Chessboard render

#1 

   Hi!

I finally got the occasion to do a little practice with messiah’s renderer - nothing too fancy, just a classic Staunton chess set :wink: The whole scene uses exclusively Thomas’ AoN shaders, and I love 'em! :thumbsup: While I overall like messiah’s render quality, the biggest problem I had was to produce decent depth of field. Messiah’s interpolated DOF doesn’t give very convincing results from a certain blur level on, and the sampled DOF needs extremely high AA values, and thus extreme render times to get halfway decent looking DOF. I tried to do 2d dof with a z-buffer image, but it only looks good at small blur levels. So I ended up rendering each piece seperatly, and bluring them individually in DFX+, wich actually gives a great deal of flexibility, and the individual renders in messiah were pretty quick.

   So, I hope you like it, C&C welcome! :)
#2

Good job Marek. I’ll bet it was fun to do something in Messiah other than Rig. :slight_smile:

#3

Very nice job, Marek! Too bad messiah’s DOF isn’t more like X-DOF - nice work around though. :slight_smile:

#4

That’s SWEET! I can feel the cold chess board against my cheek as I look up at the chess pieces…

#5

Great work, Maks ! :thumbsup: :thumbsup: I never saw such a realistic CG chess set.

My only slight critique concerns the placement of the black king: If the king is supposed to be on b8, then the posiiton would be illegal (as then there would be a double check from the white pawn on a7 and the white knight on d7). If the board should be turned the other way (i.e. the king is supposed to be on g1) the position would be rather improbable (though not impossible). That’s just a minor concern, of course :).

#6

Looking great!

#7

I think its mate in two moves, the king is exposed.

Nice Render

#8

Thanks for the nice words guys!

Wegg: It's been fun indeed to work on some rendering, instead of rigging - very refreshing, doesn't happen too often ;)

Chikega: Yeah, a X-DOF like solution in messiah would be really needed, and it would be a great addition to messiah’s renderer! Anyone knows if something like this is already possible with messiah’s API, so that someone could write a plugin…?

Suricate: Wow, what a compliment :bowdown:You’re absolutely right, the king is in an illigal position - doh! Actually I tried to pay attention at this, but I must have overseen it since I placed the pieces more in regard to the shot composition than to a real play situation :wink:
I chose a chess theme in the first place because I wanted something that wouldn’t be too much work to model and to set up, so that I had a realistic chance to finish the project (as opposed to most of my other projects that are buried somewhere on my harddrive and never got finished) :wink: The funny thing is that it actually got me interested in chess again (I haven’t played for decades) - I got myself Chessmaster 10th, wich is a great game, and Josh Waitzkin himself is teaching me :smiley:

#9

Cool!

So I was actually able to help you - nice :wink:
Although the “render each piece separately”-approach can get rather tedious, it is extremely flexible and you never hit the problem with the blur not knowing what’s behind the blurred object… :slight_smile:

May I invite you into the AoN Usergallery with this piece?

Very well done! :thumbsup:

Cheers,

#10

Thanks Thomas!
Your advices on my DOF problems were much appreciated, thanks again :slight_smile:
And of course you can invite me in your user gallery, I’d be proud to promote your shaders - they are really fun to play with, and very powerful :thumbsup: I highly invite everyone interested in messiah’s renderer to get them if it’s not already the case!

#11

Just a little edit: I replaced the white pawn on A7 with a black pawn in the above render, so there’s no illegal situation anymore :wink:

#12

Great update, maks! I guess it came very handy that you had all pieces rendered individually, so you only had to re-render that little pawn on a7. :slight_smile:

It’s good to hear that working on this render renewed your interest in chess. If you need any advice in chess training books or software, just leave me a note, I guess I can give you some recommendations.

#13

Yes, having all pieces rendered seperately makes such an update a matter of 5 minutes, recomp (in DFX+) included :slight_smile:

Hehe, thanks for the offer, I’ll think of it when I need something :slight_smile:

#14

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