Dan's Newer Stuff

[Wildsided]

My brother-in-law got Covid-19'd out of his job in HR management and is considering starting up his own firm. So I made him an animated logo.

 

[robcat2075]

Looks serious!

 

[Michael Brennan]

Great job on the logo!
Best wishes for your brother.

[Wildsided]

I finally finished the first draft of Bernie Book 1 so treated myself to doing a bit of work on the illustrations. There's a scene where Bernie's Grandpa is helping him do some homework and as the bedroom was mostly done I decided to start with that.

I don't think I've shown the room from this angle before so that's a thing. Pointless details include the maths homework being appropriate for the year Bernie would actually be in at school, there's a very faint wisp of steam coming off of his tea and one of the books on his shelf (sadly not in frame) is titled Captain Bombastic Is Really Fantastic.

 

[Wildsided]

An important scene in the book takes place in a cave near Lilymoss Pond. So I've been modelling them for making illustrations. Bernie is tiny in the choreography from this angle. The hill itself is 120 feet across, stretches back 100 feet and rises 40 feet from ground level. I've used maps in the decal to dictate the length of the grass (hair) although it's not very visible from this distance. The trees are separate models made using the treez plugin and the leaves were made using hair again with an image of oak leaves added to the emitter. 

[johnl3d]

looks great 

[Wildsided]

Cheers John

[itsjustme]

Very nice!

[Wildsided]

Thanks David.

Quick questions lads (and lasses) Have I got something setup incorrectly that's making the shadows of the leaves render without their Alpha? The leaves themselves have rendered properly but the leaf shadows are rectangles.

 

[Wildsided]

scratch that. I deleted the materials and reapplied them. that seems to have fixed it so must have been a bug. oddly, nothing else was changed for this re render but the shadow placement seems totally different. Ah well, I'll worry about that once the rest is done. Also in the middle there is Lilymoss pond. 40 ft diameter, 15 ft deep in the middle.

[Wildsided]

I've been working on one of Bernie's classmates over the last few days and decided to give her a cable knit sweater. I haven't done the sleeves yet but figured I'd post a work in progress.

[itsjustme]

Looks great, Dan!

[Wildsided]

Thanks again David ☺️

I've finished off the textures and added fur to the character. Her name is Katerina Hawthorn. She still needs hair adding.

[Wildsided]

Work on the illustrations continues. Just finished up another of Bernie's schoolmates, his name is Melvin 'Mel' Trough.

[itsjustme]

Great stuff, Dan!

[Wildsided]

So, I ran the numbers and quickly established that if I wanted to release Bernie some time before the heat death of the universe, I was gonna have to change tact.

Modelling each individual character, costume and location was going to take waaay longer than I had available so I came up with a solution that I think will work. I'm going to use A:M to rough out the images I need and then sketch over them in photoshop.

Case in point I needed a picture of Mrs Burrows in exercise clothes. My model of Mrs B has her in a long dress and rather than remodel and texture her into a new outfit I tore the bottom part of her dress off, posed her and made this.

[robcat2075]

I'm just catching up on some of this, Great looking character, again!

I'm not sure what you mean by your new workflow.

 

 

[Wildsided]

Thanks Robert. I've made a picture to demo the work flow. Essentially I'll be using a choreography and the models I've already made, plus stand-ins for the ones I haven't (Like basic blocks to represent furniture or a body to represent characters I haven't modelled). That will allow me to get the correct perspectives on the images and then I'll use photoshop to finish the pictures. I've uploaded another example of Bernie waking up in the morning. In the story he's wearing his pajamas, but I don't have a model, or the time to model and texture a different outfit for him. So I used the model I had to pose him and then drew over the image to have him in the correct outfit.

 

[robcat2075]

So the project wasn't animation, it was still images! I didn't understand that.

[jason1025]

Impressive

[Wildsided]

Thanks everyone

I thought I'd post a more extreme example of the process. One of the pictures was supposed to be of Bernie and his Grandpa inside their local Newsagents, Bernie is browsing comics and Grandpa was talking to Mr. John the owner.

This meant that in order to produce the image in 3D I would need models of:

Mr. John, Bernie (outdoor clothes), Grandpa (Outdoor Clothes) and everything inside the Newsagents.

I didn't have any of that. So I roughed out a basic layout of the Newsagents interior using shapes and a free prop plant I found online, slapped on a few decals to give me an idea of what certain areas would look like and then figured out character positions using the models I did have (Including a basic squirrel head and male body). I also refined the process to only rough sketch the parts I absolutely needed to so there isn't a full image for that aspect.

Also the text on the pop fridge, sweet packets and numbers on the clock are in 'Eulish' the language spoken by the inhabitants of Bernie's universe. I made a font for it so I can write things easier.

 

 

[Wildsided]

Not posted in a while, but I just finished a reference image for chapter 7 and thought I'd post it. As you can see Bernie's Grandpa has excellent fencing form 😄.

 

[Wildsided]

Just finished another base image and thought I'd share it. Everyone is pretty miserable in this one. Ignore the fact that the boxer dog kid is naked, I don't have a complete model of him so his body is a stand in.

[Wildsided]

Guys,

is there a a way to make toon lines detect the edges of particles? Even with the particles baked the toon lines are drawn around the underlying geometry.

 

[robcat2075]

By "particles" you mean hair?

I can get hair toon lines by setting Toon in the Hair surface props. It doesn't seem to obey color and thickness unless those are set in the render settings.

(Notice that toon lines only render if they have patches behind them.)

[Wildsided]

Cheers Robert, I tried turning on the lines in the fur material of the model and it didn't come on. So I made a new material with the lines on and they work. It doesn't suit the overall style of that version of the model, but good to know.

Thanks again.

[robcat2075]

Another option might be to craft an image that appears as if it is tooned to use as a hair particle

[Wildsided]

I've opted to go for a simpler look that closer resembles the 2D style I used for the book. Gonna be a fair bit of work but it's coming along nicely.

[Wildsided]

A spooky Bernie for spooktober

 

[Shelton]

I really like the toon renders but you have created a spooky look there!

[Wildsided]

Well guys and gals it's done and it's available to buy. The logo and all of the illustrations were made using A:M in some way so if you'd like to check it out or if you know a kid that might like an adventure featuring cute animal people then thanks in advance. 

[robcat2075]

On 11/5/2021 at 2:59 PM, Wildsided said:

Well guys and gals it's done and it's available to buy.

Where may we do this?

[Wildsided]

Lol, yeah that might be useful info eh?

The link for US amazon is https://www.amazon.com/Bernie-Snuffles-Monster-Lillymoss-Cave/dp/B09KNGG48F/

but changing the .com to a different locale, .ca or .co.uk etc, goes to the equivalent listing on those versions of the site. 

[Wildsided]

Back when we did the Planes, Trains & Automobiles contest I tried rendering out my entry with radiosity switched on and it looked cool but also a bit like an explosion at a disco.

So I ended up submitting a render without radiosity for the competition. A long while later I either read, or heard in a youtube video, someone mention using multi-pass with radiosity to get better results due to the blending of the multiple passes. That discussion popped into my head again today so I thought I'd try it out and ended up with this result.

For reference this is the competition entry at the same resolution (720p)

 

[robcat2075]

Have you tried Yves' tutorials on making settings for radiosity?

https://forums.hash.com/topic/50594-yves-radiosityphoton-mapping-pages/

 

[Wildsided]

2 hours ago, robcat2075 said:

Have you tried Yves' tutorials on making settings for radiosity?

https://forums.hash.com/topic/50594-yves-radiosityphoton-mapping-pages/

 

I have not, but I will the next time I use radiosity. If I remember from when I set it up before, I just kept gradually cranking up the numbers in the radiosity settings until my PC couldn't cope with it any more (admittedly not very scientific). All I did yesterday was turn radiosity back on (With the settings the same as they were when I last saved 2 years ago) and turned on multipass 16 before I rendered the image.

[robcat2075]

That tut presents a work flow to arrive at efficient settings and makes the unwanted results less mysterious to solve.