except where the evil parts lie, like the witch's house.
You can texture for me any day Nancy
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The blur fading with distance is a direct consequence of sampling reflection rays from inside a cone. A reflected object sitting at, lets say 10cm from a soft reflective surface will look twice as blurry as another object sitting at 5cm because the blur radius is twice as large.
Awesome! I had a feeling, knowing your predisposition for "realism" that this might be the case. Now I need to test and figure these things out.
Thanks for the lesson Yves.
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Jim.. what you are talking about is the surface roughness, i.e brushed metal versus a chrome steel bearing. William is right.. you can mimic that with a texture bump or material. Not all metals have it, or would appear to have it to the naked eye, And it wouldn't be obvious from the camera distance in many thanks to antialiasing.
I've been looking at metals all day now and I've noticed one thing related to this that AM doesn't seem to simulate. When the surface is rough and reflections are soft. They are more focused up close and get blurrier and fade more with distance. The fading we can do but the blurring isn't there yet. its a fine point of course, but might add to the realism on TM. Maybe you could have a near and far reflection filter with each having a different blurriness?
This brings up another question. Does DOF only apply to the camera? ie.. are reflections of far off objects blurred as well? I know something like this could blow the render times through the roof, but I thought after Yves educational post that we could start getting into specifics.
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Wow.. thanks Yves.. you've given me a good education. Part of my problem was coming at it from other 3d apps which break some functions out to multiple settings. I see now that AM has it all there, its just a more fine tuned dance between fewer attributes. I'll see if I can apply this to SS and Tinman to get the effects I want.
Thanks again.
Oh and you are right about the ankle... it bugged me to.. I actually lengthened his legs in the model and forgot to lengthen the shin bones ;-)
sub frame spinning lights
in TWO Lighting
Posted
thanks Rodney.. that should do it.