Just A Test

On vacation in Europe this summer, I took this little picture. Nothing spectacular about it, but as a lighting test to get my class into advanced mental ray shaders and lighting, I thought it'd be a good place to start. I've built the scene and started with some simple renders:

Perhaps I've taken the colour corrections a bit far and the vignetting is too much. However it's just fun to play around on something simple rather than overly grand ideas that never get finished. This initial rendering is just using Blinns and Lamberts. Nothing fancy yet. Single area light, ray traced shadows, and some very basic Final Gathering. I'm using an HDRI for the reflections though I can see that I need to boost the gain on them a bit as there's some crushing of the brights which is dropping them into the ugly grey area on the surface of the saucer.


Anyway, all that to say that I've also jumped on the 3D bandwagon. Hopefully all two of you that read this blog have a pair of red/blue 3D glasses. Strap yourselves in and hold on tight! You haven't seen anything this powerful since Avatar:

Small Update

Just posting the updated, rendered turntable. It still needs fixes, but I'm feeling a need to move on to something else. I'll probably still do the hair research and post updates of that as I figure things out.

Face Model Changes

We're on reading week now so since I finished my marking yesterday I thought I'd fix some of the most glaring issues with my face. Er... my CG face that is.

Firstly, since I rushed the texture painting process, I went back and painted out my double chin. This one isn't as obvious in the render, but combined with the geometric problems, it made me look fat. But I was still thin. But I looked fat. It was weird.

Next, using my favorite Sculpt Geometry tool in Maya, I went in and pushed my jaw and chin around, tweaked my lips, massaged around my eyes, and adjusted my ear ridges. Some of these modifications are more subtle than others, but in the end, I think this looks tons better. I still haven't done any real hair, but I've been playing with paint effects hair in Maya and perhaps I'll try and get a beard going first before I move on to real, styled hair.

As a last thing to look at, I've never been happy with the way blogger deals with videos, so I've gone back to my Face Off project and compiled a movie showing my progress because that is what I had originally built my face model for. So here's a breakdown of the five segments:

1- Previs. I needed a video to explain to the wife what she was filming and why. This also helps with the timing of when certain actions have to happen.

2- Proof of concept. Once it was filmed and I had it all tracked, I took my face model, put a chrome shader on it and loaded in the HDRI I took of my kitchen. It seemed to be good.

3- Next was a roto/CG test. I wanted to see that I could actually get my fingers looking like they were on top of the CG model of my face coming off. I used projection mapping to attach the texture to the face. I grabbed that right from the video footage.

4- After taking off the face, I wanted to see what it would look like with the hole that is left over. This is pretty rough, but started to give an idea of how much work was ahead. How much? Lots.

5- Lastly, I just wanted to see how it was all coming together so I grabbed a skull model I had, modified it, put a chrome shader on it and comped it all together. This really showed me just how hard this was going to be with the hand moving on top. If I was smart I would have filmed two versions (one without the hand motion) and I might have actually finished this project.

Now With Motion!

After producing that still from the other day, I decided to do a full render just to get a feel for how this is going. I also played around with my camera motion and REALLY smoothed it out. I like the feel of it much better now.

Story-wise, I felt like just having him standing on the cliff wasn't enough, so with the addition of the river in the background, I decided that the terrain of the background should also reflect that there's water. We now have a guy on the edge of the cliff on his way to greener pastures. Perhaps I'll modify the foreground geometry to be a bit meaner too so that it seems like an even tougher task for our hero.

Beyond that, I think I'm going to add another row or two of mountains in the far background to blend into the horizon a bit better.

Thoughts or comments?

Just A Test

Here's the latest. I've modified some of the geometry and gave the background beyond the main canyons some focus. The sky image is from a sunset I shot last night out on garbage hill. If the weather holds up tonight I'll shoot a few more and pick the best, but this one seems to be working quite well for what I'm wanting. After roughing this together I can tell right now the biggest challenge will be to get the video footage to match the CG. Hopefully in the next week I'll be at the point where I can start detailing some of the canyons in Mudbox. I think the flatness of the geometry also isn't helping to blend the video footage and CG. On top of that, I think I need things like fallen boulders and whatever else one might find in desert (dessert) terrain (train).

Slight Update

Here's a slight update on the motion and modeling. I've shortened the length of the shot from 719 to 460 frames. I've also rescaled all the geometry to be more "real world" scale. The motion is better but now the end portion could be smoothed out a bit in 3D. This will all have to take a back seat for a few days as I have some school obligations this week. Until then, I'll post this video and get back to it after this weekend.

One thing I should mention... the image in the background is also temporary. I was just playing around with some 3D comping in Fusion. Seems to work well, and I'll be shooting my own HDRI for the background image when I find the time for that too.

Thoughts and comments are always appreciated.

World's Edge Stabilize

So after running into a friend and colleague, it was suggested that I stabilize the footage and re-track it. I've now done that and added more terrain. The stabilize is good, but far from perfect. I'll have to revisit that.

The reason I don't like stabilizing footage and camera tracking is purely a technical one. Artistically, it can look much better because any shaky hands can be smoothed out. The down side is twofold:

One, it can look pan-and-scan-esque if the stabilization is very large where you're reintroducing a move into something that's static or conversely, stabilizing something that's moving.

Two, by sliding the footage around, you're essentially "lying" to your camera tracking software. When you film something, your footage has a center of interest which is the center of your footage. If you stabilize that and shift the footage around, you're forcing your camera tracking software to move the camera all over the place, either rotationally or positionally, all in the name of "stable" 2d footage.

Thirdly (I know, I said two reasons), when you stabilize, if your footage has motion blur and you’re telling that footage, "no, actually I want you to be still," you'll have a perfectly smooth piece of footage that suddenly has weird blur going in different directions. A good example of this is that VFX shot in Gladiator where the tiger is leaping at Russel Crowe. I'm positive that the motion of the tiger was shot strangely and the motion blur that it had was unremovable and therefore it looks very strange when compared with the motion blur that he has.

If any of you readers have any comments on how it's progressing, I'd be interested to hear them. I'm not 100% sold on the composition of the land, but I do hope to finish that aspect in the next week so that I can start playing around in Mudbox and detailing them up.