80's cartoon Post Mortem: Tell us what you learned...

#86

Well, this was my first challenge. The theme selection forced me to enter. I couldn’t say no, I’m too weak. I heard voices in my head from my 80’s child personality. I would lo ve to participate in a challenge similar to this one.

I already had decided to go for a 3d Aioros, but knowing myself, I needed a deadline to make me work really hard. I usually start but don't usually finish works or take too long to complete. Thanks to this, I've been able to see where i can arrive to. I've got a better result than expected. I'm really happy with it. So just with that point, this challenge has been worthy.

As it rewards to the deadline... the first thing I thought was: Oh shit, I could have gone to bed before if I had known before. (I had already finished the character)
Tuesday afternoon the thought was: Oh shit, I still have three days to improve the scenario, think, think.
And then back to the computer and the hours of uncountable and exhausting crative fun. I work better under pressure, but I really enjoy it. And the scenario improvement really really worths it. So, I can only thank you for making me see I can do good things In a short period of time.(I still haven't had a 3d  professional job, so lack the experience)


Furthermore, I've learnt I still don't know how to go from zbrush to 3d Studio Max using displacement maps. (you can see it the hair tests) So I finally exported high resolution meshes.

Apart from this, some other details about how to avoid problems when modelling and getting results more efficiently.

And but not least (maybe the most important), a throne with two skeletons as armrests should be in the IKEA catalogue right now. IN THE HEADLINES¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡


To sum up. I love the whole experience. (my mother doesn't, she thinks I changed my timetable drastically in a bad way [and I did]. She is my first 3d widow [don't know if you name it like this in english])
#87

first watch this movies:
Zeitgeist: Addendum
Zeitgeist, The Movie

let me know what you think?

#88

income tax is a voluntary act, the IRS they just want to confuse you to believe that is the law, even my economic teacher and logic teacher admited that income tax is a voluntary act because all of us are protected by the constition the our founded father left us. IRS is only administrative deparment no thing more they don’t have the right to take your money and nothing else because their is no law for them to do what they do.

about wesley snipes all lawyers knows the income tax is voluntary act they just get paid by IRS and Judges too to shut their mouths to miss leaden to believe people have to pay income tax.

take care

#89

i learnt that i never have enough time :slight_smile:

#90

Well, here are three things I learned from this challenge:

  1. I learned more about how to use ZBrush displacement and normal maps in Lightwave.
  2. I learned more about my current computer’s limits! :wink:
  3. I learned that I’d better pick something harder to model next time! :slight_smile:
#91

This is so way off topic it’ll be the last I say on it but you sound like you still need to be warned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
If you don’t trust Wikipedia then here is the 16th amendment on USConstitution.net.

It has nothing to do with the IRS. The 16th amendment was ratified on February 3, 1913. That means long before we were ever born congress passed the law and then the states ratified the amendment as part of the constitution. That means it is the law that there can be an income tax. Your teachers are dead wrong and will get you thrown in jail. I too bought into this nonsense years back but if you do proper research and not conspiracy crap you will see it is not voluntary. Those guys that preach this idea, including the ones I originally listened too, ultimately get thrown in jail themselves.

#92

Man I tried SOO hard not to reply to this recent shift in topic, but it’s way stronger than me.
I just wanted to add to this, Wyatt.

Using common media tactics, it is possible to “prove” virtually anything you want to. What people need to understand, especially when dealing with propoganda such as zetegeist or Michael Moore films, is that what they DON’T tell you has much more meaning than what they DO tell you.
Also, Zetegeist was a really stupid “film” IMO. If you look and listen closely, there is virtually no solid scientific or factual evidence to backup their cases. Verifying and checking up on these so called “facts” on the internet is an exercise in futility, because the fist few pages of results you get link to conspiracy sites anyway who all recycle their info between them.

-Rage

#93

Guys…

Stay on topic.

-R

#94

ok guys let stay on the topic, roberto is right. You win Harris :curious:

#95

je je je ok let stay on the topic, ok :wise:

#96

I think the major thing I learned was how to use mentalray. I use other render programs at work, so it gave me a chance to explore mentalray. It’s nice that max ships with such a great renderer. I’m also proud of the fact that I stayed with the project for the duration. All too often I get sidetracked or lose interest, but I’m glad I made it to the end! Great job everyone, you guys kept me going :slight_smile:

#97

Things I Learnt and Likes
my goal with modelling challenges right now it to start modelling in a way that allows both animation and the generation of high quality stills.

to this end i focused on cloth modelling and, despite not finishing, felt i made some good progress. particularly, i was happy with my modelling of cloth using a low-poly base mesh. i think that this is important to me because nCloth for maya responds well to using low res meshs, post smoothed down the history tree.

i also learnt some more about zbrush pipelines, particularly for LW through the discussions on it in other peoples threads. despite me being a maya user i found this interesting. thanks to wyatt, rage and some others for their contributions there.

i particularly enjoyed razorsedge’s WIP as i felt his modelling made use of some interesting techniques (syflex, low poly etc) so that was good.

Things I Learnt and Didn’t Like
i have this, perhaps irrational, dislike of poly modelling anatomical form without following muscle flow and there were a number of WIP’s where the creators were not making use of edge loops etc in defining muscles and joints and all that good stuff.

what bothered me about this was that, for a lot of them, this worked perfectly fine. i mean the outcomes still had anatomical detail.

this has made me wonder about how poly-modelling is changing with tools like zbrush and mudbox providing billion poly displacement approximations without breaking a sweat.

i think though that this probably comes down to Animation vs. Illustration, and the need for deformations however i’m not necessarily convinced of this and have decided to investigate how well this less involved method of modelling works along with other possible things like driven displacement textures.

so yeah, i like modelling anatomically but if it’s just a waste of time doing so then i want to know about it. efficiency and moving forward and all that :slight_smile:

@japetus: if this was your first render using MR then i’m even more impressed. it didn’t look like the shaders were complicated (i’m guessing mostly simple MIA materials?) but they all came together so nicely, accomplishing a cohesive style that captured both the interpretation and the original cartoon. i think you can be justifiably proud :slight_smile:

my only crit of your render would be the backpack which i think ended up feeling a little flat. i was thinking perhaps a more ceramic/glazed texture (fresnal ref, ior ~1.4 ref 1.0, diff slightly off white etc) just to give it a bit more presence.

so yeah. just thought i’d mentioned that i think you learned the thing you set out to do well.

#98

Axiomatic: Thanks for the comments. In retrospect it would have been a good idea to give a bit of reflection to the jet pack. Kinda wished I had chosen a pose that showed it off a bit more, I had put some nice details up there. Oh well, I guess that’s why we have the ortho views too right? :smiley:

#99

No problem bro. Amazing how easy it is once you get the specifics down.

Now I have a question for you or anyone else that wants to answer. I’ve seen messages before about Mental Ray and that its tricky but it give such good results etc. etc. Coming from the Lightwave side, with small bits of experience in 3DMax and Maya, the process is you make the model, you texture the model, you prepare your scene, set your render options and you render. Usually that means hit F9. If your using FPrime its a little different but still its not that complicated. Mental Ray sounds like a separate program but if its just for rendering what is all the talk of shaders etc? If the answer is too long and complicated, point me at a wiki or info page that gives the basics.

One more of those questions that I never bothered to ask.

#100

Well at least in Max, if you have a 3rd party renderer like mentalray, brazil, or vray, they have their own custom shaders you can use along with standard max shaders. At least for my uses mentalray has come a long way in simplifying the shaders. MR has Arch/Viz shaders which are pretty easy to get a grasp on. As far as rendering goes, it is all contained in max, although I believe mental ray has to “convert” the scene at render time, but it is all running in max, so you don’t have to open a new program to render anything with mental ray (at least in my experience with max).

#101

In Maya is pretty much the same, you just pick a different renderer like when you pick FPrime. In addition, with Mental Ray you can write your own shaders, most 3rd party renderers allow for this… I’m not a coder so I just thank the many code heads out there writing shaders.

MR for Maya converts the maya nodes; the scenes are translated in order to get them rendered, just like LW, the geo has to be triangulated at render time.

You can learn more here
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/mental-ray.html

I made this glass shader (I still need to upload it to mrmaterials.com) The scene provided uses Photons, and it is illuminated by a poly. I was trying to duplicate a mr material for max.

#102

Your explanations are much simpler than theirs.

That doesn’t sound so bad but there must be something about it that is difficult since that’s what I always read about it from others.

Plus from their FAQ,
“How many licenses do I need to render on a multiprocessor machine and/or on a network of machines?
One license per cpu.”

Yowza, makes me appreciate LWs 999 free render nodes.

#103

Well nowadays, obviously you would need max or maya running on the farm and thus you would also have a license of mentalray. So I suppose you have as many licenses of mentalray as your chosen 3D app. Don’t know what htey are talking about for multiproc machines…i have a 4 processor machine at work and a 2 at home and definately no license problems. I was a little intimidated by it at first, but it’s really not bad once you get into it. It’s always the same challenge of learning what their terminology means and what settings means this vs. what you learned in another app. Not bad and I love to use it for it’s excellent skin shaders and Architectural meterials (that come with some nice presets for starting points).

#104

In MR for maya you get 8 nodes with one license of Maya if I remember correctly, still not as good as LW 999 nodes but I end up rendering with RenderTitan if I need to anyway, otherwise rendering overnight has been ok.

#105

Hrm…

[b]I learned:

[/b]
[ul]
[li]that zbrush models with more than 10 or so subtools can get tedious reeeeeally fast (which translates to = Subtool Master is very helpful sometimes).[/li][li]that modeling and sculpting bandages is a giant pain in the ass![/li][li]that if you have a model with lots of subtools, it’s probably a good idea to try and break each and every one of them before sinking time into a sculpt that you may have to throw away later.[/li][li]to consider the prominence of a character on a turntable. The turntable is supposed to display the character, and probably shouldn’t compete with it unless it’s part of the design.[/li][li]taking into consideration the previous lesson, one shouldn’t waste hours of work on a turntable you won’t use. Especially when there is more you could do to your character. :P[/li][li]it’s a bad idea to create geometry in zbrush and then reconstruct it, when a simplified mesh could be generated in maya/max in about 15 seconds.[/li][li]that mentalray doesn’t seem to like lighting double-sided objects that have no depth.[/li][li]not to overdo texture resolution unless you have a machine that can handle it.[/li][li]to count teeth.[/li][li]how to sculpt and paint ROTTING FLESH! Yeaaaaaaaaah! And maggots?[/li][/ul][b]
My next focuses in learning are:

[/b]
[ul]
[li]about mentalray. I run into issues too frequently, so there are obviously gaps in my knowledge.[/li][li]about hard surfaces in zbrush. I see so many great hard surface models built, sculpted, and rendered entirely in zbrush. The how of that just eludes me.[/li][li]about a better way to meet up subtools for organic models. For this particular model it wasn’t so important because there were things hiding the seams; but I won’t always have that luxury. I’ve seen some multi-subtool organic models that seem to meet up perfectly, and I want to know more about how they do it. And I don’t mean just the polys meeting. They light as if it’s one mesh as well. I’m stumped.[/li][/ul]