AProd
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Posts posted by AProd
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Hey Eric,
Great job with this model. It definitely got my vote!
I made a stab at this ship a few years ago in an image contest, but yours is way better than mine was. Great detail, texturing, lighting...really top notch.
You rock!
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Here's my latest try at using volumetric lights to give the effect of sunlight filtering through the trees in the deep forest. Disclaimer: this is not a single render pass, but a backplate with several layers (three, actually) of "sunbeams" balanced in After Effects. If I were animating this, I would still render out the individual passes, but I imagine it might get tricky.
I did take away some lights, but I kept some on under the canopy, as I think it would be dark enough that they would be concerned for their guests possibly tripping on the steps. The cafe sign is now wooden, with block letters set out from a redwood burl backplate. I am thinking I would add a couple of small lamps out in front shining on the letters and casting their shadows onto the burl.
I'm starting to think the neon trim is just not looking like it belongs. Maybe an ornate wooden trim with some modest lighting behind it. I'll have to play with that some.
They look great. How's about doing this with a TWO set sometime.....Well, the technique would certainly add atmosphere to any scenes set in a dense forest. I would be concerned about the way I ended up doing it. I would still render the light beams in separate passes so that they could be dialed up or back as needed. Balancing the light levels of the whole scene when adding volumetric beams has turned out to be very tricky. Otherwise I would say it could work--it might just require a lot of tweaking.
Cheers, John
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D'oh! I forgot that volumetric lights don't work well in multipass renders. That's why they were showing up as mush in my first tries--I was rendering in 3x3 MP. I did a little test project in an attempt to figure out what was or wasn't happening (see attached).
Now I will make another attempt to have sunbeams filtering down through the trees to the scene. However, my strong instinct would be to do them as a separate pass, and composite the two plates in After Effects. Would that violate the rules and/or spirit of this exercise? I'm just thinking that it is always easier to acheive just the right balance when you are dialing up and down layers, as opposed to tweaking a bunch of parameters, doing an hour-long test render, repeating, repeating...
I like the idea of a wooden sign too--I will try that tonight.
Cheers
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It sure has been fun looking at what others have done with this model. The renders so far have been amazing!
I got a bit of a late start on it, and only have been able to spend the last few days at it, so it is pretty rough so far. But at least I think you'll be able to see where I'm heading with it. I'm going for the deep forest look. Kind of place an Ewok can stop in and have a few drinks at the end of a long day of battling Imperial Stormtroopers (using only sling shots and spitwads, of course).
I have been using the main overhead with a gel, and as a volumetric light. I had visions of having little shafts of sunlight streaking down to the cafe, but so far it just casts a murky green film over the scene, and takes a bloody long time to render (about seven hours for this image). So I think I will nix the volumetrics and "add them in post" if I feel like it. Hopefully that will speed up the renders.
So now I am going to go back in and try to finish the texturing, and making an ambient map for the canopy. I'd like to try o get more specular highlights to come from some areas; it's looking a bit flat to me. Any other thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated!
Cheers, John
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Hey Mark,
Great job with the PET (I remember that machine! Never had one--my first was a C-64).
In corporate life you have to find your subversive fun where you can (such as making the woman who stole your parking place exactly 5% fatter and 5% uglier in her newsletter pic).Thanks for the belly-laugh. That is AWESOME!
Reminds me of the "Art of Star Wars" exhibit they had here in San Francisco several years ago. There were several matte paintings from the first trilogy there, and I always loved looking at the little "artistic expressions" in them. Like the stormtrooper with a huge smiley-face head standing in the back of the crowd scene. Or the one whose feet were pointing backwards. Or the little tiny bumper sticker on the back of the Millenium Falcon model that read "How's My Driving..."
I've often put little messages on billboards and such and put them in CG scenes...too small to be resolved on the broadcast, but I know they are there. (Though more recently I've had to be careful with that, with more shows being done in HD
)Anyway, great job, man! Cheers, John
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I've always been a big Targa fan. I use it for everything--decals, rendering out to, etc. It's lossless and can carry an alpha channel. Plays well with video, too. The only problem I ever had was back when Adobe Photoshop 7 first came out--it had a problem with the alpha channel (they provided a patch to fix it, but it's something to look out for if you have that version of PS).
Cheers, and good luck!
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Ah, if only we could travel forward in time by about a year (or perhaps into an alternative universe...one in which I have more spare time). For a couple of years now, I have had a standalone utility called "ChorSurgeon" sketched out. It would be like a A:M specific text editor that would open up project or chor files, and create little sprite representations of any cameras, lights, models, nulls, or whatever. Then you could drag a camera from one chor to another, or models, lights. It would also have a clone function, to allow you to take a model reference and duplicate it in the chor with the same attributes but translated by an offset.
Sigh. I think I need to retire first, though.
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Wow--that's really cool, Luuk! One of the best analglyph examples I've ever seen.
It's funny, the pure red/blue setting for analglyphs seems to give a much truer effect than the grey version. I guess some folks prefer the grey because the result of the red/blue is so strongly tinted. Of course, I always love using pairs, since the color stays true. And it reminds me of using the stereo ViewMaster when I was a kid.
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Here's the gray analglyph and stereo pair of my Ferry Building entry:
Oh, and btw--great job to everyone in the contest! Thanks to all who voted for mine...I'm honored to have placed in the midst of such an awesome group of entries.
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This is the biggest format I ever had to output from A:M for. It only needed to be 30dpi, but at 32 feet wide, I had to crank out about 30K pixels wide. That certainly had my computer begging for more (memory)!
I put some pictures of the finished billboard near the top of my home page:
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I have worked as a broadcast designer in the television industry for the past ten years, which involves a lot of work producing 3D imagery. As a freelancer, I am often required to mesh with a given studio’s workflow and toolset. For this reason, I sometimes find myself having to work in Lightwave, Maya, or C4D. Every time I do, I have to groan. I have to adjust my bid to allow for extra production time. I have to prepare to hear myself saying, over and over again, things like “what do you mean, I can’t <<insert cool functionality here>>? I can do that in A:M!” or “you gotta be kidding me—they don’t have the <<insert any one of a number of essential and fundamental functionalities here>> plug-ins?! Heck, A:M does that right out of the box!”
So what often happens is that I bring my laptop in, fire up A:M, and do in a few hours what would have taken me days or weeks in whatever software the studio had deemed best for their needs. Then I sneak that footage in, impress the heck out of the client, and smile knowingly to myself. You see, I can never tell them the truth. Producers tend to be really stressed out people. Were I to tell them that my $299 application just smoked their Multi-K dollar software package, I fear their brains might simply explode. And I kinda need to keep them alive so that they can sign the checks…
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For those of you who missed its debut in September, The History Channel is airing "The Battle of Tripoli" again this week--at 11pm on Thursday the 11th, and again at 3am on Friday the 12th. I believe that is for both east and west coast. However, I have DirectTV and I'm on the west coast, so we get it at 8pm and midnight. (stupid spherical Earth...) So anyway, just be sure to check your local listings.
There are sailing ships and maps that were made using A:M, and I have samples on my web site if you happen to miss it.
Enjoy!
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Wow thanks Aprod! Thats alot of info. I think Im going to get Pro for vector paint. I think having AM and AE is a great combo. Because with AE you can do fx and render faster since its 2d and not 3d. Can you think of some books and links to start me off? What plug ins cant I do without? Like which Trapcodes plugins are the best ones? I just see me create a cool animation and then use AE to add some zing for color and some effects because its so much faster to render in 2d instead of 3d.
I've only bought one book on After Effects, and it gave me so much info that I've never bought another (although I've been tempted to pick up a more recent edition). It's "Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects" by Chris and Trish Meyer. They are the husband and wife gurus of the AE world. I was introduced to AE when I took an all day class taught by Trish, and I've been hooked ever since.
For plug-ins, it really depends on what you are intending to do. I would suggest looking at the Adobe web site--they have a page that lists a bunch of the 3rd party developers of AE plug-ins. Peruse the list and see if there are things you might need. But unless you have some specific need right away, you'll have plenty to keep you busy just learning what is in the program (and you'll have fun, too!).
Boris's "Continuum" is impressive because it gives you so many effects. Same with DigiEffects "Delerium". I had started with that, and it gave such a wide range of effects that it held me over for quite a while. Though I struggled with its smoke generator. Then I tried the smoke in Trapcode's "Particular". It was the best synthetic smoke I'd ever seen, and a real nice interface. Check their website--they have some package deals where you can get Particular, Shine, and Stroke--all awesome plug-ins.
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AE is for the most part a compositing tool. It also has really cool text functions. To me the name After Effects is kind of misleading. It is not an effect generation tool. It woun't generate fire, explosions and FX like that. Most of the FX that AE generates are in the form of compositing effects.
I'd have to disagree with that. Compositing is a big part of AE, but it is also invaluable for visual effects (as opposed to special effects, which are done at the time of shooting). While it is true that AE doesn't offer much in the way of smoke and explosions out of the box, it does allow for 3rd party plug-ins for that. I use it to add smoke, fire, and bigbadabooms to footage all the time.
Yes, AE is a 2D compositing program, but it allows you to apply a myriad of effects to any of the layers. AE out of the box allows you to blur, color adjust, key, distort, scale, rotate, re-time, and do a lot of the image processing things that Photoshop does (emboss, add noise, glow, solarize, painterize, etc.), but to moving footage. And just about everything is keyframeable--you can change parameters and stuff along the timeline, and even edit the curves.
Then there are hundreds of 3rd party filters and filter packages to do just about any specific thing you want to do, including smoke, fire, explosions, color effects, film look, etc. Boris offers great filter packages, as does DigiEffects, TrapCode, etc.
Just bear in mind that AE is a 2D program. If you look at the flyers it may talk about 3D, but that just means it allows you to manipulate 2D things in 3D. (Think of it as being able to create a stage populated with cardboard cut-outs of actors. You can move a camera and lights in and around the stage and it looks great, but if you look at the actor from the side you see that they are really thin, and the illusion is lost). If you need to move around something and see its sides and back, then you need to do that in a 3D package.
So I see A:M and AE as a perfect marriage. I couldn't make a living if I didn't have AE. I wouldn't want to live if I didn't have A:M. Buying filter packs for AE can add up fast (I have about $4K invested in AE), but it all depends on what you need to do with it.
I use A:M to create good looking footage. I use AE to put it all together, and add the little flourishes that really make it shine.
And yes, it is theoretically possible to do compositing all within A:M. But I suppose it is also theoretically possible to build a house using only a hammer. But pretty soon you are going to get tired of cutting boards by hacking at them with the claw end. I'd much rather have a hammer AND a saw, AND a drill, etc.
So anyway, I hope this helped somewhat. If you have further questions, I'd be happy to assist. I've been using AE for many years.
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Here is a web page with more thumbnail/image samples from the Tripoli show, along with one Sorenson 3 Quicktime file:
http://66.70.254.100/work/samples/sampTripoli.html
I also put some pages together with samples from other shows I've done work on for The Travel Channel and The History Channel:
http://66.70.254.100/work/samples/sampChamp.html
http://66.70.254.100/work/samples/sampTopSecret.html
http://66.70.254.100/work/samples/sampFortKnox.html
http://66.70.254.100/work/samples/sampOpReu.html
::whew!::
Thanks for the comments, y'all.
Nice work! Did they give you the reference material?
What kind of layout are these maps...somethings look like you've used bump maps and some appear to be separate models?
The networks usually give us no reference material. We do have segment producers here who dig up some stuff, but for a lot of it I do my own research, since I know exactly what and how much I need in visual terms.
The layout for the maps is indeed a combination of models on top of flat maps with bumps and displacement maps.
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...one more...
(I'll put the rest on my web site)
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Another image...
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Here are a couple of screenshots of a sampling of the graphics I did for "The Battle of Tripoli" which aired last Sunday the 19th of September on The History Channel.
We just heard from A&E Network that the Nielsons were very high for the show (1.3, as opposed to their usual 0.8 for most of their other programming), so chances are good they will re-broadcast it soon. I'll post the info on my web site (www.atkinsonproductions.com), so check there in case you missed it last Sunday.
[i have more sample images, but it looks like I can only post one at a time here, so I will try to create a web page on my site this weekend.]
Okay--just added, here's the web page with samples:
http://66.70.254.100/work/samples/sampTripoli.html
See below for more links to other sample pages of A:M animations I've done for shows that have aired.
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Hey folks,
Thanks for the comments, and a (early) happy birthday greeting to Kyle!
Ross--many of the big cable networks contract out to smaller production companies to create their programming for them. I'm not sure if any of them even have production facilities in-house. I am an independent contractor who works on projects for Indigo Films, a small (only about 12 people on staff, with the rest being freelancers...they have four Avid editing bays) production studio in San Rafael, California. Indigo does programming mostly for A&E Network (which includes History Channel, The Learning Channel, etc.) and Discovery Network (Discovery, Animal Planet, Discovery Wings, The Travel Channel, etc.). They produce on average around ten hours of programming a year, which keeps me with plenty to do. I consider Indigo to be my prime client, as they account for about 90% of my work for any given year.
Because Indigo is a smaller studio, their budgets tend to be smaller. The producers don't care what kind of software I use, so long as the results look good. So I tend to reach for A:M. (Unfortunately, some of them have been coming in with Lightwave artists, so I'm having to pick up LW now too.)
I like the fact that Indigo is a smaller studio, because I get to wear lots of hats. I do titles, visual effects, animated maps, CG, and even step in occasionally to do some voiceover and re-creation acting. The downside is the fact that being pretty much the entirety of the art department, I can get swamped when there are four shows going on at the same time.
Oh, and as for web stuff, I have been long overdue on updating my web site. But a big part of it will be updating my samples, and I am hoping to create an area with Tripoli samples.
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Just a little programming note:
This upcoming Sunday the 19th of September a program will premiere on The History Channel entitled "The Battle of Tripoli". I did just about all of the visual effects and broadcast graphics for the show, so it involves a lot of Animation:Master output. Namely, all of the maps, ship models, and some of the battle simulation were done using A:M.
I believe it is in the prime time slot--it airs at 8pm (Pacific time) on our DirectTV, which may mean it also airs three hours before that (or 8pm eastern time)...but anyway, just check your local listings, if you are interested in taking a look.
Thanks!
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Hi Frank,
At the risk of doing a "me too" posting, I just have to say that your work posted here is fantastic! I love the atmosphere that you have achieved...that kind of "futuristic retro" that I always imagine Jules Verne would have created if A:M were around 150 years ago...
I look forward to seeing more samples from this city. Got a short film idea in there?
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Hey Ken,
I didn't see anything in the entry guidelines about this, but is there any problem with an entry also being posted in A:M Films? I know some festivals will disqualify a submission if it is available for viewing online somewhere. I've been hoping to get "The Daydreamer" cleaned up and out.
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If anyone has doubts that A:M can do photorealistic, forget it. It can do more realistic than real.
I recently worked on a show for a major cable network, and had to create a DC-9 and have it blend with some existing aerial footage. The contact at the network was being very finicky about the realism of the cg. I spent about three days modeling the jet in A:M, matched the lighting, and generated footage I needed to merge with the stock footage. The result looked marvelous.
Late in the post-production, we received some notes from the network regarding one of the latest cuts of the show--including one that said "this airplane looks cartoony."
My heart sank, and I grabbed a tape of the show and fast-forwarded to the shot in question given the timecode he listed. I pressed play...then burst out laughing. The plane in question was live footage of a real aircraft. Seeing as there were no other comments regarding my CG airplane, I had to really tip my hat to Animation:Master.
It's more realistic than reality!!
John Atkinson
Atkinson Productions
Star Ship Challenger
in Work In Progress / Sweatbox
Posted
Hah! You're just up the road a piece. Just a couple of splines away.
BTW, I also really dug the Vette. I voted for both of yours, and didn't even know they were from the same person! (I'm wondering...has it ever happened before that one person placed in the top four with two images in the same contest, or is that a Hash first?)
My harshest criticism of the Vette image is that it is not very green. I mean, there is an issue of "Popular Mechanics" visible in the trash can. That should go in the recycling with the other colored paper. It is sending the wrong message!
Good job again, and congrats!