In the middle of winter London can get pretty grey. I took these images and processed with that in mind as part of a little Photography mission with my flatmates. Enjoy…
This work is licenced under this Creative Commons Licence.
This post originally sourced from our website; www.squintopera.com/blog/?p=363
The recently completed Green Lighthouse, the first public CO2 neutral building in Denmark, will be showcased at the forthcoming UN Climate Conference (COP15) being held in Copenhagen in December. Our film, commissioned by Velux, will be played to demonstrate the building’s excellent intelligent and sustainable design.
Or view here www.jamesshaw.co.nz/#/content/Film/Velux.flv
Here are a few pictures that Andrew put on the blog (www.squintopera.com/blog/?p=302) from the making of the Moon project. We took the footage in an adjoining warehouse space using bags of concrete as moon dust and a hired space suit that Andrew wore for the shoot.
Andrew taking his first steps.
Green screen.
Andrew fidling with the camera and showing the green screen visor that was later comped out by tracking and replaced with a CG reflection.
Ollie our director (wearing mask) taking Andrew through his first steps.
Final Comp.
Comping in the moon lander with live action.
Close up showing comped in visor reflection, tracked and added in Shake.
Live action with comped in 3D elements surrounding and in reflections. Modelled in 3DS Max by my workmate Nic Hamilton.
View the final movie here: www.squintopera.com/#/projects/?id=121
Autodesk in their infinite wisdom have changed the “select by name” dialog box to a “new and improved” version that is incredibly frustrating to use.
If you want to change this back to the original select by name dialog box then follow the following steps:
And now you should have the standard selection dialog box like before! Enjoy.
Here is a tutorial on how to make grass within Max, based of Peter Guthrie’s excellent example (www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2009/03/vray-grass-tutorial-part-1/), but taking it a little further and applying this idea in bulk with Max’s built in tools.
The basic work flow is to model a very simple grass blade, make a cluster of grass and scatter across any object. Here is a example we (www.squintopera.com)used this technique in to give you an idea of the finished effect; www.jamesshaw.co.nz/#/content/Film/Cairo.flv/
Here is a couple of base CG beauty passes to give you an idea of the raw result before any post work has been done on it;
MAKING GRASS STRANDS
As previously mentioned this is based off Peter Guthrie’s tutorial with a few variations or notes to expand on this idea.
Firstly make a plane with 1 segment across and several in the length direction. Then add a length-ways UVW mapping, taper and using an edit mesh above this with soft select on vertex warp to a shape you like or several variations you can make into a group.
MATERIALS
Collapse the stack into an edit mesh. Then rotate the 4 strands into different directions by selecting and rotating the different elements. Then randomly set 4 id’s for them. This is so you can subtly change the colour with a colour correction within you multi-sub material.
Then make a multi-sub object material with 4 vray materials.
And within each multi sub make a VRay2SidedMtl like the following. You can also use the following grass textures by clicking on them and right click and save image. There’s a black and white one that you can use as an option for the translucency channel. But you can just leave this blank if the grass is at a distance and leave it grey.
The VRay2SidedMtl really is one of the most important things to use to get the light illuminating through the blades. Otherwise your grass will tend to look very flat.
Inside this VRay2SidedMtl sits a pretty simple vray material with the above grass blade in the diffuse channel (thank you Peter Guthrie for originally making this), with reflect set to white and Fresnel checked so it doesn’t look like chrome. Then adjust the Hilight glossiness to 0.6 which will help to spread the specular light you get off the grass. Again this is another very important part to make the grass look convincing. And unlike Refl. glossiness it will not be costly in render time and look almost identical, especially at typical grass distance.
To get variation in the grass tone change the bitmap diffuse channel to “Colour Correction” with the grass blade jpeg as the map, then shift the hue and saturation as follows differently for each of the 4 material id’s.
MAKING AN AREA OF GRASS
Now you have your clump of grass you can use this to populate surface. I found using individual strands was difficult, as the scatter we will use only really does up to around 70,000 instances before becoming a bit unstable. So if you use a clump of grass then you can spread further with less. Other options of scattering grass include pFlow and vray scatter; which I’ll go over later.
So now make a plane or use splines to create a free form extruded shape, or even detach a polygon from a surface to make a start. Remember when you extrude though to extrude 0 amount and only cap one end otherwise the grass will go underground as well. Also watch with way your normals go.
To make a scatter object of grass do the following:
Now you have a grass patch. The following is an example of how you can change the grass size on the sub-object scale and even add other simple plane flowers etc to add detail (click on it to enlarge). You can even mix grasses and flowers by using the same distribution object. Simple and no money spent… apart from Max of course.
ALTERNATIVES TO SCATTER
There are other ways of distributing grass. Peter Guthrie mentions the excellent VRay Scatter (www.rendering.ru/index.php/plugins/vrayscatter/), which has the advantage of varying colours more randomly then a multi-sub will do, and also varies the scale by a greyscale bitmap. The scatter method above has no method like this for varying and blending heights. The only problem is it’s a bit buggy (as if Max isn’t!), and it costs.
You could also use PFlow. I’ve had a quick go with this, but haven’t managed to vary the scale by a bitmap yet like VRay Scatter will do, just done density by material.
You will need a group of different grasses and some type of mesh as a distribution object. And obviously create a PF source and click on Particle View to get the following image.
Here’s how you might do this…
Hope that may help someone out there! Enjoy.
ARTIFICIAL PARADISE, Inc from Jp Frenay on Vimeo.
Pretty slick piece of animation this. I always love the ambient occlusion style renders, there’s just something purely 3D about them; such a great descriptor of form. To be harsh it is a little matrix like and the font my workmates insist is looking a little dated. The storyline resolution is a little lacking as well, almost trailer like in it’s “there’s more” message at the end. But hey it’s pretty nice none the less!
Especially like the end sequence with the introduction of colour bleeding through as a collection of memories. Nice subtle gradients of colour in this when the “machine” is introduced back. Be great to make some time to work on something like this.
Here’s more info…
Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for?
Selected at the ONEDOTZERO festival in the WOW+FLUTTER 09 category onedotzero.com/programme.php?id=373&event=31216
Selected for the Autodesk 2009 Siggraph Show Reel
youtube.com/watch?v=Gj5tLOMxLOU&feature=player_embedded :
Production : Condor
Director / editor / compositing : Jean-Paul Frenay
Main 3D artist / compositing : Sandro Paoli
3D artists : Sylvain Jorget and Sébastien Desmet
Additional 3D operators : Otto Heinen and Okke Voerman
Sound Design : Seal Phüric feat. Neptunian8
Kahn’s Exeter Short Film from Alex Roman on Vimeo.
A great little video that Alex Roman put together. I have seen the stills before, but seeing it as a moving image is great. I’ve been an admirer of his work for a while now; great use of high res materials and lighting within scenes.
We’ve been discussing whether this is possible with a client led project, as often these types of beautiful renders are compromised by relentless client changes and clients wanting to show every detail possible in every shot of the film. It would be nice to work on a project where detail, atmosphere and experience are key rather than explaining an architectural project like the documentation process does.
Below are some teasers Alex did beforehand. Some extremely nice stuff. Enjoy:
T&S Teaser 3 from Alex Roman on Vimeo.
T&S Teaser2 from Alex Roman on Vimeo.
T&S Teaser 1 from Alex Roman on Vimeo.
This is a very funny click from the Popcorn Comedy nights (www.youtube.com/user/PopcornComedy#play/all), in this particular instance at the Doodle Bar (www.thedoodlebar.com). As part of the Popcorn Comdey evening they show a number of clips from people that post them, and random stuff from the web, as well as live acts. Very. very funny!
