United3dArtists Archive

Crazy Colombian - Title Sequence



I got paid to do a short little animation - took him about a month to get the cash for it (some university kid) but then he paid me to do a youtube title. So here I am doing something for very little cash, but for the fun of it - relaxing in trueSpace and it's slow crunching. I simulated, lighted and did everything in the workside of TS. I won't use my passes shader this time around - as I want to keep it cheap. I will put motionblur using Avisynth and a script from MVtools2 for VirtualdubMod - super cheap, and not a bad result - fast results.

So anyway, I did have fun and gave him the joy of trying out new colors. You can see all the iterations in realtime, so it was nice not have to render again to show the client a "close to final" look and feel...

You can see the iterations here.

I tried out my old realtime reflection techniques.. it's harder on a flat surface and will probably have to make a camera rig for that.. but kinda works. (using the camera projector)



You can watch the preview animation below. This weekend I'll render out the final. I have a lot of work to do, and this job was too cheap to give it priority, though it has been a pleasure.



I should learn Blender more - it doesn't have a bad GLSL realtime preview system - and a much more easier shader setup system... but well.... I wouldn't know how to get my passes system in that - nor how to use the Game Engine post effect and soon, realtime camera DOF and SSAO built right into the viewport!

Now.. if only it also had fog, lensflares, other beauty aspects - and last but not least - voxel based realtime GI like as in Unreal. =P

Oh well, meanwhile I'm still enjoying trueSpace and it's DirectX novelness and fun interface and workflow..

A Final Preview.



Enjoy! I certainly did.

Cool. And great that you are getting work doing this!

A question though. Why don't you use Soft Image for your work projects? Is it company property and you can't use it for your own jobs?

Good question. Well... I don't personally own Softimage - so I don't think I can personally freelance from it unless I... go through darker more dubious means... (and it's EOL'd.. dead, like TS... but less free)... And my home computer is not fast enough for it's rendering system - because I don't have a good CUDA graphics card to run Redshift on my home computer - the Render Engine who's the only good sidekick for Softimage (then Arnold) - and again I don't have licenses for those either... or I simply don't have enough nodes to make the inbuilt mentalray or expensive Arnold farm viable with the "time vs. quality vs. price" battle.

So - because I don't have a renderfarm - and I don't have the licenses nor the funds for the such - I try resort to immediate results as cheaply as possible - and trueSpace and DirectX9 viewport tech and tricks does well enough for exactly that and my free-lance work.

I do have a small 4 or 5 node farm at work - and we are investing in licenses for the such - though our hardware isn't quite up to scratch for Redshift just yet - potentially being quite powerful one day...... if the studio can survive and prosper. So we still try stick to Softimage - as it's a VERY capable software, more so than Maya in most workflow aspects.

Loco eh?
Curious: Have you ever tried messiahStudio?

The camera zoom tricks make this one

Bravo, nice to see some (if small) payment for commissions

Thanks guys. Yeah, the camera zoom trick was fun. Unfortunately - I didn't have a proper "reflection" camera rig, so the reflections broke after the zoom....

I have not tried Messiah Studio. I hear it's rigging and animation is superb! And it's rendering is very much like that of Arnold. But I couldn't find much educative material for it... so thought it might take a while to learn.

I just had a thought - I'm going to put some DOF into this. I thought... why not? He didn't pay for it - but I thought I should do it for myself anyway - won't be too much work to do.

Well if you would like, I would be willing to transfer my ownership to you. I have messiahStudio 5, it is not the newest version. Just PM me your contact info.

Wow! That's generous of you trueBlue!

I'll see if I can find some time for it... and I'll PM you.

I've been playing with the DOF in blender composite nodes.



It's exaggerated, and with focus on the wrong thing - but it's preeeety. I use two defocus nodes, and the foreground defocus has an inverted color ramp - I use color ramps for more control to where I want to focus things - and then a dilate/erode filter set on "feather" at a somewhat high value to bleed into the lens blur over the focused parts and background parts.

I am liking the quality so far. Now to focus it and animate it - finetuning the dilate/erode according to the defocus node and the RGB z-depth info I can pull from TS.