Eon (3D Scene) Entry: Nico Strobbe

[Nothingness]

Hey Neville,

thanks a lot man, But i wished i had more realisme than now. But anyway, i might even be able to crank that detail up with bigger renders.

The thing i have for the background is almost finished, but i'll do another one cause this one doesn't look too good.

ps. your entry in the illustration is a kick-ass entry man. Simply sweet. I should look more into it to see how you did your space dust looking effects.
:thumbsup:

[AndreiSzasz]

hey Nico ! good scene you gott there:thumbsup: whaiting for the background and the final render.
good luck dude!

[Nothingness]

http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/entries/15/11813/11813_1169044364_medium.jpg (http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/entries/15/11813/11813_1169044364_large.jpg)

Okay, long time since i updated, and i just descided that i'm not gonna redo certain things like background and foreground details. I'm out of motivation to try and improve it some more. Also i hate when you arrange everything to make it to the deadline, and then get an extension. Redoing things make me feel like doing some work twice and you loose even more time. I'd rather put my time in doing something else.

Anyway, here is the compositing with a lack af a few elements like the roads in the background, the lighttube + effects and a pda alike device in patricia's hand.

cheers

[johnkomnos]

Nice job Nico,
but i would like to suggest some things which i believe will improve the image...
a) the girls standing is little cold.. maybe a more life like standing.. more relax standing look more natural.
b) the land around the tube looks a little flat.. maybe some depth and clouds perhaps improve it
c) the walls in the end of the cave could be more random like rocks expanding downwards.. its an asteroid after all.

i don't want in any case to consider me impolite... i just notice some things and i like to share it with you...

i look forward to see the final image with the composition...

[Nothingness]

hey John, thanks a lot for the comments.

i was planning on redoing the background totally, and fix certain things from the background. But since i'm sick and tired with this work right now, i'll just finish it and call it a challenge.

But i sure appreciate these kind of remarks that sometimes slip my eye while working on it.

cheers

[Nothingness]

http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/entries/15/11813/11813_1169155997_medium.jpg (http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/entries/15/11813/11813_1169155997_large.jpg)

Okay,

after feeling too tired and exhausted, i tried sleeping during the night and woke up at 7u30am and fell the mood again to continue the challenge and make it just a little better.

So here is an adjusted forground with little detail like little rocks on the road and a more interesting displacement map on the tunnel wand.

cheers

[arturro]

BRAVO!
great changes, keep it up! no advice or crit at this point as I see you're doing pretty well :)

[VietEmotion]

yeah man, that looks great, the deplacement is very cool, now tune up the background a bit and you are our(linh and me) "muscles from brussel" hahaha:D

[Nothingness]

Hey Arturro,
thanks for dropping by man! after seeing your beatifull render, i felt the need that i should go with this entry as far as i could. I hope for the best when i'll do the background. Little time left, and much work.

Hey Tuan,
Nice to see you here again. I hope the displacement will stay nice at high res. It's great what you could do with only 3 procedurals if you're able to set 'm right.
Cheers man

[johnkomnos]

From now on you should wake up every day 7.30 and working the challenge... because your foreground with the details on the rocks is awesome... not to mention that you created it better from the image that i had visualized in my head...


i look forward for some new surprises!!!
Excellent job!

[Nothingness]

Hey thanks John,

but unfortunate, i'm mostly finsished working around 6 am, so we'll see what we can do. But i hope i can do something about the background too, but time is sure running out.

cheers

[Nothingness]

http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/entries/15/11813/11813_1169507037_medium.jpg (http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/entries/15/11813/11813_1169507037_large.jpg)

Just posting this cause otherwise i won't be posting at all untill i finished it. Since there is not much time left, one shouldn't be too picky about it.
I still need to change a lot on this thing, but it is the start. this little render is about 4min30sec rendertime, and with the cloud layer it should double.
The cloud layer should give a better prospection to the size of the chamber, and therefore i also need to change the little detail. The sand bump should be much smaller, as do the bump of the water. Then i'll check on the detail needed to do a 7.5k render. The middel space is where the road goes.

little note: only the water has bump, and everything else is displacement.

cheers

[MacAndre]

your tunnel looks great. :scream: i really like the displacementmaps on the rocks:buttrock:

[Nothingness]

Thanks MacAndre, the displacement can be such a pain in he a** to get it just right :banghead:

[Nothingness]

http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/entries/15/11813/11813_1169514053_medium.jpg (http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/entries/15/11813/11813_1169514053_large.jpg)

2 hours later with some detail.

this is a little part where i added bump and tweeked a lot of procedurals. Rendertime is getting much higher now.

Up to some global tweeking, but first: sleep!

[mmoir]

Hey Nico,

Your models and textures look excellent, and I like the viewpoint of your image. I look forward to the finished image. Good luck .

[daWinky]

Hey Nico,

ah, the last updates are coming along very nice and it's amazing to see the details now with your new displacement:thumbsup: ! The results are definitely worth the longer rendertimes! I wish you good luck now with the final steps and looking forward to see the finished scene:) !

-sabrina

[Nothingness]

hey mmoir, thanks o lot. But i fear i'm not gonna see the final myself.

Sabrine, hello again! I was happy too with the result of the umproved textures of the thing. Unfortunatly, moving from maya 8 to 8.5 cause of the huge amount of bugs on the osX level was a big mistake. Batch renders crash continually and produce horrible artifacts and corruptions in the renders. Then rendering the full res version - a part of the background that took 3.5 ours - just crashes when you try to save the image. And so much more freaking trouble.

so it's official, i'm through with this challenge. The fun is long gone and i'm sick and tired of all these damned bugs. I'm not in the mood of starting to render everything manually cause i just don't have the time.


so, maya sucks !

[ChewyPixels]

Hey Nico. So sorry to hear that you're done with the competition. I can understand the hardware/software issues. In my case, I used up a good week or so sculpting displacements for my environment. When it came down to rendering them properly in Mental Ray, I kept getting "out of memory" problems. I got lucky a few times to have them render up nicely, but these were few and far between. Bottom line, I used a week to sculpt and another 3 days to try to figure out the Mental Ray issue for NOTHING! :banghead: Precious time wasted. :cry: So now I'm using this weekend to throw together a quick environment for my vehicle. We'll see how far this gets me. :crosses fingers:

In my opinion, I truly suggest that you finish the competition with what you have. I think that you're trying to render you animation and still at high res, but this is not a requirement for this competition. You should really try to render this out at the required 640 x 480 size. I think that if you do this, you should minimize or eliminate the rendering issues.

C'mon man, we have to see all your hard work! :)

[Nothingness]

thanks Jesus,

but i just don't have the time nor the mood left. Lowering my render resolution won't help cause it's a problem with the batch render of maya. It is unpredictable and sucks. And when i render the still - even if it's at 7.5k - it just crashed when i tried to save the file. How on earth can you actually solve that? Render it so many times in the hope it won't crash once? I can understand you are trying to motivate me, and i really appreciate it, but this challenge has already learnd me much as well as stressed me even more. And believe me, the displacement on the final render was awfull. I think it's just the problem that mental ray has too much trouble with handling a huge object that will have a tesselation with an enormous amount of polys at rendertime.


besides, what app were you using? I used maya with mental ray and i know there are some things to check to get your render going. I must admit having less than 3.5 Gig Ram is a death-trap, but lowering your BSP in your mental-ray settings could help a little. Standard it's set to 10 and 40, and setting the last number to 30 or so could lower your memory use.
And if you can, use multiple objects instead of one big. And in the mental ray for maya 8, you were able to set your max Physical memory limit. (in 8.5 it's automaticly now) Standard it's set to 800 - and this get's you nowhere ;-)
If you have 2gig for example, you could give your system 500 and set the mental ray memory limit to 1500. Or try 2000. It helped me a lot when i was rendering my vehicle in the beginning of the challenge.
Depending on the app used, you should optimise the system of tesselation. Some system use very little polys where the surface is flat, others don't.

But it can be a hell, i know!

cheers

[SweD]

ooooh damn Nico ! it really sucks ! :argh::argh::argh:
you've spend lot of time on it, and you've got a great concept man. it's a really sad news.
Can it be possible in maya to do a Blow up render by region ?
i've this problems with 3ds max and Vray, around the 3-4K, i'm out of memory, too much polys, too big bitmaps...
solution for me was to realise a blow up with render in 4 parts, determinated by coordinates.
it a bit heavy, it give some problems to do render by mats, but it run.

Anyway, i've follow your work, even if in last times i'vnt post, and in the future, i'll continue to follow what you'll do.
I hope this challenge has allow you to up your skill, and i hope to see your concept vehicle and patricia elsewhere.:applause:

Cheers

[daWinky]

Sad news Nico:sad: !
But I can well understand that you've lost the patience and ambition with the challenge now...perhaps you have the motivation to finish the scene after a little rest, you've put so much work in it and I really like the result so far!
Anyways, it was a pleasure to follow your thread and I hope to see you with a new project around here:) ...

-sabrina

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