The Journey Begins Challenge (3D) Entry: Mark David

[Womball]

This came out amazingly! The mice don't even look like they are 3d cg creations but more like illustrations. I like the story too, very indepth and fun at the same time. Hahahahah at cheddar warrior.

[mdavid]

Womball
Thank you very much. I really appreciate such nice words. I had a lot of fun doing those critters. Here's how they look at full (final) resolution

http://www.mdavid.com.au/images/hirescritters.jpg

[Womball]

Hmmm so it may be the lighting and the shader on the hair that gives it the storybook look. Your using at least 1 shadow casting light and probably either GI or lights to illuminate dark areas, without casting shadows. The hair doesn't seem to cast that much shadows but the effect looks like its painted. Sorry I'm dissecting your piece so much it. I'm not sure what your doing with the render settings other than that. Do hairs take a long time to render with this lighting setup?

[mdavid]

Womball
Hi again Nathan. I was just admiring your thread when you posted to mine! (I really like the characters in your scene).

I found it very hard to get shadows to work on the hair - the software allows for it but I couldn't get the look I wanted without a lot of experimentation. Funny thing is, even while I type this I'm thinking of new tricks I could have tried. It never stops in 3D does it? As for GI, well the hair in Cinema's Hair module, which I used for the fur and some of the reeds in my scene, did not seem to respond to it. Instead it is lit with its own (regular) light.

You're right in that I am using a shadow casting light too, though, over the entire scene to give hard shadows. After all I'm trying to depict a sunny day.

Render times are really cool with the Hair module. With the rat and mouse together there are more than 350,000 hairs! So when I render, the computer has to think for about 10-15 minutes (on a dual processer G5) while it calculates what the hair will look like and then it renders the hair as quickly as a flat surface. With fewer hairs, like with just the whiskers and reeds, for example, then rendering is VERY fast - almost instant

[Womball]

Each hair is rendered as a polygon? Hairs are hard to control in Blender too, I am using them for the grass in my scene. I have gotten render times up to about 1 hour and a half when I was first started using hair. :-) And this with 100,000 hairs. Although I had 16x over sampled aliasing on which seems to be the most expensive aspect of render time. Although 15 minutes isn't bad, I'm going to make an animated bird character so rendering optimizing would be great. Did you render the hair as its own layer?

Thanks for checking out my thread btw, its going to be tough to finish it on time.

[shakes]

love the high res, mark!! awesome

[mdavid]

With the Cinema Hair Module, the hairs are not rendered as polygons, no. As I understand it (and someone correct me if I am wrong) the module treats hair as something almost like a procedural surface. So you put in some hair 'guides' then brush them and tweak their shape and length and stuff like that, adjust the hair 'material' and then hit the render button. Then Cinema creates the impression of hair to fit your parameters. I don't know how they do it but it just works. With about 5,000 hairs it renders almost instantly. I'm still finding my way around it though so I can't really describe its full potential.

With AA, that has been an issue with Hair though. The default AA is just fine but once you reflect hair on a surface, like for example the reeds reflecting off the water in my scene, then suddenly you need to really crank up the AA settings and that did slow things down for my background.

[makaron]

love that high-res... :bounce:
what nice eyes they have!... just perfect eyes... and the fur also looks so real...

[Scied]

this Idea is realy great and I love the way you've done your scene, its prety much finalized isn't it? I realy laught wen think this is the journey of the cheese most than the mouses jounrey! But I think altought realistic the image has a senso of humour haven't it?

[miketche]

You've created a really wonderful image here. Love the story.
Congrats on finnishing and and good luck.

[Chappers]

Mark, thanks for the comments re my journey. Yes it is nice to know there are other C4D users out there.

Did you use the Hair Module for your mice? A really geat job if you did.
Your lighting is also fab. I'm rubish at lighting at the moment.

Chappers

[melkao]

Hey noce job....and congratulation for finish!:thumbsup:

[mdavid]

makaron
Thanks Mona! Looks like your challenge is getting close too. I love those GP curtains

Scied
Many thanks. Yes, all my free time came to an end so I had to finish the image and post my final. I appreciate your comments

miketche
Much appreciated. It's great that you've finished your image too. It's a really strong entry too. Good luck with it

Chappers
Hi Janice. Yes, I used the Cinema Hair Module to produce the fur on both of the critters, as well as some of the reeds. Some of the reeds are modelled and textured normally so I could get some extra detail and using aliases to duplicate them around the scene, and then I filled out the background reeds using the Hair Module. As for lighting, yeah that can be tricky. I've used different lighting setups for the foreground and background elements. Using mainly hdri for the foreground stuff and mainly using 2 arrays of lights to illuminate the background stuff. The challenge was to make foreground and background look like they're being lit by the same light source

melkao
Many thanks! I appreciate your comments very much

[Silgrin]

Wow, lovely funny idea!:bounce: And that huge piece of cheese as a journey food:)

[KOryH]

Youv'e captured such a nice little moment there.
The render and lighting is very clean and professional.

Best of luck to you.

[Squibbit]

cool stuff, dude :thumbsup:



.

[mdavid]

Silgrin
Thank you. I appreciate that a lot. Good luck with those amazing robots

KOryH
Thanks so much for the encouraging comments. I'm really looking forward to seeing how Hansel and Gretel turn out because I think it is already a very beautiful piece of work

Squibbit
Cheers! Much appreciated!

[SketchPad]

Amazing stuff.

I think your piece is very original since you use Rodents the way they
really look, at the same time - it have a mystical "Adventure" feel
over it. The light setting is nice, the picture is calm, lot's of detail
for the audience to look at while being "roomy" enough to leave
space for the main focus (the characters and the journey).

Well done!

[mdavid]

Hey, SketchPad, thank you very much for such kind words. I appreciate them very much. :)

[oceanbluesky]

Congratulations on finishing such a fantastic beautiful piece of artwork Mark! It is an honor to participate in a challenge with artists of your calibere -- your sense of perspective, depth, color, and light really comes through. Love your details from the wedge of cheese to the logo ono the sail...the whole scene really works. Looking forward to see your work in a future challenge!

Best wishes with the judging! Cheers!

[mdavid]

oceanbluesky
Oh wow, Eric. Thank you very much. :) I'm feeling a bit bowled over by such kind words as yours. I've had a lot of fun with the challenge and am totally amazed by the range of styles and high standards I've seen and the fantastic global community that exists within this forum. I keep being pleasantly surprised by more and more high-calibre entries that I didn't even know existed. I'm sure looking forward to seeing how this last week goes, when I expect some seriously impressive finals to go online. Good luck with your own challenge entry too. You're producing a superb piece of art

[sathe]

Congratulations on finishing man. I feel yours is one of the most adapated to the brief so good luck in judging. the only nit picky thing i would have liked to see is a more cartoony version of the mice and no so realistic however the effect is there either way. :) Cya

[FlaminGlow]

Hi Mark,

I like your image soo much man, the water isn't great as others though, i don't know why i'm also bad when it comes to create realistic water surface (but yours isn't bad i'm just feeling that it has a greasy look) of course the image is more than fantastic.
brilliant job on creating that two fellows and managing their fur and poses, good luck on voting time Mark and see you there. :)

[mdavid]

Sathe
Thanks Grant. I admit that on more than a few occasions I was asking myself why I hadn't decided to go cartoony! This was my first attempt at nature realism and it's been a steep learning curve. But I was really keen to visualise a picture I had in my head and that picture was of a real rat and mouse!

FlaminGlow
Many thanks. Good luck with your image too!

[chaitanyak]

hey, this was a really good thread. Thanks for taking the time to make all those instructional images for the rest of us noobs. :)

[InTerceptoV]

This is one of the images in which you can at first sight see that there is a journey ahead. 5 stars for that only! The characters are great, specially in high resolution shoot.

Good luck!

[mdavid]

chaitanyak
Thanks for that. Much appreciated

InTerceptoV
Many thanks. And I just checked to see how your final turned out and it blew my mind! It's fantastic. Congratulations to you

[atra]

Hi Mark

sorry I missed your journey

This is a really nice image!
High-Res is breathtaking!! :applause:

Good luck :D

[Selina42]

Hi Mark thanks for the comment!

Its great to see your image -although weve both done sailing mice with a realistic look its kind of crazy to see how very different our images are! I really like all the detail youve added to the image -i always think thats what can make or break a pic and in this case youve done a very nice job indeed! I reckon my mouse is off to visit yours! Good luck!

[DaddyMack]

This is a reaaly sweet and warm piece to me... They look like they're off into the wild blue yonder here and there is a real sense of togetherness between the characters... I think it is really well underplayed and these days that's pretty rare... Congratulations on a fine illustration mate! I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for your works in the future:wavey:

[mdavid]

atra
Thank you for that! Much appreciated

Selina42
Thank you Selina. Yes it was cool that our images are so similar yet so different. There can't be too many sailing mice out there so if your critters do cross paths with mine then I have no doubt they'll recognise each other. I'm sure my critters have enough cheese to share too ...

http://www.mdavid.com.au/images/cheese.jpg

DaddyMack
Hey thanks for that. I got swamped with work and trying to keep up to date with a whole lot of threads, and so unfortunately yours was one thread I really didn't drop by as much as I wanted. But I was delighted to see you produced a really cool image

[KangarooMan]

Hey there Mark, congratulations on finishing your entry it looks excellent! The painterly feel that you've achieved here fits perfectly (I am a huge fan of painterly renders :D ) with the theme! :applause: Best of luck to you in the judging!

Matt :)

[ramras]

Hey I am remembering St little move. Gr8 work and good characters. All the best for voting.

[asbassie]

Have to say: " Nicely executed." Exclamation on cute. Those little critters are extremely nicely modeled, so needless to say that the detail is awesome. Hope these guys find their island.:D

[tuck]

congratulation for the final man!and Good luck with the judges:eek:

[mdavid]

mmbenya
Thanks Matt. It was a lot of fun. And good luck with your amazing entry

ramras
Many thanks

asbassie
Cheers! I hope the little guys find their island too, and sure hope they don't end up on Cat Island by mistake :)

tuck
Thank you. Much appreciated!

[mdavid]

Wow! What a cool challenge this has been.

Congratulations to all the winners. The amount of knowledge and skills in this forum is amazing.

It's been a while since the little guys set off on their journey. It looks like they've reached their mythical rodent island. What wonderful news.

http://www.mdavid.com.au/cg/journeyends.jpg



http://www.mdavid.com.au/cg/journey3.jpg

;)

[shakes]

uh..oh! looks like they should never have left! very cute mark.
I like the little ambient pic!

[mdavid]

uh..oh! looks like they should never have left!

Yeah, John. Them's be treacherous waters out there

[makaron]

yeah. they finally got there... :bounce: but tell the cats to be nice or I send Ninja over... :p

[Gunilla]

Oh noo! Watch out! :D

Looks like their adventure continues - nice ending
Looking forward to see you in another one :thumbsup:

[mdavid]

Gunilla
Thanks for that. Yep, this challenge was fun and I'll be mighty tempted to have a go next time. I just hope the theme isn't Rats and Mice! I hope to see you in one again too

[Try]

He, he great sketch Mark.:thumbsup:

Was hoping to se the Cheddar warriors on the winners list!

But if your lucky the next challenge will be called “The journey ends” and you already have your concept finished now.

Me I`m going to get a hold of some of the same stuff the jury is smoking. So I can get into the same state of mind as them.

Maybe I can figure out what to make the next time.:)


I am very happy fore the lucky 7 winners! But I don’t quite get it…
Maybe its not meant to be a logical thing this….

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