Thanksgiving 2011

[totlover]

Well I am back once again. This years video should be a lot more detailed I am hoping but the rendering will kick my butt. But it will be worth it.

So i will just keep posting screenshots of stuff i am creating. Just keeping my progress up because i wont show any of my family so i want someone to see my progress and maybe help me out with some advice!

 

none of the lighting is final.. and some stuff wont make final cut because of memory and rendering.

 

First Day:

[mouseman]

Great progress for one day!

[TheSpleen]

Great building

[totlover]

Well Now there is a second building in the picture. There is no door because this is the side.. the corner of the street is to the right of the picture. Sidewalks are probably to come next. Or more buildings... these are fun.

 

i am making my own textures now... only one not mine is the red brick.

 

sidewalks were next:

[NancyGormezano]

Fabulous little town! Coincidently there used to be (probably still is) a "Sue's Kitchen" restaurant relatively close to me in Mountain View.

[itsjustme]

Looks good so far! The only suggestion I have is to bevel everything.

[jirard]

Looks good!

I would recommend using Jasons default cho. lighting setup. It gives great lighting with short render times.

[totlover]

Looks good!

I would recommend using Jasons default cho. lighting setup. It gives great lighting with short render times.

 

Where would i find that?

[jirard]

Here.

[Vertexspline]

totlover----- such a cute little town shapping up....there is a thread on moving to wyoming but i think I would rather move to this town.

 

Rich

[Zaryin]

Man, I wish I could build a town. It's looking great so far.

[John Bigboote]

awesome city... just got back from a roadtrip across Michigan... your little town looks like many a small Michigan village... hope you keep adding to it!

[totlover]

Thanks for all the comments so far everyone! I am home visiting the family for the weekend and most weekends until school starts. But I will definitely be adding a whole lot more to the city and other things through out this week. I have never been so anxious to get back to work on something. I am really liking what i have done so far for this years video.

[totlover]

Todays Updates:

 

another block done:

[final lighting will improve the look]

 

i tweaked the lighting a little bit.. im going for a certain look i think and i am getting closer to what i want it to be

i am gonna make the bushes not so much the same looking either and my trees may need a little changing up. but we'll see

[totlover]

Today's

 

another street. the house ones in the back are more fillers as the camera will not go down that street you can see. it turns right here

[itsjustme]

It looks like it will be a fun animation, Caleb!

[Vertexspline]

Totlover---- looking better each iteration. Gosh..you are prolific.

 

Rich

[totlover]

This will more than likely look a lot better with improving the lighting, plus all the shrubbery and wotnots that I will be adding to the area, but yeah this is where the next part of the video will come to!

 

[totlover]

Is there a way that you can make a certain model just lit up without using lights in choreography.. Like say i have a cloud skybox towards thing in the sky and I want it to be lit up without having to light it with my lights.

[Zaryin]

There are ambience maps, but they don't add true lighting... That's all I can think of before I leave for work, haha.

[totlover]

Well I have just about finished up the first two minutes of footage for my video. This is just the fly through of the town and showing off the arena (image below) and i just have a few more camera tweaks and some model adjustments and it willl be off and ready to be rendered.. Which is a problem because its going to take a very.. very long time. Plus the fact that i am going to be populating the second part with people because they are all outside of the arena waiting to see the "Main Event".

Then I have individual character scenes to do which will probably be anywhere from 10-20 seconds apiece.. And I have twenty plus characters to do. Oh fun.

 

 

But yeah this a screenshot of the arena entrance.

 

And uh any ideas on large areas of grass that is simple to do without putting like 300 stamps of a decal on there. im messing around with just material roughness right now and it may get the right look.

 

And yeah my lighting is now all whack again so i am going to have to redo it all once again, cause now that i look at it.. there is too many spotlight spots and shadows are not realistic.

 

EDIT:

here is a new screenshot

[robcat2075]

Grass is tough to do.

 

For out door light... Are you wanting sunny or overcast?

[totlover]

For out door light... Are you wanting sunny or overcast?

 

I am going for a sunny look but I just want it to be somewhat realistic lighting. I am still trying to figure out lighting it is quite the bugger.

But what I just did was somewhat a decent look and that was a very big klieg light casting shadows then turning up ambiance on the objects and I got this.

It also cut the render time down a good two minutes.

[mouseman]

Awesome set, and very impressive modelling progress!

 

For the lighting, a bit more shadow would be good. Maybe the ambiance is too high? Or perhaps you could try ambient occlusion or FakeAO?

[largento]

Nice!

[Rodney]

 

I really like the effect in this render (at least in the thumbnail image). It reminds me of the Tilt Shift effect that makes standard photos/video look like miniatures. (Example)

 

Your project is really coming along nicely!

Some of these buildings remind me of my home town area which certainly pulls me in.

 

 

Added: A thought. When all is said and done if you are looking for something of a photographed/video'd look you might run the entire sequence through the Filmgrain Post Effect filter. This would break up the look of too-perfectly computer generated imagery. Just a thought... not necessarily a recommendation. For additional lighting degradation (to add a subtle effect of filming over time in real light) you might be able to also adjust the color of the film over time via a mild Tint filter.

[totlover]

Appreciate the suggestions Rodney and Chris!

I am definitely going to need to spend some time on lighting.. Probably will just spend a whole day on that once all of my animation and modelling is done.

 

But Here is the second part of my video. Its going to consist of a child carrying a camera through the hall and walking door to door and when it opens you will each of the contestants for the tournament and they will be doing their own quirky thing or inside family joke. But I have constructed the hallway that I am going to use. Minus something in the corner in the far end of the scene. And this also makes a left turn to more doors. 23 total doors i believe.

 

But this lighting is pretty memory intensive.. plus the probably too high of patch count i have right now.

I never got to do an actual render it just pretty much froze so i used render lock mode until it finished.

 

[Rodney]

Is the interior set also a part of the exterior model?

 

I only ask because if it is... you can cut down on a whole lot of splines by having them as separate models or projects.

[totlover]

Is the interior set also a part of the exterior model?

 

I only ask because if it is... you can cut down on a whole lot of splines by having them as separate models or projects.

 

No it is in a totally different project with nothing from the previous one.. The Entire set is one model however.. And consists of 18000 patches.. I do not know how it got to be so high. I think i am going to be splitting this up into a bunch of different models and then reducing the patch count a lot.

 

 

:::EDIT:::

I just noticed each one of the chairs is 600 patches.. im going to make them way less quality.. but i'll put the model up for anyone who wants it. its fairly decent and if in a somewhat closeup shot it would do someone help maybe.

 

metalchair.mdl

[totlover]

Does anyone have an Idea as to why my scene will not render at all? It always stops at a certain spot on both my lap top and desktop.

[Zaryin]

It might be a memory issue. I would definately split your model up and start creating action objects if you haven't been doing this already. Ask any of the great mechanical modellers around here if you need advice on that though. I haven't really explored that much.

[totlover]

It might be a memory issue. I would definately split your model up and start creating action objects if you haven't been doing this already. Ask any of the great mechanical modellers around here if you need advice on that though. I haven't really explored that much.

This is the first I have heard of action objects what are they for and what do they do?

 

And slight change of pace either way. The hallway is pretty much being cut from the project its causing me way too many problems and I need time for rendering if I will even be able to.

 

So instead of going door to door I am going to show each person's inside joke scene intro clip from a 'security camera's' point of view and put a filter to make it look recorded.. so quality of render wont matter for this.

 

This is a look at the first thing I have done for this method.

still needs animating done obviously but this is just where i end the day.

[totlover]

Well school has started. I am attending the Art Institute of Atlanta and my first semester just started and I already love it. But its still no excuse for why i have not been doing my stuff for thanksgiving. So now i am bout to start working hard on this to get it finished so maybe i can do some decent editing in the end.

 

But here is a screenshot and two rendered clips of the individual characters introduction scenes.

 

 

this one.. one of my grandpas does his hair before putting a shirt on.. always has.. and his wife puts his shirt on over his head in the morning. and one of my aunts makes fun of this so much so its in the video..

 

this grandpa is the "chuck norris" of our family. he is the man and can "do anything" ha.

[Vertexspline]

Totlover --good luck with school.....enjoy that. and when you get time to do more of this stuff will be watching eagerly to see how this develops.

[mouseman]

Fun stuff so far!

[totlover]

I dont want this to offend anyone its just we always joke our cousin about being homosexual when in fact he is not. But for halloween at school he went as Woody from Toy Story. He is 17.

I am not letting him live that down. Someone should have made fun of him.

 

 

That is where i come in

 

 

 

And others.

 

[totlover]

I am very close to being finished sorta. Few more clips for some characters then its off to editing.

But i thought i would share this clip with everyone I dont feel like putting them all up however.

 

[totlover]

Well everything involving animation master is about complete. My last 42 second animation of a fly around inside the arena is rendering but that should about do it. Then I have a little more editing to do and my friend will be finishing up some music for it and it will be good to go. I am very pleased with what I have so far.

 

This is a screenshot from what I am rendering right now.

[totlover]

Here it is . Youtube Safe upload so some posters and stuff are blocked out. You'll notice the grey boxes.

But this is it. First people to see it!

 

 

there are some weird glitches in the scenes at the beginning. There was nothing i could do about it.

[Wildsided]

Bravo Caleb, love the sense of scale you achieved with the town and the 10 year old in me couldn't help but giggle at the kid who farts himself into a wall. Excellent work.

[Rodney]

Very impressive.

That represents a whole lot of modeling and animation.

...and you made your deadline too!

 

Color me impressed.

 

Congratulations!

[mouseman]

Way to go! I'm sure there are a lot of in-jokes there. The beginning really has scope ... rivaling the scope of some of John Bigboote's projects!