Jump to content
Hash, Inc. Forums

balistic

*A:M User*
  • Posts

    182
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by balistic

  1. It was a shame to hear about Avalanche getting dropped by Disney last week. Hope all the old-school A:M users there find new jobs quickly.
  2. It's funny that I should happen to cruise by the Hash forums today, as I probably only do it once a year these days. From 2007 to 2010 I was working at Blur in LA, but switched over to the video casino gaming sector in 2011 so I could move back home to Nevada to be near family and have a better work-life balance. I still do a lot of 3D environment stuff, it's just for slot machines instead of videogames/movies. I have a website that's in need of an overhaul, and tend to post sketches and such at my ArtStation page. I haven't done any 3D at home in quite a few years, but I just built a new desktop a couple weeks back and am looking forward to trying to get back into it; particularly real-time stuff and GPU rendering. We use Unity at work, but we're a couple versions behind, and those new lighting tools in 5 are calling my name. Thanks for asking about me, and any of you A:M old-timers are quite welcome to add me on Facebook!
  3. Good to see you guys too Rodger: another compliment I wanted to pay you - I like that you add a bit of wobble to your panels with a bump map. Makes for interesting highlights, and keeps things looking hand-made. I think you've been doing that for a while though. At any rate, it still works. I almost never render anything without adding some low-frequency bump wobble to the surface.
  4. Rodger, it warms my heart that you are still doing this kind of thing. I haven't had a chance to use A:M in years, but knowing you're still chugging away at these awesome trains is pretty great. Nice paint shader, BTW.
  5. Definitely put it in a sealed box. Ported subs sound like butt *fond memories of my old MTX Thunder 8500 and 1.2 kilowatt amp* I really need a system in my new car . . .
  6. Hate to tell you this, but I'm not sure you've mapped it correctly. Greenland looks particularly distorted, and everything seems too wide east to west.
  7. This is some really solid work, considering your age. You'll go far in CG. Get the character out from behind the desk for the next piece. Let's see some full-body animation.
  8. Really great piece. My favorite of the entries. Good job!
  9. Really nice. The lighting looks spot-on. The only thing I don't like is the design of the camera. It seems a little plain-looking, like primatives mashed together. Otherwise though, great-looking set!
  10. really great work guys!
  11. woah, this looks cool. Wish I had time to play with it.
  12. a fun topic. I've, uh, explored it a bit myself. "July 12th, 2062 - discovery of hos on venus" oh and
  13. So how do you stop a render and keep the image it's rendered so far? If you can fit the whole thing on screen, just hit printscrn and paste into your favorite image editor. Do it before you abort the render though, as A:M seems to occassionally empty the frame buffer and hide the image when you abort a multipass (I wish it didn't). bentothemax: Glad to be able to provide some motivation for you. Find something in CG that interests you greatly and persue an in-depth understanding of it. People will eventually take notice.
  14. I think the enivironment and saucer both look fine, but the way the camera is constrained to aim at the ship in the first shot is . . . well, BAD. You're doing a disservice to what could be a very cool sequence. Try tracking your camera by hand, instead of contraining it to the saucer. You'd get a much nicer shot, I think.
  15. Not many, actually. I had to set the density as low as it would go, I think because the mesh of the terrain is too dense (something like 96x96 patches). I'd be surprised if there's more than a couple thousand hairs on the whole thing. It just looks dense because of how wide the sprites are.
  16. just mindlessly messing around with a couple hair systems. Painted a bush sprite and a grass sprite real quick, just to get them in there and get a feel for what might be possible down the line. Obviously you'd want a lot more variety in the images if you were doing something more serious.
  17. I'm not counting my eggs before they hatch either John . . . we'll see if anything I threw decides to stick. As cool as the Expose books are, they seem to have a habit of going a bit ga ga over anything with a lot of detail . . . CGTalk is the same way. Tough to get noticed unless you drench your image in noodly details. I'm more selective with my detail . . . there's a lot to be said for just capturing an impression. edit: and good luck to you too, man!
  18. I bumped up the very bottom of the tone curve, without touching the absolute blacks. It's definitely a dark piece, but I think that's about what you'd get if you pointed a camera at a similar scene. It's always tricky working in the bottom third of the luminance gamut . . . there's so much variation there from display to display. robcat: this one is meant to be darker, but it may be too dark . . . I think I need a few days away from it to get a fresh eye.
  19. Ah, thanks for that mirror tip Yves. I was wondering why I seemed to need to crank the intensity of the photon map to 700% to get it bright enough. I'll have to try that next time.
  20. thanks for the feedback Nancy. I just now went back and bumped up the bottom end of the tone curve a little bit, and added a bit of the noisy bloom that the first version had. It's subtle, but it brings the image more in line with the image in the first post.
  21. Thanks for the feedback guys, here's what I'm calling final: I think the composition reads a little better this way . . . or it could just be because it's different than what I'd been staring at for six years. Fixed the light leak on the table in A:M, tweaked a few little things in Photopaint, including a few subtle pieces of floating dust. Stopped the render at 21 passes because it looked good enough, and because I needed my computer back render time on this one at 1280x960 was 12-ish hours, but I increased a few of the radiosity settings more than I probably needed to. As for how to work with heavy scenes like this, it's actually pretty painless to do preview renders if you keep the settings low while you work. It only takes about 15 seconds to throw 80,000 photos around the scene, and with final gathering samples set to minimum, I can do progressive renders pretty quickly. edit: the white background on the forum destroys a lot of the shadow detail in the image . . . try saving it to your PC and viewing it on a black background to see what's going on in the darkness.
  22. Thanks guys! Gonna set up a 25-pass version tonight with some tweaked settings that fix the light leak under the table and make the photons a bit less splotchy. It's nice to have renders going while I sleep again
  23. I like the new version more too, not because it's radiosity, but because I've learned quite a bit about tonal balance and composition since I made the original piece.
×
×
  • Create New...