Love.Leech.Tomato.

[PaulNewman]

I've visited this site before, can't recall when . . .

David, from the short clip I can see it looks good. The soft visual styling is confusing, although I don't say it should be there, it just currently makes it harder to evaluate the animation with it. Is this a post processed effect?


Can you tell us more about the project, your current struggles, and your goals?

Thanks for sharing :thumbsup:

[dobermunk]

Hi Paul. Thanks for the feedback.
I'm getting very mixed reviews about the jitter, whereas the stills seem to convince most of the people I've shown it to.
I want to get a pastelly NPR look. The characters have no faces, so emotion will be fairly broad, and I think the render style contributes to this. Its a try anyway.
This is a straight render - there's no animatioono in there to speak of right now... I'd like to try some textured 'dirt' or 'paper in post, just to see how it works. Maybe applied to the depth map - might be an interesting dichotomy to have a 2d effect applied to make it more spatial. Still plodding along. I know this is off the beaten path for most folk - no action, no glossy 3D. Its just something I got to get out of my system.

[timnhe]

Looking good David, I love this render stile.

Congratulations

[chikega]

I like the soft body effect in the Leech. The hand-drawn pastel look is convincing. What renderer are you using?

[dobermunk]

@timnhe: thanks. You like the jitter, too?
@gary: I'll post an animation soon. No softb ody effect, just a spline. Works great except that the geometry twists. I get away with it in this render style though. This is rendered in LW.

[chikega]

The geometry will contort after a node is moved past another node along the X or Z plane, from what I remember.

[dobermunk]

Yeah. Its really unfortunate because this kinda kills the tool. I forgot to mention that MArek helped me on this in the beginning (so, thanks Marek :-). He has a spine system that avoids the flipping, but it was too angular for my leech curve.

[ThomasHelzle]

I also like it more in the still as in the animation. The jitter is rather busy.

Other than those fantastic NPR tools you once showed me and that aren't publicly available AFAIK, I still have to see an idea for NPR that is stable, flexible and moves in a convincing way.
If I would have such an idea, I would be more than happy to code something for messiah, but everything I've seen so far either didn't go above the usual things (cellshading) or requires a rather huge team of scientists etc... :shrug:

Keep up the good work - I'm looking forward to the short!

Cheers,

[dobermunk]

Other than those fantastic NPR tools you once showed me and that aren't publicly available AFAIK, I still have to see an idea for NPR that is stable, flexible and moves in a convincing way.
Jot. Yeah. Grr.
The best I've seen since that will be presenting at Siggraph next week - THomas Luft.
Check his work out: http://www.cgmi.inf.uni-konstanz.de/members/luft_en.html

[ThomasHelzle]

Looks great - and is rather inspiring.

I think a lot of what that software does could be done by hand.
- creating the rahter coarse mesh of a tree for instance.
- don't render it but use it as a particle emitter for billboards.
- particles emitted at frame 0 only and with no velocity (is it possible to make particles stick to the surface in messiah?)
- use paintstrokes as texture for the particles.
- maybe combine in post with some filtered renderings.

But inspired by your cool rendering, I experimented with something I wanted to try out for quite some time, and it actually worked:

http://www.screendream.de/stuff/BlobNPR.mov

I just took what I had open anyway so this is Garys SSS test blob animated with some bones and "inherit root".
With TLHPro: Merger and it's 28+ Photoshop Layer modes you can do some cool stuff with nodes...
The Blob is actually floating above the ground, so the shadow is off.
This is all geometry and texture based so it is fully stable. Especially cool is the shadow - quite tricky to get that in messiah.
This is really just a first test, you could do a lot more beautiful things with it...

19 sec rendertime per frame, no AA (not needed IMO).

Cheers,

[dobermunk]

Are you 2D-displacing a gradient? Show a screen-grab, man!
I love this kind of stuff. Mine is a very simple (as if I could do anything else) displacement hack. I've also managed to have 0 jitter by synchronizing the displacement with the motion blur passes, but I'd like to maintain it - just quietly. I'm happy with the tomato in the video, for example. I've also been debating the paper tyexture thing. It really changes the thing fully - pasting it down into 2D. Yours looks like an old window blind - or bamboo paper. Cool!

Anyway - you have a very nice krausel. I'd concluded that it was impossible to get this render in messiah after tests, and with the direct steps it wasn't possible. But you make me uncertain again! Dammit! ScreenGrab!

[ThomasHelzle]

hehehe - cool you like it. :thumbsup:

The first thing is, that I found that you can guide displacement with a gradient, so there is displacement by an AoN: fBm node only at the outline (based on camera incidence). This gradient is evaluated before displacement, so it's result is then deformed nicely.

The same gradient is used for Opacity in the first animated example above, but it looks cool without that too:

http://www.screendream.de/stuff/Blob_014.jpg

I use a frontprojected bamboo paper for the background.
The same texture and projection is used as color in a Basic shaders color input for some shading.
This result is then combined with the pure texture map in a TLHPro: Merger in Overlay mode, so it interacts nicely with the background

This is what you get with higher diffuse and a bit of specular - Mjamm, nice :

http://www.screendream.de/stuff/Blob_014b.jpg

and with AA (rendertime 1:27 minutes):

http://www.screendream.de/stuff/Blob_014c.jpg

AA or no AA depends on taste I think...

Here is the shadertree:

http://www.screendream.de/stuff/NPR_Object.jpg

The messiah ground plane material works similar when used with a directional light:

http://www.screendream.de/stuff/NPR_Floor.jpg

I think the possibilities of combining completely different shadings etc. have not even started to be really explored. Joe did some such "in-render-compositing" also in a thread some time ago...

Very unusual styles can be achieved with advanced merge modes.

Cheers!

[dobermunk]

Hi Thomas,
wanted to replicate your look, but AoN is asking me for the licence.
The Aon.lic is in the same folder as the "theArtOfNoise.mp". THis is correct, right?

[ThomasHelzle]

Not necessarily: the AoN.lic file has to be in the /plugins folder...
It doesn't work with subfolders, while the .mp can reside wherever you want...

Cheers,

[dobermunk]

Gotcha. Since messiah supports the "additional" folder, I had my Aon stuff all in that. Didn't occur to me that it wouldn't find it.
All cleared up now - on to Thomas' Krausel research!

[dobermunk]

I'm not getting the displacement on my object.
I set max displacement to 1 and have the fbM_noise plugged into the bump node. Argh. What am I missing. I just rendered a displaced face today and it worked fine.

btw: the render type "sprites for polygons" sounds like it could be something of the ilk that you described: a cloud of sprites about the unrendered object. Right?

[ThomasHelzle]

Did you set a bump amount in the materials gui?

Yes, that particle mode was what I thought about....

Cheers,

[dobermunk]

http://www.stickman.de/content/temp/messiah_wishList/cgTalk/leech_disp01.jpg

Okay. I got a nice texture on the horizon, and an interesting chinese brush type look to the stones. Not much control at the moment. Having trouble with the leech as well. Its very thin, and I'm not getting that level of displacement I'd like. Thought the two main controls for this (FBm) would be iterations (re dimension) and size. But size seems to do nothing. Haven't gotten that nice wavy line at this scale yet.
Very interesting stuff, though!

[ThomasHelzle]

Not knowing what you are doing, I would suggest making the leech double sided first?

It also often helps to first visualize what your procedural is doing (f.i. by connecting it to the radiance input of the main material to see it solo) . Size sure does work, but if is it very small, the mesh can only be deformed where actual vertices are, so you may not see much difference without upping the subdivisions - and there is a limit to that too...

Cheers,

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