heyvern

Lighting and "environment" as Rodney said are crucial to any material. We could give you a "perfect" material for both the metal rim and rubber wheel but if it isn't lit well or have an environment around it to reflect it will look as bad as your failed attempts. It's a tricky thing to pull off. There isn't any perfect solution. You need to study lighting and reflective surfaces in 3D. There is a a basic starting point for chrome type materials I use in AM. Specularity with a high intensity and medium to low size (like 85/35?). A little reflection or... a little more reflection (depending on how reflective you want it of course ). A high diffuse fall off percentage. I usually use a a medium dark gray with a high diffuse falloff and some reflectivity anywhere from 30-90% depending on what I want or what looks good in the chor lighting setup. If you render in the modeling window it will look like crappola though. Only one light and absolutely nothing to reflect. You need an environment... or.... Lately I've been using environment materials or projection map materials to simulate reflections. I use a small tiled blurry kind of dark to light image to create a nice reflective environment. It doesn't work in every situation though. Look for my Terminator endoskeleton thread. That is what I used for that. There is no environment reflecting it is just the material. It's a lot of trial and error. When you have a lot of irregular chrome shapes it works well. If you have flat or large smooth areas it doesn't look as realistic. Rubber tires in my opinion are very simple surface materials. A very large specular size with a very low intensity. -vern

Is this an original model? Or are you modifying an existing model done by someone else? If this is your model done from scratch you have a great start. If you are a new user of AM you are way ahead of the learning curve. There is no "magic" solution for smoothing the mesh. You have to view the mesh from many angles and tweak the points till the mesh looks smooth. I often look for a "bump" or crease, select a point in the trouble area and rotate the view so I am looking "down" along that spline at a very steep or low angle so I can see all the bumps and wiggles along the spline that aren't as visible when looking at it straight on. Then you use the arrow keys to nudge the points this way and that way to smooth it out. Sometimes if you have problem areas like 3 point and 5 point patches this is not easy. You may see or discover a better way for the splines and points to be connected and have to break the mesh and reconnect to smooth things out. This process is very much like sculpting with clay. It's part of the learning process. After awhile you feel this thing in your brain that sort of goes "ping!". Suddenly you just... feel it. You start to get use to the process and it becomes easier. It takes practice. I can still remember that moment. It's a real moment. It's when you smooth out a series of nasty bumps on a model, the splines flow smoothly the mesh looks smooth and it felt almost "easy" getting there. How long did it take you to get to this point? How long have you been using AM? Keep practicing. Try not to get frustrated or discouraged. This isn't going to happen "overnight" but if you persist it will come to you. -vern

If you try to select 5 pt patches that have not been "created" yet it won't work. You must select a legal patch. That's the only thing I can think of. Also if you are using the patch group tool and do anything else it reverts back to the "regular" tool. Yes, the tool works for me with v15e. -vern

Oh I get it now. Extruder does not require a path to be selected. Sweeper does. Sweeper did not show up when I right clicked because I didn't have a path selected. Thanks folks! -vern

Don't spread this around. It's not like I am switching to windows or anything. I still love my mac... but I don't use AM on mac anymore. Haven't for a while now. Second... it isn't called "sweeper" in AM although I don't know what it was called before. I thought sweeper WAS included with AM as well but I didn't see the name anywhere and thought maybe I made a mistake. I kind of thought it was like a "generic" version of sweeper. Like burger king has the whopper... Macdonald's has the bib mac. Yes it works great. The problem is you must right click in the correct spot. Where ever you right click to select the extruder plugin is the "starting" point (I think) or maybe you just have to right click on the path itself... whatever the steps are I did not get a successful result until I right clicked on the path itself. Right clicking anywhere else seemed to base the extrusion on the click location as a starting point. Or maybe not. It just produced crazy results. It was extruding along the path but in crazy ways. I was a teeny tiny little bit dissapointed that it didn't use the path as the "extrude" path. I was kind of hoping it would use the actual path for the extrusion. Basically it just uses the path as a "guide" for extrusion. For example I created a path using very few points and bias modification similar to the primitive beveled models. I wanted to get "perfect" curves and straight runs. Instead I had to bump up the number of segments to get those smooth curves and then delete unneeded sections. Not a big deal. It is still a huge gigantic time saver. -vern

I don't think it is sweeper. I'm using a plugin that came with AM called "extruder". I thought Sweeper was a commercial plugin with more features. -vern

I think the images whether they are big or not are being really scaled up during render. Putting them on a dome over the scene means that only a small portion is visible at any time. In that view of your render it probably means that only 30% - 40% of the entire sky image is seen. Even a huge high res image will have to be scaled way up to cover the dome. I can't say for sure without seeing the original sky image but it looks like the "blotchiness" might actually be film grain. The more I look at it the more I think it is film grain. Where ever you got the images they still had to be scanned in. If they were shot digitally I think it would look different. -vern

Never mind. You right click on the spot to start the extrusion. -vern

I got it to work once. Then I created a more elaborate path and all I end up with are wacky things that don't seem to follow the path at all. Is there a tutorial somewhere? Does it not work with bias changes on the path? -vern

When I was playing with materials for smoke I noticed that my material seemed to be "stretching" based on the size of the patches. In areas with long patches the material was stretched more than in areas with very small tightly packed patches. Maybe it is the type of combiner. I was using a perlin combiner for my experiments. -vern

To bend a cylinder without distorting the shape you have to rotate the cross sections. It's just like a "pipe" or "tube" that is bent. The cross section at the bend rotates to keep the shape. If you just stretch and translate the points of the cross sections without rotating them it isn't going to look right. That is why most of us use bones for each cross section constrained to other bones in varying amounts in a chain so that the cross sections rotate properly to maintain the shape. This may be harder to set up but it's way easier to animate. A cylindrical "shape" like the cable you describe stretching and punching into something may need more patches to maintain the shape after it is stretched. If you stretch a cylindrical shape too far, spreading out the cross sections too much even rotating those sections might not keep the shape consistent. -vern

Glad it worked out! I hope you didn't feel like we all ganged up on you too much about the resolution issue. I think, speaking for myself at least, the goal was to save you wasted time and effort. 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. If you just went out on a bright sunny day with a clear blue sky and your 50 bazillion megapixel digital camera you could get a smooth high res sky image that would really push this up a notch. There may also be some nice free sky images on the internet. I bought a CD a while back of some sky images for a job I was doing. My client always needed these big huge beautiful skies added to crappy images of fields of corn and soybeans. I got tired of tweaking the gray overcast storm clouds in all the images they provided. Just a suggestion... another suggestion. -vern

The largest print image I ever created from scratch on the computer was a 16 x 20 inch poster I did many years ago. This image was part of a promotional advertising brochure for a "new" (at the time) offset printing process that used 6 "special" inks, CMYK and an extra bright cyan and red ink that increased the dynamic color range of traditional offset 4 color printing. This same technology is used now in consumer "photo ink jet" printers that only cost a few hundred dollars. At the time this new offset printer prototype with proprietary computer system cost a few hundred thousand. The specs for the pint job were; 16" x 20" at 600lpi (lines per inch as apposed to dots per inch. LPI is the number of "dots" per inch in half tone printing plates. It has nothing to do with digital "dots"). The image was composited from massive high resolution scans done by the client on their own scanners, from 4 x 5 transparencies and several elements I created and rendered out of a "popular" 3D application at the time that no longer exists (AM? I had never heard of it yet back then. It existed but it was probably version 4 or 5 or 6?). The image was so big and difficult to work on that I could not use Photoshop. At the time this was being done the most powerful Mac with Photoshop was brought to its knees by the size of the image. Windows PC's just weren't an option back then for desktop publishing (win 3.1 anyone?). Mac was the only way to go. I had the most powerful Mac at the time with maxed out ram. Photoshop could barely open this image let alone work on it with multiple layers. I had to use version 1.0 of a brand new application that had just come out that used some sort of proxy image display that only loaded the area being worked on into memory. It was very cool and I wonder whatever became of it. It didn't actually edit pixels. It used some sort of "list" of the changes you made. What you saw on the screen at any time was only 72 dpi of the area that filled the editing window. So if you zoomed in it only had to draw that small portion at "full" resolution. The only way to get a "final" image was to export it. Without this application I could not have considered creating this image at the full resolution. Even using this program the image was so difficult to work with it took a week to finish it. Don't even ask what the render times were for the 3D elements. I had started those ages before hand after getting a low res comp image approved. The only 3D elements were a few stone pillars with a stone arch. This took a week to render (not with AM. I didn't know AM existed back then). A week literally. I had to keep pausing the render each day to do other work and let it run during lunch and at night. You think your render sizes are big? These were HUGE! The final image saved as a tiff format at the resolution needed to print 16" x 20", at 600lpi was over a 1gb. We had no way to transport the file without sending an entire hard drive. There was no way to transport the file to a printer. The printer helped us out and sent a huge hard drive to put the file on. I eventually had to cheat and reduce the size and resolution and save as a JPG so it would fit on that hard drive (final image was about 650mb). The final print was so amazing, so fantastically sharp and wonderful it was incredible. The 6 color print process and special inks made it jump off the page. The agency I worked for at the time never allowed the artists to get any printed samples by claiming some sort of "confidentiality" clause in our contracts (top secret experimental printing technology. This was back when printing was a HUGE business). I think this was some sort of strategy to keep us from building up a portfolio and get a better job. I was very angry I never got to get a print of that poster. The final image size I NEEDED to print a 6 color 16 x 20 poster at 600lpi (which is actually 16 x 20 at 1200dpi or 19200 x 24000 pixels) was 1.29gb. I ended up using 600dpi instead of 1200dpi so it would fit on a disk. The frustrating part was that the hardware and software was able to handle the full size image. It was the storage media that was lacking. Funny thing... I just now used Photoshop to create a 19200 x 24000 image to check the size... if only I could go back in time with this Mac to do that image I might not have had that nervous breakdown. Looking back on it now I really think I had a nervous breakdown working on that monstrous image. I had actually already quit that job before the end of the project but was hired back as a part time freelancer to finish it. I was the only person who knew how to use the software that created it and figure out how to get it on a disk. Ironically my new job involved working on a Unix based "Barco" system. Very expensive. System and software updates cost in the thousands. Imagine if AM cost $3000 each year to upgrade! The Barco system could handle gigantic images easily but the software to do this was useless compared to photoshop. Now of course a cheap computer with a copy of photoshop can easily do ten times what that hideously over priced system could do. ----- p.s. Ah... the memories... did I tell you about how a coworker got filthy rich investing in Iomega just before the zip drive came out? I showed him a tiny article I found about this cool new "zip" drive coming out. I casually mentioned that if I had any money to invest in the stock market I would buy Iomega stock. This drive was going to be huge. At the time removable media was very pricy (no CDs). He invested a bunch of money and made out like a freaking bandit. I thought he could at least have bought me a steak dinner... or a car. -vern

Your difficulties are most likely due to the processor intensive things you have in your project. Displacement and hair are both very processor intensive when rendering. If either of those things were "fast" and "easy" everyone using AM would have hair and displacement all over the freaking place. At the size you want to render you probably don't need 16 passes (is that right? 16 passes?). You could probably get away with 9 or even 6 or 3 and still look good. I used 1 or 2 passes (maybe 3?) on most of my recent project and everyone was amazed it looked as good as it did. I will say this again... resizing in photoshop is perfectly acceptable. You have to see it to know this. Your image doesn't have a lot of detail that requires a huge resolution. There isn't that much in there that benefits from a huge resolution. I would even bet money that the decals/images you use aren't even CLOSE to the resolution you are rendering to. If the displacement decal for the rocks is not the same resolution as the render resolution it is all wasted effort. Rendering at a huge resolution with low resolution images won't make the details any sharper. Is the sky an image? If so is the image used at the same resolution as the render? If not it will look... blotchy and soft when rendered. The missing pixels are "interpolated". I think I see some "blotchy" enlargement artifacts in the smaller render you did. Rendering it HUGE will only exaggerate those things. Here's the 1500 pixel image from your first post scaled up to 6500 pix in Photoshop. A little sharpening and saved as a jpg with a medium compression. Yes, at full resolution, 100% in photoshop you see things getting a bit "blotchy". But rendering it larger, save as a targa and scale THAT up in photoshop it will look like a million bucks. Several of my last few image contest entries were rendered at a slightly smaller size and scaled up in photoshop. In some cases it was a small amount like 10-20% but even that much is a huge difference in overall size. It looked fine. No one could honestly say they could see the scaling done. ----- There is another option if you are willing to spend the effort and risk the time lost if it "goes wrong"... Do your final render in the chor window. Zoom in on sections and render just one section at a large size. Do a screen grab when it's finished. Keep offsetting the view and rendering until you get the whole thing and then stitch it together in photoshop or an image editor. The problem here is that if it stops rendering or you "bump" something after it's done you lose that rendering and have to start again. You should also WRITE DOWN THE CAMERA ZOOM AND OFFSET VALUES. That way if you close AM you can get it going from the same spot. -vern

The render size is just way too big. It's total overkill. You could render half that size, rescale in photoshop, a little sharpening and you would barely notice any difference. Maybe something between 4500 and 750. That's a huge jump. -vern

I would taper the grass to a point. Maybe a freshly cut lawn would have flat tips but a naturally growing field would have pointy ends, otherwise a very impressive image. ------------ Anything can be put onto 35mm film. Even low resolution crap digital images can be printed to film (I've done this. It works). The "digital" equivalent of 35mm film doesn't really exist because it's a chemical process. They sort of "guess" what it should be but it isn't "real". From my experience in the print area and photographs, the printers always specified a size in megabytes for the image. Not resolution but the uncompressed tiff size in megabytes. That determined for them that it would be big enough to print at a specific size. I would often have to send out computer illustrations to be printed to 4x5 transparencies because none of our printers at the time could take digital files (imagine that!). This was back in the day of Syquest cartridges... not CDs or even zip drives. All our files had to fit on 45mb or 80mb cartridges. The concern wasn't resolution but banding. Back then I would have KILLED for the EXR format or the higher bit depths we have now... holy cow. That stuff didn't get mainstream until after I got out of the print biz. I had to use a lot of noise in Photoshop back then... lots of noise to hide banding. Banding was my nemesis. That image you are rendering is going to be HUGE... about 60mb uncompressed. If you plan to animate it get a big hard drive. -vern

Select all the points or patches and hit the "F" key. Same thing. Sometimes my "hand" slips when right clicking... or I right click in the wrong place. Or maybe you don't have complete patches selected. Not sure why you would get a different set of options or why "Flip normals" wouldn't be visible. -vern

I've never in my whole life been considered one of the "Powers That Be". Will I be able to walk through walls? Teleport? Pick up attractive women with a single glance? I've always thought of myself as more of a "Powers That Pee". (Since the big snow storm I've been "writing my name" a lot.) -vern

Pirates don't do christmas trees. It doesn't go well with their swashbuckling image. p.s. How do you swash a buckle anyway? -vern

I love how you did the storyboards and planning with AE. Replacing with renders as you go. I tend to do too much ahead of time IN AM first, and then do blocking. I should save myself all the extra work and do more sketching and tighter storyboards (change your pants had NO storyboards except "in my head".) . Pencil and paper... Have to find a pencil... I used one a few years ago... where did I put it... That part of the process is the best info for me. The blocking, composition and timing of your animation was really well done. It was the first thing I noticed. -vern

For me it is a deadline and a lot of caffeine. I was going to comment too on the fast turn around for the first one and also your "style" of documentation. If flows as well as your comic book tutorials. You also have a great talent for "teaching" in a visual media. -vern

Oh good grief! Another tantalizing sample of this animation! It's driving me CRAZY to see it. Just a few seconds of it and I'm dying for more. That whole scene of the door opening... the walking in... just a few short seconds... and so much personality and character. The animation "quality" is one thing but it's the ACTING that keeps jumping out for me from the small samples I see. I loved listening to Iztok Mlakar. Hearing that little introduction (well, reading the subtitles anyway) makes me want to take some night classes to learn the language! I doubt very much that I could find a class like that around here or get training CD's from "The Roseta Stone". My brother knows the guys who run Roseta Stone... maybe I can get them to do a series for... what is it? Slovenian? Quickly before it's lost. Dusan, up until you explained the history of the country and the language I would have thought you SHOULD do a "dubbed" version. Now... forget about that. The language itself is part of the story. It should never be dubbed. Remember when they dubbed Mel Gibson in the original "Mad Max"? Ick. Blech. Yuck. -vern

Those "photorealistic" images don't just magically happen. It takes skill and talent. Photorealistic skin is the holy grail of 3D software. Yes, AM can produce those results but like any program it isn't a "one click" solution. You could buy something else and not have any more success. You would still have the same issues involved with texturing, lighting, render times etc. I wish I had more advice for that technique. Hopefully some others have more input on that. It often isn't just "one" thing. There are many ways to achieve the look of "photorealistic" skin. -vern

If you think about it, those classic old serial films with cliffhangers are the same as shows today like "24" and "Lost". Besides production values and story nothing has changed much. -vern

Great background on this! Isn't it wonderful how ideas come together? I liked the "flash" version you did as well. For a moment I wasn't sure if the world as a "snowball" was some kind of global climate change political statement. (it could get cold instead of hot you know. Watch that documentary called "The Day After Tomorrow". Very scary.) p.s. The handwriting in your story boards is so much better than mine. I have story boards I can't even read after a few days. -vern