Feature using cinema 4D

[benytone]

hahaha....awesome work :scream: ...thats FrontPage stuff :thumbsup:

.

[soccerrprp]

Very nice work!

Richard

[ThirdEye]

Great work guys, especially without the horrible color correction. Great hair quality coming out of C4D HAIR and great animation as well.

[plugged]

[Scott Ayers]

Nice:thumbsup:.

I do a lot of furry animals myself.
The hair around the ears is very short which is really tough to do without using an insane amount of hairs. Even after using a few tricks I've learned to keep the count down.

Would you be able to tell us how many hairs it took to cover those squirrels?

[Shademaster]

Awesome work Kai! Really anxious for some rig info :D.

Awesome once again!

[webhead]

Some nice stuff on your reel. I did think some of the movements of the squirrels looked a bit too mechanical, but overall, your stuff looked good. Congrats on hitting the front page.

[IlaySHP]

Thanks Kai!

Keep in mind we didn't do any of the audio or website design
Coffe-scripting and xpresso-api in future of product.bundle ;)

[51M0N]

Ecellent work, well done.

[kiboSVK]

perfect animation and hairs cool job :thumbsup:

[Srek]

Very cool work, thanks for sharing :)

[Rantin Al]

Sabre toothed squirrels! Brilliant. :thumbsup:

Cheers, Alan.

[3dj]

Very nice Kai! Thanks for sharing.

-Jim

[danb]

Nice work!!

[LucentDreams]

Nice:thumbsup:.
Would you be able to tell us how many hairs it took to cover those squirrels?

705 070 per squirrel. The 70 would be the small brows whiskers and cheek whiskers. Typical Render times for a single squirrel on 64 bit Quad Core was about 1min 10sec, and about 15% slower in 32 bit. The basic squirrel for turnaround renders in 1:12/frame on my quadcore with 32bit vista.

http://kaithestuffguy.com/images/Squirrelprogress.jpg

[LadyPurple]

Eheh very nice! 5 stars! :)

[LemonNado]

Awesome!
Rainer

[RenderTITAN]

Great stuff. Little animals and robots make me laugh. Especially when they are animated well.
M

[sketchbook]

nice!

where you in portland again? damn you for not emailing me.

[shakes]

Wow, really nice fur work, and the movie short is great! excellent seeing Cinema Hair being used in a feature.congrats!

[LucentDreams]

nice!

where you in portland again? damn you for not emailing me.

Nono, this was the feature back in october last year.

[KsiKsu]

very nice, nice to see that there exist actually people who use c4d for mor than motion graphics

[ooo]

Great stuff! Well done :thumbsup:

odo

[ChrisCousins]

Yum! Great stuff. Is the motionblur inside C4D? Looks lovely!

Cheers - C

[Horganovski]

Awesome work.. great to see animation of this level being done in Cinema.

Cheers,
Brian

[LucentDreams]

Yum! Great stuff. Is the motionblur inside C4D? Looks lovely!

Cheers - C

Yes motionblur in cinema, Depth of field which really was only for the few close up ground shots which had extreme DOF, was done using 16 bit depth map and compound blur in AE. Ideally we would have liked to use http://www.dofpro.com/ but we didn't have any budget left by that stage.

[AkinYaman]

great fur application and render

[govinda]

Oooh that brings back some bad memories of meeting up with a squirrel once upon a walk across UCLA... Moral: don't try to feed sunflower seeds to wild squirrels.

This is just the best thing I've ever seen in Cinema, flat out. Exceptional. Dare I say DAYUM!

[boxy]

Ha! that is fantastic! The render quality is just luscious, it makes one proud to be a Cinema User. On that subject, I had to do a (still) red squirrel recently for Abbey, A0 poster. Gotta love Hair :)

http://www.savbox.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/posts/AbbeySquirrelFinal.jpg

[lllab]

very good work Kai, and the fur is amazing real:-)
hair is really a cool module in c4d.

cool
cheers
stefan

[JoelOtron]

kudos--nice rendering and integration, but VERY nice animation--really captured the frenetic squirrel energy--mixed with nice human expression. Im sure the there were tons of challenges in the rigging of that stuff as well.

[TemperalVision]

Awesome Squirrel Kai. Love the fur. Animations is very well done.

Very cute. :thumbsup:

[arctor]

very nice work!



OT : anyone have the name of the music in the Hive-FX http://hive-fx.com/ reel?
I think it's The Durutti Column but I can't place it...?

[kvb]

Bravo Kai, excellent work as always. And congrats on the frontpage:thumbsup:

[ecore]

Nice nice nice!:thumbsup:

[bobzilla]

Great job, Kai and all who worked on it.

Nice to see it made the front page, too.

One small step for Kai, one giant leap for Cinema 4D!

[3dtutorial]

Sweet as a nut -- very impressive work!

Cheers,

J

[JBSDesigns]

Wow really great stuff!

[MAN0]

impressive work. thanks for sharing

[ThirdEye]

OT : anyone have the name of the music in the Hive-FX http://hive-fx.com/ reel?

That's Ultramarine, by Michael Brook.

[soccerrprp]

Kai,

Why don't you create and sell your own tutorials? I am certain that you are very busy, but it seems to me that your body of work and expertise could take a lot of us beyond what is available now. Maxon is doing a good job, but is not offering enough it seems to me.

There is such a lack of instructional material compared to other apps and I know that this would be helpful to us all.

Richard

[ChrisCousins]

Kai, Why don't you create and sell your own tutorials?

Heh - now that's quite amusing :D

Click here (http://www.cineversity.com/tutorials/index.asp?cid=5) and check the authors...

[soccerrprp]

Okay, okay. I wrote the above w/o thinking about cineversity stuff! Guess I should get subscription to cineversity, huh?:)

Richard

[Triker]

Inspiring work.

[arctor]

That's Ultramarine, by Michael Brook.

thanks...sure sounds like The Durutti Column :)

[AVTPro]

Excellent Work. This is Maya OSX on the Mac? I did a porcupine where I had some trouble stripping the length of the quills. I had to use objects. Of course there's no need to hand paint fur on squirrel but you seem to have a lot of color variations.

[kiteman]

Nice work Kai , and nice work to your team too :)

[AVTPro]

My bad, I didn't realize the header kicked me in a C4D forum. Nice job.

[LucentDreams]

Excellent Work. This is Maya OSX on the Mac? I did a porcupine where I had some trouble stripping the length of the quills. I had to use objects. Of course there's no need to hand paint fur on squirrel but you seem to have a lot of color variations.

No Maya or macs at all in this production.

The color Variations aren't as simple as they may seems, The Squirrel uses both a tips and and roots map for overall coloring, but They have Three dominant kinds of fur, the Under side is mostly a very soft plush yellowish white fur, the top fur is much thicker course and shinier, and then the tail is just loaded with fine sparse wiry hairs. SO many of the hair materials use the two maps for overall coloring, but the hairs for each section did use separate materials with different attributes, which also meant we could apply different variation values and gradients for along the hairs. This was especial useful for the squirrel tail which has very distinct coloring patterns along the hairs.

I n this image you can see the bottom guide have a selection that I've restricted the bottom material to. Both materials are using the same Root and Tip maps, but the gradients are slightly different, mostly the saturation of the brown and the color of the tip. They have very different blending values though. and things like specular translucency were different so the softer bottom had a little more translucency than the course top etc.
http://kaithestuffguy.com/images/tailhairs.jpg

[AVTPro]

Thank you very much. This is exactly what I was talking about. I understand the layers of fur that is needed to build on the look and variations. You did exceptionally well with this technique around the face and particuliarly around the eyes.

It's the graphic interface on the different coloring "along" the fur is exactly what I was referring too. I believe Maya lacks this control set. This is the very thing that would have made all the difference in time and deadline on my projects.

Clear color "Adobe" banding interface. Instead I had to use geometry...almost killed my deadline.
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f190/AVTPro/Picture2.png
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f190/AVTPro/quill.jpg
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f190/AVTPro/Picture22-1.png

[basti]

cool work! the only thing i didn't like is the completely still
camera in every squirrel shot. this even makes the animation
look like stop motion in some shots.
but i guess it might be because of a limited budget to cut
matchmove costs.

anyway great work! i really like the shot with both squirres
chewing on the rope around the tree! good animation on
that one!

basti

[LucentDreams]

Yea the head is pretty complex which is why I used the tail as the example. The head has two hair objects, the overall head and then a duplicate that was reduced down to 10 000 hairs that are much longer to act and guard hairs and help add to the silhouette. The main hair object has 11 selection sets and 4 materials The Upper gray and lower fluff again, but also a dedicated material for the eye loop area and ears.

[govinda]

Pardon my hairlessness (hey there's a line for a sitcom), but how are the UV maps in those channels functioning? They look to be allowing you to color differently on roots versus tips. And then there's a smooth blend along the length of the hairs? And then how are they interacting with the gradient in the 'Color' setting?

[imagefact]

I would also love to know about the lighting!

Could you clue us in to what type of lighting and rendering you used? It doesn't have to be too specific, just an overall idea of technique. (eg: basic lighting, GI, AO, etc).

Also: was the ground all backplates or did you do any 3D ground?

[LucentDreams]

There were shadow catchers for ground and branches or trees, the the only fully modeled props were the nut and Camera object.

We looked at GI on hair is still too slow sadly for the large amount of frames and little amount of time. A few shots used a Dome of spot lights to basic GI fake but mostly it was a combination of Ambient illumination no higher than 10% and then 2-4 Spots and or omni's

AO passes were done separately only for shots where either the teeth or eyes were visible, or we also did shots where AO was on shadow catchers that had direct interaction like the branches and ground. There are a few shots Id have liked to have used AO but didn't have enough time to justify the little effect it would have.

The UV maps are for the actual model, in this case the squirrel, I cheated and overlapped the left and right side fore a symmetrical UV to optimize mesh coverage on the texture. Ordinarily would avoid this to do asymmetric texture but being covered in fur I figured the fur would offer enough randomness. If you use just the root and tip textures then it samples the maps color at the root and applies the color of the pixel in the maps to that hair, then does a blend along the hair form the root color to the tip color. The gradient goes from left being root to right being tip. In both the root and tip options you will see a blend mode drop down, and a mixing slider, these allow you to blend the colors of the root and tip samples onto the gradient. Finally under the gradient you see there are variation values for hue, saturation and value, we wanted to preserve the colors so no hue variation, but we did use value and saturation to get some lights and darks and colorful and grayed hairs. in there, particularly for the squirrels back where we needed a good salt and pepper sort of look.

[boxy]

Just amazing :) that sample is very informative, thank you
Boxy

[imagefact]

I had a feeling that you didn't use GI. But not because of the look! It looks very realistic and wonderful. It is a good example to everyone that you DON"T need special rendering engines, mentalray, Vray, but just good 'ol intelligent lighting design.

[LucentDreams]

Well it has nothing to do with cinema's GI either but more of using GI with hair. Cinema has a special GI sampling for hair which make it substantially faster than if the hair was say physical geometry, but it still means rendering the hair with raytracing which is magnitudes slower than the standard rendering for hair.

[mosconariz]

Cool! That hair is amazing! but there's something about the animation that looks a little weird to me... maybe it's just me

[Vidar3d]

Top shelf stuff Kai. Really great.

[Troyan]

Excellent work on the squirrels and excellent animation. However, I do agree that some motions seem a little stiff or robotic as squirrels tend to move very quickly in fast, jerky motions.

[JoelOtron]

How difficult/easy was it to convince Hive to go with c4d--or was it never an issue? Im assuming if you were the TD that Hive already had a team of in house c4d guys--or were you and Ngrava involved with the assembling of a good c4d team? Were you involved with the early on logistics for setting up the pipeline? I find it interesting and exciting that this sort of thing is happenning i the feature world, just wondering how this sort of thing comes to be.

[bluecanvas]

Excellent work on the squirrels and excellent animation. However, I do agree that some motions seem a little stiff or robotic as squirrels tend to move very quickly in fast, jerky motions.

Squirrels move almost like they are on speeded up film in real life. Not something that's easy to animate by hand I imagine.

And you can't mocap them. Yet... :D

[LucentDreams]

The grunt of animation was done over 2 1/2 weeks by three animators.

The Owner of Hive, Jim Clark has been using C4D for several years now, he was one of the Directors forthe HP flea spot as well, and left Bent Image Lab to start his own studio focusing on Cinema 4D.

Ngrava (http://forums.cgsociety.org/member.php?userid=26905) was the only other one I'd work with before as well on HP flea. The other animators and the compositor were locals he had worked with many time and work frequently in Portland.

[Afrowave]

I was fiddling for the sound, (should have been watching the screen) and then when I finally looked up, "Whoooa".

I was doing some pushups as I "psyked" to start on a CA for a film prod client. I am very happy to see work like this.

Infact I know a lot of CA C4 artists on this board who are damn good. Are there any other examples of work like this we can droole over?

Thanks Kai, keep on going...:thumbsup:.

[Fadi3d]

Amazing work man I liked it very much

[robotbob]

bravo kai,

this is fantastic. i am in awe of this project. and the rendertimes seem blindingly quick.

pedro

[Pegasus]

This is so realistic. Great Work.

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