FINISHED :: Particle Cannon (Mechanical + Enviornment)

[roguenroll]

ok, then,,,,ummm, is it frpime or standard LW render?

[NanoGator]

Originally posted by roguenroll
ok, then,,,,ummm, is it frpime or standard LW render?

Nar standard render. I don't have $$ for F-Prime at the moment. No radiosity or anything, just a bunch of shadow-mapped spotlights.

[nismoS132]

the little white spots on your cannon's finger tips make it look like some kind of render error or bad photoshopping. i've noticed those in your earlier WIP shots too.

there's also a line of it running across the tube that looks very aliased.

[gerardo]

GREAT JOB Nanogator!!! :thumbsup:
Seems a complicated mechanical model, you maybe want to add it some DOF.
BTW, How long take the render?

[minus]

I like it a lot. And for a week, that is certainly better than I have been doing for environments.... but I'm learning :thumbsup: I'll call this ::inspiration::

[zuzzabuzz]

First off, congratulations on finishing it! Now..to finish the ore refinery? :p

I don't quite notice the white spots mentioned. Looks very good. Nice atmosphere, and looks like a cool machine. Definitely a machine.

[chikega]

Beautiful modeling and texturing job, Nanogator! I remember when you started first posting the cannon with all those "nurnies". At first, I thought it was this huge space ship thing - but, now, I'm a bit lost. I say this very humbly, but I look at the image and I'm a bit lost on the scale of the cannon. I look at the windows above to get a sense of scale, I then look at the hand rails and get a slightly different read on the scale of the cannon, I then look at that little tiny "handle" at the bottom middle of the cannon and get another sense of scale. I hope I'm not sounding to critical - it is a great job, nonetheless.

[SimianLogic]

It would be cool to put a human figure in somewhere to get a sense of scale. Nothing too high-detail, maybe a back shot of a guy in a lab coat wearing a hard hat or something.

Very cool model, though.

[Cytrix]

Awesome, very nice model :thumbsup:

[Rei Ayanami]

I like the modeling work, it looks great as a set peice (even if it looks very over complicated)

but i see one minor texture error, the stripes down the side of the big metal tube in the middle has a bit of stretching towards the LHS.

other than that great work!

[Shade01]

I like the detail you've put in there- really great model! If you're going to add it to your reel, I'd add more dramatic lighting- it looks really flat right now but I know it's a graphic for a game. Your alpha for the cannon could use some cleaning up around the edges too.

[sampi]

Awesome i like it .
realy great model . :applause:

[policarpo]

Really nice model Nanogator...I just have a few critiques...I went ahead and marked up the image and did some quick color correction on it as well...hope you don't mind.

Keep up the good work!

http://www.policarpo.us/samples/nanogator.jpg

[-mindcache-]

I personally think compositing in a ambient occlusion pass would do wonders for the scene =) Just a suggestion.

[NanoGator]

Alrighty dudes, I updated the image. If it doesn't say -r2 in the credits, try reloading the image. (I overwrote the old one because I sent a couple of emails out...) You can see the original here: http://www.reflectionsoldiers.com/refsol/artwork/phaser_cannon_type1/phaser_cannon_finished-r1.jpg

I just wanted to say that I got GREAT feedback from everywhere I posted this. I made a list of all the criticisms and addressed them. (If I missed one, please feel free to remind me. )

- Anti-aliasing refined a bit. Unfortunately, there's still a little bit at the knuckle of one of the claws. I think that's a result of the new lighting. I'll re-investigate that when I go to do the demo-reel animation.

- The lighting is a little more dramatic. I didn't want to go overboard here because I want the camera to be able to fly around the rig without having to do too much tweaking for each scene.

- Added a subtle diffuse glow in order to improve atmosphere of the imagery.

- I've been asked a couple of times to make the cannon look more 'worn'. The reason I havent' done this is that it's a brand-new prototype. (Sorry, I didn't mention that before!) I wanted it to look a lot like some of the machinery I saw while researching particle accelerators etc.

- Hazard stickers have been refined. I also fixed the back, but you can't see that in this render. I had a problem with them on the other end. Well, no more. I've grown a lot in the UV space in the last couple of months.

- Shadow map resolution's been improved for the reddish 'malibu lights' at the bottom. (Sadly, I think I introduced a small problem here. Will reinvestigate soon.)

- It was mentioned to me that there were too many warning signs at the bottom. In the original design, those signs were meant to be there so that if somebody was standing at the guard rail, they'd see the warning that they should stand back. However, it cluttered things a bit so I removed 4 of them.

- The warning signs haven't changed. The reason for this is that they're supposed to look like a light up LED based sign. I think that'll look more apparent when you see an animation of it. (There will probably be some refinement of them when I get there, however..)

- I brightened the flares on the end of each particle emitter a bit. I wasn't quite happy with the way they originally came out.

- Fixed a mesh error at the tip of each 'claw'. I think it's a little hard to tell from this angle, but there was definitely some nastiness there. I'm kicking myself for not fixing it sooner.

- Slightly altered the camera angle.

*whew* Big update heh.

Thanks dudes, I *really* appreciate the feedback, it's been very helpful. More ideas? Throw them at me!

[NanoGator]

@nismoS132: Oh yeah... I did a little too much hackwork on the fingertips. I've fixed them, though. Thanks for mentioning that, I had forgotten about it!

@gerardo: DOF, not a bad idea. ;) The 1280 by 960 version was around... 6 minutes or so? Although, this latest render was about 20 because I did much higher anti-aliasing to deal with the claws. I still haven't quite figured out what's happening there.

Part of the problem is I'm using roughly 200 megs of textures on this guy, plus there's 1.5 million polys, so my RAM's all gobbled up. When I do the animation for this guy, I'm going to seperate it out into layers. I think it'll render considerably faster then.

@minus: That's one of the nicest things a fellow artist can say to me, thank you man. :)

@zuzzabuzz: Ugh sorry, the refinery's on hold for the moment. Gotta find a job. (Unless I need to finish it for demo reel v2...)

@chikega: Nar, I know what you mean about the windows. They're a little misleading, they're more like port-holes than like bay windows. Remember, this is a high energy accellerator, so they're not going to want too much 'viewing room' up there. I did take some time to scale the cannon and rails and windows appropriately, but I guess I didn't do a good enough job on communicating that the windows aren't meant to be that big. Doh. I didn't address the handles on the system tho... hmm. I should probably look into the scale issue a little deeper here. (It doesn't help that the 'garage door' behind it is unusually large... heh)

@SimianLogic: Yep, you're right. I need to look into that.

@Rei Ayanami: Thanks. :) I think I addressed the UV problem you mentioned. Better?

Over complicated? Hmm others feel that way? I gave it a lot of pipes etc because that's what my reference material more or less looked like. Maybe it'll make more sense once animated?

@policarpo: Man that was cool, thank you for illustrating that for me. :thumbsup: Whatcha think of the update?

@-mindcache-: I've heard of ambient occlusion, but it's not a term that's been used with Lighyhwave that I know of. Could you please describe that to me? You an XSI user? hehe

[gerardo]

An illumination more dramatic many times means a simpler illumination. (I refer to less lights what to setting). Personally I think that a tonality of cold colors and a volumetric zenithal light (maybe made with polygons) would be well in your scene. However I would keep those lights of warm tones as indirectly light in the model's base.
BTW, 6 minutes is an excellent time for an image of that size. If you have many problems by consumption of memory for images, try saving them as .IFF or .PNG

Best Regards


Gerardo

[NanoGator]

Hmmm.. I'll consider the tonality. I think if I render in seperate passes I'll have an easier time with it.

As for the images, I already have them saved as 8-bit .PNG files . Wish I could take it down further. Unfortunately, LW doesn't care so much about that. Most of the diffuse and specualrity maps I used would easily go down to 4 bits without much in terms of quality lloss. Ah well. Next time around, I'm going to do texturing a little more effeciently.

[nismoS132]

looks great now :buttrock:

the top finger still has some 'fur' near the knuckles, something easily fixed with photoshop. :)

anything else below is purely my own personal taste.

the picture looks a little cold, i guess your lights are all white?

military storerooms usually have a yellow hue to it, due to the cheapo bulbs they use and just plain bad maintainence :p i think the overall picture would be better if there was some yellowish/orange tint on the reflections, as well as some red bounce from those little siren things on the platform :)

[gerardo]

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- Anti-aliasing refined a bit. Unfortunately, there's still a little bit at the knuckle of one of the claws. I think that's a result of the new lighting.
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I´ve had the same anti-aliasing problems with some rigs; by chance, are you using spinning lights?

[NanoGator]

Originally posted by gerardo
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- Anti-aliasing refined a bit. Unfortunately, there's still a little bit at the knuckle of one of the claws. I think that's a result of the new lighting.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I´ve had the same anti-aliasing problems with some rigs; by chance, are you using spinning lights?

Nope. Just a spot light. Ray traced even. Heh. I think I'm just going to render it in a seperate pass. I can afford higher anti-aliasing then.

[NanoGator]

Somebody made a comment earlier that I thought about a little bit more, and I realize what he was saying now. He said that the guard rails + the observatory windows indicated different scales. I decided to tackle that a little bit more. I made the guard rails smaller + I raised the cieling above the portholes. I think it looks a lil better now. Comments?

http://www.reflectionsoldiers.com/refsol/artwork/phaser_cannon_type1/cannon_scale_test.jpg

[roguenroll]

big improvement, but how bout more military guys around it like on stargate, a few top guys, and a few guards at the doors or walls.

great though, much better.

[SimianLogic]

It looks a lot better with the two guys in there. I think I like the "warning" rails better than the "in progress" rails. Your choice, though.

[brap]

This is indeed coming along nicely!
I agree that the addition of the human characters for scale really does a lot for the piece. Might be worth your while to whip one up before you do the final animation on this puppy.
One other little thing-- from my experience, I would suspect that the strong highlight that you're getting on the top of the canon is going to sizzle quite a bit when animated. Just a thought, but it might be worth trying to get it to soften up a bit more.

Cheers,

[chikega]

Much improved ... everything seems to fall into place, now, scale wise. It's looking really good :).

[phreek_3d]

Hey Nano,

Looks good, but I think you need to check the mapping on the Hazard stripes. You are useing Cubic right, you might want to try UV thor this ;)

Also the bump on the floor looks a bit smooth, maybe adda bit more "high level" noise in the spec to help break it up a bit more.

Also I think the LED boards will look great in your animation.

But these are just my thoughts, looks good, keep up the good work.
:thumbsup:

-Kris

[Rei Ayanami]

It looks good, but i think that it looks like its floating just a tiny bit, im not sure but the lighting seems to be a tad off. could be just me tho i never like lighting even in real life!

great work tho.

[NanoGator]

@roguenroll: Heh. Well the point there wasn't to add them to the final illustration, but rather to give everybody an idea of what I'm after. Seems to have worked. Maybe one day I'll rig up a dude to put in there, but time is short at the moment.

@SimianLogic: Could you clarify a bit? I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

@brap: Hmm.. In the test animation I did, there is some flickering on the texture of the lift. I think it's an anti-aliasing problem. *Sigh* I hate solving those. Maybe a lower res image?

@phreek_3d: Is that before or after you looked at the new 'r2' image? I used to use cubic, but then Sunday evening I went back and corrected them with proper UV maps. They look okay so far. If you see a problem, could you localize it a bit so I can address it?

I didn't want the floor to be too bumpy. On one hand it's worn, on the other they need to be able to roll equipment around on it... I might reinvestigate that, though...

@Rei Ayanami: Hmm.. Before I rendered it, I double checked that it is indeed on the floor. I think part of the problem is that malibu light right in front of it. It's not casting any shadows that indicate where it is.

Thanks all, I appreciate the support. Next step? Demo reel.

[SimianLogic]

I'm talking about the little rails between the people and the particle cannon. They used to have "Warning" written on them, but now they say "In Progress." I went back and looked again, and I think the thing I really liked was the checkered square border that ran around it. Whatever text you decide to keep on them, I'd go back to using the border. Hope that's clear.

[NanoGator]

Oh heh. Did I mention that sign was animated? I just rendered it on a different frame. :)

[Nemoid]

Hey nanogator! great work there, man! :thumbsup:

you should reunite all Ferion related thread into one.

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