What I'm working on - Draise

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Draise
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What I'm working on - Draise

Post by Draise »

Random stuff

Image

I started playing around with DAZ studios, then into Softimage to build a somewhat pixaresque looking pixie kid thing. The head was rather realistic at first, and now it is not.


I needed to learn more hair stuff, so thought.. why not in SI? So I started to learn how to do some hair stuff.

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MikomDude
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Re: What I'm working on - Draise

Post by MikomDude »

Draise, that pixie is a pixie of nightmares. That horse that just ran through an oil spill isn't exactly an improvement.

...oh well , time to go to bed :) :| :?
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Re: What I'm working on - Draise

Post by clintonman »

I feel sorry for the oil slick horse, he looks sad, I guess because he's covered in oil. The pixie has a Matrix mouth. I wonder what that means?
Clinton Reese

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Re: What I'm working on to study and experiment- Draise

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hehehehe

I do like my horrifying experimentations and sadistic animal torture.

These really are results of experiments, not really projects per say.

Here is another:

Image

Opened up my good old trueSpace, heavily modded, to try out an experiment. I loaded up an old abandoned project.. and tried out a trick that I learnt in an animation studio here with Blender - use planes with alpha transparency to create cheap atmosphere.

It totally works, and for real time!

I have also decided to delete any addon that may crash trueSpace and see if I can do a full webseries production with it… one day. I want to squeeze that much juice from it because I love playing with that software.

I will have to play a lot with colorus, lighting and shadows and composition if I want to use it right - as I don’t have all the fancy bells and whistles like bounced light, true AO, or even SSAO, no realtime DOF or ANYTHING. I have to work tricks from my Pass shaders or something to get all those cool aspects.

I am not sure if it is a time saver having to avoid those effect and lighting and doing them artistically by hand, or if I am just investing too much for a very stylized animation. I am sure the realtime rendering aspect will be nice eventually during crunch time, but I have to think about it. The pro about trueSpace is that I have everything with the realtime viewport there - rigging, modeling, animation, etc. Pro’s and Cons. The alternative is a Blender/Unreal Engine workflow.. or a Softimage/Unreal Engine workflow, or Softimage/Machstudio Pro 2 workflow. One big turnoff for trueSpace is if I do want to render out passes, I have to manually switch the passes to render. All the other workflows will do it automatically for me.

I wish there was some way to script out D3D renders from the Workspace.

Oh, but it’s free. Hmmmmmmm….
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Re: What I'm working on - Draise

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Image


This is a proof of concept done in trueSpace.

Rendered in realtime - using some cool nifty shaders in WS hashed together to make one cool shader. I saw one image in my collection (I collect images of things that inspire me, a good 9 gigs large now) and it made me think up an idea.. and that idea I’m cooking up.

Hope you like my little celuloid jellyfish!
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Re: What I'm working on - Draise

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Image

Fur Study

So.. when I don't want to work, I experiment and study. lately I have been trying out fur techniques. I have started to learn hair grooming in both Softimage and Blender. But both systems are locked into their rendering solutions within their software, and by no means export by any way to other packages like Mach Studio Pro 2 or Unreal Engine - limited to rendering inside them with the biased or unbiased renderers on CPU/GPU acceleration (but still not realtime).. But both do export Alembic and FBX.

So I thought to myself, why can't I use geometry with textures, like they use in realtime games, made in Softimage or Blender.

I tried out different techniques first in Softimage (which was hard) using some free addons. I succeeded in a feather like system with some texture limitation - but in turn learnt about Syflex and simulating cloth in a very powerful way to simulate the cloth. I also tried out a very inefficient geometry painter. I also learnt that Softimage instancing and particle system, within itself, is very powerful - but not easy to export. I then exported the result I could create with that system to MSP for some thick splodgy fur with a fresnel specular and SSS. It looks nice, alien in a way. Probably could work on the shaders more in Unreal Engine, with some fresnel transparency or something. Though, now that I did it, simulating it could be an issue, but the particle system in SI is quick to do something alternative, and it might be good for full body characters with that system, as the system is weighted to the rig, with simulations applied, and quick styling guides. Export doesn't take long, result, realtime ready. Partial success.
Pro: can use geometry fur for realtime solutions or alembic workflows, can create curve hair guides with cluster controls, can transfer body textures to full body fur textures easily, can simulate geometry fur relatively easily, attached to weighted characters very quickly and easily.
Cons: geometry fur is based purely on geometry and can quickly get heavy, hard to style clumps and other fur features, no alpha map can included with the texture, no individual card UV sets, no multiple texture clusters, requires more knowhow to get it down and third party addons
Future workaround: make thin geometry hair polygons, like literal hairs, have multiple hair sets, keep hair cards light on geometry count, import weighted and animated characters from elsewhere, or FBX from elsewhere, then apply fur and export to realtime solution, render with more shader development in Unreal Engine instead of MSP, learn more ICE stuff to help create clumping as it must be possible.

So, now I turn to Bforartists, a Blender fork that has everything Blender has, though easier to play around with (once you have relearnt all the shortcuts and workflow a bit). I create geometry instance hair really easily, quickly convert easily, turn into UV'd geometry easily - but lose simulation as soon as I convert it to geometry - partial success, non simulated fur a go. I then work on a symbiotic relationship with Softimage, assigning clusters to my card system so I can apply anchors to the inner part of the fur to then simulate it to the weighted geometry of a rig. I have yet figured out a sure fire system that will work under pressure - but atleast I can make fur really quickly, and for nonsimulated hair, it works like a charm.
Pro: Geometry fur has UV's, meaning cards can be used speeding up potential animation and simulation speeds - and reandering, styling with the cards have the same hair tools available as the ones used in Blender, can export as FBX or Alembic, can have multiple texture clusters applied to the hair, perfect for static hair systems, can have some limited hair deformations using operators
Con: Cannot be truely simulated once converted to geometry, hard to attach simulated fur to weighted or animated rigs,
Future Workaround: by using the texture clusturs in my hair cards, I can apply weighted cloth attributes in Softimage and maybe Blender using a weighted rig input as the anchor - a proof of concept still needs to be made..

But so far I'm happy with the potential realtime fur I can do from Blender and somewhat Softimage - a behemoth of a software with all the doors open, if only I knew what they were and how to walk through them better - or the more friendlier Blender that just gets the job done in some curious way.
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Re: What I'm working on - Draise

Post by clintonman »

Maybe you can get some tips from the character that epic released.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog ... e-released" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Clinton Reese

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