United3dArtists Archive

Decided that I found something.. since my country in the Fifa World Cup is doing.. well... surprisingly - for the first time in world history getting into the quarterfinals - well... thought to show my support, show something spangled in that regard, but towards my own country, well one of them: Colombia.

I am far from over, I will have to quickly model a stadium, some quick lights, lens flares, and shiny things to make it spangeled, and a pasture.. but I think I'll do that tomorrow, oh, and make a cool mouth rig/control system.

Quickly rig.. ok.. I don't think I'll make it, oh what the hell, it will be worth a try.

I modeled the soccer ball in geometry, actually, it's a cool rig, bit.. not quite how I want it, but it works. I used Gimp Insane Bump to help get the textures, also the AO from Blender Baking.... Not bad for a realtime shader I think, I can make some cool nifty things. Now to study and understand my translucent shaders better.

I also have decided to do my AO passes seperate than having them in the scene with the Beauty pass. I think I can have some cool lighting effts with the 32 odd lights I use for the AO used elsewhere on another pass.

I still haven't finished my Pass Changing script, but slowly but surely I am making a better shader. I am using Prodigies realtime shader as a base - I think I will add fresnel to it. My translucency shaders, I have 4 to study and choose from, some are better than others.. but it would be cool to somehow port those HLSL bricks to GLSL for blender later on oneday.. but we will see.. I am by far not there yet - and. .I am too busy.

But all is well, having fun.

Enjoy!

Here yah go.. I followed a 3DMax tutorial, but did it in TS. Not as exact, but it works.

Did some quick grass, learnt trueSpaces hair system inside out. It's SLOOOOOW.. but it works. it's great for quickly whipping up vegetation with cards, I've found. I made a green grass with translucency using the hair thing, then screencaptured it with windows then into Gimp to make an alpha, then used it with another grass shader I found that came with TS and then used my own grass shader. I made the field in a triangle shape according to the camera. If TS had culling, that would be AWESOME.. i wonder what it would take to develop these things.

I can see TS with the LE to be quite adapt to more development, using scripts from game engines and the like ported into trueSpace.. but I'm not coder, and the nodes are not clear enough.. but maybe oneday it will work. I think I will slowly improve TS over time, but considering how slow it can be sometimes (well for my dual core) I wonder how viable it really is for quick webseries or the like.. but i think it's still got lots of juice to squeeze out.

Anyway, now just have to build a quick stadium with yellow figurines in the background, some grafitti particles raining down, and then the final composite and some lighting effects to get it all sorted.. I have two days. Yah.. fun.... !!!

I really need to work on my area light, I'm tired of having large specular spots on all my lights that i use, I can only distribute large areas of lights if I use many lights... so I have to make a rig.

Anyway, thinking out loud here......

ARGH! Modeling! I am so slow in it! I need to practice more.

I also get so distracted with learning scripting and other things, including that I started my area light rig, but I'm guessing I'll need a lot of lights to get a good area "ray" like realtime light. I will try use a tecnique similar to my AO rig, but a little more modest... hmm....

I am happy with the composition, and now I just need to add details and effects to get my final image. Tomorrow is the 3rd, so I'm going to try do my best to finish modeling there, then I will render off what I have on the 4th to try submit on time.

Cool character!

Started the stadium, finished it. Right now Colombia is playing Brazil, so I gotta run! I have finished it, I am happy with the result, but.. it has not stars yet, one moment.

OK DONE! They are half time, have to run!

I think I'll do a debriefing, cause I seriously didn't put much time into this project, but I was happy with the results...

So first things first: my passes.




+a lens flare pass (bright spots to pass through post effects)

I wanted to add more depth to my depth pass, but due to the stage being a good 300 units behind, my depth shader only covered 100 units. I will have to either scale everything to size before running passes. Considering that, I build my character as huge.. so I have to keep scale in mind. I also assume it will make TS run a lot faster, it had a lot of trouble expanding and doing operations at a scale that size... I will have to run some tests.

I would also then create my trigger pass node, maybe try learn how to use different attributes so I can modify the switch script according to the root name, and yeah! I would prefer to run the script in Object mode, but then my shaders wouldn't be portable via objects (for scene construction). But sometimes Scene wide materials really helps with modifying lots of elements.

So.. I might make.... or learn better material tagging.

I am also planning to colorize and save my own nodes to work with concerning shaders, matrix's and the like. I like Softimage's ICE system because it is context safe. More often than not I have no idea what the context is in the LE so I have no much clue as to how to create or do things.

I think the more I learn about ICE and could technically reproduce things in the LE - including particle systems and other geometry modifiers - without having to script too much..


Oh so much to learn, sometimes just working and modeling and pushing things around really calms the mind, but I do like the technical side of things also... so.. onwards.

More ideas, lots of work.. I'll keep working on my shader system in my free time.



Next thing, my AO pass also needs to have things to scale, as I built the AO light pass system to a sphere dome, scaling the directional lights casting "rays" and shadows certainly didn't scale well, so I got a terrible effect - plus the stadium wasn't even in the dome...

I got a couple of seconds per frame rendered in HD, but considering the AA, I need to scale that up then compress it to get better samples (more than the video card can handle).

Another thing, I have to watch my hair system in TS. It is quick to chog my computer, regardless of the videocard. I found it ran smoother on a slower video card with my machines at work that run nearly 4 times the clock speed. So that really helps, the faster a computer is, the faster trueSpace is. Handy.

Also, if using hair system in TS, making a field would be handy to do it in sections - drop the quality the further away it is from the camera - or better yet, model with very low polies and scatter them using particles in the MS or in Blender and import and texture them within...

But for shrubs and patches of grass, the hair system is perfect - quick and to the point. I ripped off a "back scatter" material from sample scenes I have then used my own alpha mask and grass texture.

In blender, I used the composite nodes for the bloom, sheen, and lens flares (which I quickly drew in gimp).

The AO didn't do much, but it just helped "pop" out some detail. I used two defocus nodes and color ramps to bring out a DOF in the fore and background (or else I'd just have one and not the other).


So... I didn't really use my pass scripts that have been devoloping, thanks to many of you.. but I have developed some ideas and practicing. The idea is to create a super shader, one with Depth, AO ready shader, Normal and then the beauty aspects. I will also try create or copy a translucent aspect to it - maybe.

It will be my "one shader" fits all.

I'll even try make it lighter with "delete un-used nodes" later on - like if you aren't using translucency, constant, depth or AO, you can just delete them, lightening up your object. It's a theory.