3D Matte Painting

[nickmarshallvfx]

I dont know too much about 3D, and almost nothing about Maya, but is self-illumination different to just turning up the ambience? When ive seen examples of matte projection in Maya, self illumination has been used to light it (or not light it as the case may be).

Other than that, can you possibly post a test of the shot so we can see the problems with the mattes? The shot looks very cool so far, and quite ambitious, i hope u can pull it off :)

Oh, and once you have a matte painting that is photoreal, if you want extra bumps and undulations in the surfaces that the camera can see, you are better to adjust the geometry that is being projected onto, rather than trying with bump maps. At least that is what i am led to believe, so someone please tell me if im wrong there...

Nick

[Chrike]

hey Nick,

cheers for the tip mate!
I´ll post a wip as soon as I got the next render out.
Once I projected it back onto the geometry I can´t adjust it anymore (in terms of bumps and stuff, can I? because the projection won´t match anymore then which gives stretching and errors with the alpha channel. :)
And turning on the ambient is for the self illumination btw :) If i turn both the ambient and the diffuse lighting of the material down it renders pretty much black.
Will give the displacements a shot I think :)

Cheers,

Chris

[JJASSO]

hey, I like the composition and the camera movement, it looks very nice and have a sense of scale, I would like to see yoiur painting though to see what you can change or fix, matte paintings should mostly be self illuminated 100% and with this you wont be able to light bump on them, so maybe it's a matter of atmosphere passes, try making some street fog pass and other for aereal perspective, a lot of detail for such a shot is needed. some reflection in the buildings as well, looking forward to see the image

[Chrike]

Hi there James,

Thanks for the comment & advice :) Very appreciated!

This is one pass I rendered out from Maya:
http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p297/Chrike/cgsociety.jpg

I tried to get all the elements covered to project through one camera basically.
It´s divided up into a total of 16 layers to avoid texture loss due to overlapping.
However, I figured that the buildings close to point "F" are extremely close to the camera so I set up a second projection cam for them as they require more detail.
What do you think about that?
I rendered @ 4 times PAL resolution by the way; 2880 x 2304 and raised the resolution up in Photoshop to 4200 x 3600 to have more to work with.

And another thing which really confuses me at the moment:
If you think about the screen above as a normal painting....
All the buildings are quite huge and pretty far away from the camera; so they would all have a certain lack of detail and loss of color values and things like that due to all the atmosphere and dust (from the tornado) and other factors inbetween.
However, actually the buildings close to point "F" are really close to the shot camera and the stuff marked as "B" is far away as this is the actual background.

So basically rules how one would normally approach a painting do not really apply in here. Or well; they do but rather than from the point of view to the background they have to be applied from the shot cam point ("F") to the background ("B")..??
Does that make sense?

Kinda difficult to get this right in my head.

Thanks for any advice in advance!
Will post a render as soon as possible; had to fight with the tornado the last two days but will continue with the matte today.

Cheers guys,

Chris

[nickmarshallvfx]

ha, camera projections can be a bit crazy to get ur head around, ive been mulling over similar things myself recently as i want to move onto them soon.
I think for all regular atmospheric effects paint them straight into the painting, but for the extra tornado haze and mist that will be moving, do it with ur simulation. Thats if im understanding what you are asking properly?

Nick

[Chrike]

haha yeah that stuff is really bitchy :D
but nevertheless great fun! it´s crazy how much you -could- achieve with that! :)

by the way that was kind of a misunderstanding. I will definitely do all the moving atmospherics and debris and things like that in 3D.
It´s really hard to describe the kind of problem I have in my head right now.. well maybe the images explain a bit better:

This is a testrender I did today: the textures are not all updated so it does not 100% reflect what´s visible in the second image.

http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p297/Chrike/testrender_01st_may001.jpg

http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p297/Chrike/shot3_28th_april_full.jpg

I´m basically working my way from the background to the foreground right now trying to find values that work well in the projection before I´m going to refine and texture everything properly.

What I tried to describe is:

take a look at the building in the foreground on the left side in the render. It´s very close to the camera and hence darker and more intense in terms of values and color and so forth.
However in the projection image it has pretty much the same distance to your point of view as all the other buildings.
If that was a normal painting the difference in values and contrast would be quite low compared to the rest of the city. Hope you know now what confuses me :)

Well, working on this projection image is definitely a whole new experience.. it´s quite.. different.. :D

My problem is mainly:
As you can see in the first image the quality is extremely low. The texture quality just sucks actually.
The image I project back is 2880 x 2304 and this is a small excerpt of it at 100% size in photoshop
http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p297/Chrike/excerpt.jpg

so actually the size seems to be sufficient. This is just a screencap from the full size image and the details are really well visible I think :\ don´t know why it comes out of Maya like s*
Any ideas? Or suggestions for render settings or something?
The screen was rendered with Maya software on production quality setting again...
bah .. :(

Thanks,

Chris

[TomasWarren]

Hey Chrike, i think the image looks great not least because this type of shot is very difficult to do

with regards to your render probs, have you looked at your filter settings in Maya? This is something i've come across myself recently, and it does seem to have a big effect on the quality of the image. If you turn off filtering on the projected image file attributes, for me that seems to sharpen things up considerably. Also, try adjusting the filter settings in your maya render settings, maybe try using a triangle filter. Or, if you try rendering with mental ray, set your filter to mitchell and set your anti-aliasing contrast threshold to about 0.06 and see if that improves things at all

hope this helps, good luck!

[Chrike]

hey tomas!
thanks for the tips :D will try this tonight when i make the next render tests.

edit: oh hey we´re practically neighbours btw lol. are you @ uni bournemouth?

[TomasWarren]

haha yes i am indeed!

didnt realise until you just pointed it out, im a 3rd year on the ba, so my lab is right next to yours! small world eh :)

[Chrike]

haha yes i am indeed!

didnt realise until you just pointed it out, im a 3rd year on the ba, so my lab is right next to yours! small world eh :)

haha yeah it definitely is :D
Thanks for the tip with the filtering by the way, that seems to have done the trick perfectly. Have to do a couple of more renders to be sure.. with more finalized buildings but there´s a major improvement already. cheers man!

Chris

[mordecaidesign]

Chrike. This is some awesome work. Keep it up. Can't wait to see the final results

[rucish]

apply ur texture with projCAM on surface shader, and plug ur projection into incandecense. in render settings turn off use default light.(u can keep it on if u are using surface shader) make separate render pass for shadows. you can get away with 3 passes, color, AO and shadow. also in texture settings turn filtering to 0, it will make it sharper, you can add on top of it another pass -zDepth. i hope it helps. good luck it looks good.

p.s try light RGB pass, extract it with shiftchannels and use it as a mask for color correction.

[Chrike]

hey cheers mordecaidesign and rucish! :)
Its really getting there slowly but surely. I noticed that the textures themselves make a huge difference already. Like the more detailed they get the better it looks on the projection.
This is another shot I´m working on at the moment.

http://www.chrike.de/shot3.mov

Needs obviously still quite some work on the extension, particularly in the background and the close foreground and elements like smoke and the dissolving tornado and so forth will be added as well.

I´m tempted to make it a little bit darker and have a go with lightnings and things like that actually but it´s not decided yet.

Cheers,
Chris

[JJASSO]

nice work on the second shot,that looks real to me. and will be better when you finish the shot with some other elements, I would totally buy it, great work, hope you can share some higer res .mov's

[rucish]

looks great! good luck

[proconpictures]

hey chris,
nice to see you're havin' fun wit some projection mapping.
is the tornado houdini particles? since when's BU using maya?

i was gonna make the same suggestions as the ones your fellow student from the BA course next door made.

however, as for projection mapping i really recommend darin hilton's gnomon dvd. that's the best and most forward way i ever saw it being broken down. even if you're a starving student and short on money it's worth it: http://thegnomonworkshop.com/dvds/dhi01.html

what kinda specific problems do you still have and when does your shot have to be done?

[Chrike]

hey guys :)

thanks a lot james! that´s very encouraging! still quite some work left but fortunately couple of weeks to go.
And sure thing, I will share high res images as soon as they´re finished :)

thanks rucish!
your tips btw were really good. The z-depth pass is damn handy when it comes to compositing.

And last but not least:
cheers procon :)
How come you know all the stuff about BU? been a student yourself?
And yes, you´re right. The tornado is a Houdini particle system and will be rendered with sprites or maybe i3d (have to do more tests on that; at the moment the volumetrics always kill my machine lol) .. will have to see the next weeks.
When I said I´m doing it in Maya I was actually just referring to the camera projection of the matte paintings; sorry for the confusion.

And I actually watched this Gnomon dvd!
Maybe I should have watched it entirely rather than partially though. You know, I have a bit of a prob with dvds like that cause to be honest I find them extremely tiring...
So after a while I always kinda end up just watching the stuff without actually concentrating on it anymore and hence I have to watch it again and again.. so as soon as a problem is solved in my head I tend to just work with what I got rather than continue watching :D

Thanks a lot anyways! Pretty much all of my probs are solved now; the rest is more or less just refining the textures and then hop on to compositing.
It´s due on the 6th of June btw!


Cheers guys,
chris

[TomasWarren]

Just to answer procon pictures question, in general the ba use maya and the ma tend to use xsi and houdini, especially the digital effects course.

when were you at the ncca? any good stories? :)

[proconpictures]

chris, am glad your shot is finally getting closer to where you want it to be.
what you said about the tutorial is actually right. we all work hard 24-7 and when we sit down to watch something we're just doomed to fall asleep. especially when your a student.
as for my bournemouth knowledge, i just know a few people who went there and have good jobs now. so, i've been playing with the idea of taking the MA myself, even though i'm working as digital matte artist already. the course just seems great, allowing you to explore exactly what you are most into. how do you feel about it? are you living on campus? how many shots are you actually trying to get done for this project? and how big is your group?

[Chrike]

Hey guys,

sorry for the lack of replies. Was really damn busy getting this done on time :)
Thanks a lot for your help along the way!

Here´s a higher resolution version of the second shot:

http://fc05.deviantart.com/fs30/f/2008/168/a/8/Term3_aftermath_by_chrike.jpg

The first shot doesnt really have a single matte so there´s not really much to show here. What I ended up doing was making a matte painting for the sky and few separate cleanups and set extensions for the city part at the ground;
Then I animated it in After Effects.
Actually I would have loved to work even longer on both the shots but I will start with the last uni term next week so I´m kinda already in the pre-production phase; so there was no just no time.
If you like you could watch my showreel with a more detailed breakdown and the final project itself on www.chrike.de (http://www.chrike.de) :)

Thanks again, you really helped me a lot getting my head around it!

Chris

edit: hey milan, come online in msn more often man :D really hard to catch u

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