FXWARS! TESLA - Trey Harrell (Tribute)

#11

Here’s a still test frame I did on a very quickly modified Zbrush base mesh (poly smooth added in Maya… you can see facets in her lips currently).

There’s no bump, displacement, or anything other than diffuse and (very very rough) specular maps on her face at the moment influencing SSS. The hair is a 2D billboard cheat, which I’ll likely be able to get away with because the camera parallax isn’t going to change.

Basically, I’m seeing how little I can get away with blendshape, rigging, texture and detail-wise on my characters… because of the style and selective cuts / camera angles, I don’t think she needs anything much more than more eye makeup and a proper displacement map for her head and neck.

I’m rendering out a mix test right now with three very rough blendshapes (eyes x-wide, closed, hero sneer) to see if I can avoid spending the time setting up a proper Osipa-style facial rig with hundreds of lovingly crafted muscle contractions I’ll never use. The basemesh I used for this really isn’t set up for decent animation, so I’m going to avoid a full facial rig if I can. Efficiency is the goal here, and I think she’s pretty close to good enough now.

More once the sequence finishes rendering,

–T

#12

Here’s a first stab at shaders and expressions on the Maria model.

I think she’s pretty close to working already, eye and lip weirdness notwithstanding… but I’ll be painting a proper displacement map and doing a little more eye makeup for the final. Might also wrap deform the eyebrows on top of the mesh because they’re too soft for my tastes.

Eyes open, eyes closed and a slow sneer are all I need her to do :slight_smile:

http://www.treyharrell.com/fxwars/wip/mariatest1.mov

Now onto the robot and scientist…

–T

#13

Its animated, but i have to let the computer sit over night or something to show people. i used particles so its really frustrating. but really gives the effect i was trying to achieve. I tryed using splines and noise but it was to hard to get the erratically look of lightning.

#14

Ok, did my final sculpting, rigging & texturing on the Maria character and I’m going to call her done for now. I could keep tweaking her for another couple weeks, but I think she’s pretty good now… besides, I’ve got a lot more modeling to do!

A few expression stills, and a raw render before major post effects and hair below (just diffuse bloom). I think she turned out pretty well, and is a pretty good likeness of the actress given the timeframe.

–T

#15

Well, I spent the entire day tuning to get my renders down under 10 mins a frame on my quadcore… juggling filter size/bsp/sampling/final gather etc etc etc. As any mental ray user knows, half the time you spend more time getting a flicker-free look that’ll render in your lifetime if you decide to do almost everything in-camera (which I did due to refraction and bokeh depth of field on everything in the shot).

Anyhow, I finally dialed in the first two shots and fired them off to render for a couple days (doing beauty/occlusion passes plus an RGB split alpha pass because I’m not separating layers).

So… now that every machine in the house is tied up for a while, it’s time to play with some looks! :bounce:

I know originally I’d planned on working in black & white and try to emulate the film’s look exactly… but I’ve been working in color up until post and I’ve come up with some pretty nice looks… so, survey time.

What do you guys think? Which look is your favorite?

–T

#16

wow this is really awesome…you matched the fritz lang look very close!

#17

Great work , I like 2 and 4 look the most:)

#18

Look no.4 is my choice :slight_smile:

#19

Thanks for the feedback guys! Still having a hard time deciding, so keep the suggestions coming! :thumbsup:

Here’s a second-ish of each of them in motion back-to-back… had to make sure that the final gather flicker and bokeh grain didn’t waste render time, and that the added stock grain matched the treatments.

http://www.treyharrell.com/fxwars/wip/tablelooks.mov

Worth noting that my bottled plasma widget is (you guessed it) Maya hair curves with turbulence driving extruded tubes that have a fast perlin noise driving opacity and incandescence, then passed to shader glow.

Because the shader glow is a post effect in Maya, I’ll be rendering a light flicker pass after the main plates are done. I’m a little worried that her neck and camera-side of her head are looking flat, so I might throw in a touch-up shadow pass at the same time.

And… now time for me to wait a day or two for these two cuts to finish rendering.

Edit:

I figured I should probably mention something about Mental Ray bokeh and render times.

The bokeh lens shader gives really awesome depth of field and lens defocus bloom dot effects, but it’s incredibly expensive to sample high enough to remove all of the graininess.

In fact, anything above 4 samples in my scene shot my render times through the roof, so I decided to uh… fix it in post and stop wasting my time trying to tune it out with 10 minute test renders (10 minutes if I was lucky, that is).

Anyhow, in after effects, I use:

Effect->Noise & Grain->Remove Grain (tweaked to taste per shot)

Effect->Noise & Grain-> Gaussian Blur (to make the remaining bokeh grain soften and expand a little look like film grain, by about .2 pixels)

Effect->Noise & Grain ->Add Grain (setting dependent on stock look, but I never go much higher than 30-40%)

You’ve got to be very careful that when you add grain in post that it doesn’t call attention to itself. The default settings in after effects are WAY over the top.

Hope this helps someone deal with bokeh or even final gather noise. Quite often it’s way faster and easier to just deal with picky, time consuming issues like that in compositing.

#20

I’d like to see a mix between the second and third images. I like the skin on the second image but I like the environment better on the third! Awesome stuff!

#21

Looks awesome!

I would go for the Modern cold one.

#22

Same here! Looks really fantastic! Keep up the good work!

#23

Thanks everyone!

I think I’ll probably do both the black & white plus one of the color variations (either cold modern or cold cross, or spit the difference between them based on feedback and my own taste).

Mostly, I’m keeping the black & white around because it was my original concept, and I’d forgotten how incredibly useful it can be for look development/lighting/shading to really fine tune your contrast before worrying about color (well, that and a deadline and a little friendly competition to make you push yourself! :wip: )

I’m leaning toward the one labeled cold cross process, maybe toned down a bit toward “cold”… mostly because it’s very very different in execution than the original and I really like the feel of how stylized it is. The executions are pretty easy… they’re nothing much more than exposure/levels/curves adjustments and varying diffusion/blooms on the highlights and shadows, plus different film stock grain.

Linear workflow rendered to 32-bit EXR allows me to not only crush/burn shadows and highlights (plus other tonemapping) in the ballpark of where I want to be in the render view, but also allows me to abuse the hell out of the curves, levels and exposure without chunking out the image in post.

I’m almost positive I’m going to render a touchup pass now to restore some of the depth on her skull where the midtones got flattened, and I also think I need to add a little more specular rimlight on the right edge of the tube because it’s not reading too well, but other than that I’ve got to say I’m super happy with how well it’s turning out given the tight deadline and rendering constraints.

–T

#24

Ok, so my first two shots are now composited and done.

I took everyone’s feedback on the color choice and went and refined the look a little more… it’s based off the cold cross process, but I pushed it a lot harder. I didn’t show any restraint at all on the saturation :stuck_out_tongue: Added occlusion, additional shading to her head so it’s not as flat, and some extra specular on the glass to get the edge to pop, and I’m going to call it done.

Had to use optical flow retiming to fix some awkward animation that I rushed through at the end because of the need to get this thing rendered. Not ideal, but it works in a pinch.

So, here’s where the look ended up for the color version… The black & white final look will be refined once everything’s cut together.

#25

So, I’ve got the robot as done as she’s going to get, modeling-wise now.

I started off trying to do her as old-school NURBS patches, because it made the most sense due to her contours and sharp creases.

Then I remembered why nobody in their right mind tries to do characters as nurbs anymore, I came to my senses and I did the head/torso in zbrush and limbs/greebly stuff as polys with smoothing in no time flat.

I’m surprised how well the zbrush detail holds up for hard surface stuff (at least at the level of detail I need for this piece…). The body isn’t going to be close enough to camera to really sweat minor details and contours. Occlusion and my metal shader will disguise quite a bit of the rough edges. It’s very difficult to get flat surfaces on a plane in ZBrush. If I had more time, I’d probably do this whole thing with proper poly topology with sub-d creases, but the deadline is looming.

Head & torso were quite literally sculpted from 16 poly faces that were pulled into a rough silhouette, then divided until I reached the memory wall. I knew she didn’t need to animate or anything, so I didn’t worry about topology whatsoever, I just needed to get the sculpt to read properly from the front, with the silhouette and face being the most important. No detail whatsoever on the back or areas you can’t see. It was modeled purely for the front camera angle.

I deleted the low sub-d levels so I was only subdividing 4 times at render, and also so I could model to a fair representation of the silhouette… so sorry that the mesh is mud, but there’s nothing worth studying there anyhow :slight_smile:

Moving on to layout for the master shot now,

–T


#26

Got all of the non-animated plates locked for this one. Still have some color/exposure work to do and the effects passes need to render, but it’s a huge milestone completed… no more hardcore modeling or lighting besides the scientist, but that should go reasonably quickly.

Very glad I’ve been rendering RGB passes… I’d have gone insane trying to color/exposure balance everything in the scene on separate plates.

These are a little hot, sharp and dark still, but they’re in the ballpark of what I’m going for.

–T

#27

I think I realized this evening that I’m going to have to give myself waaay more time on projects, or upgrade the old 2 gig Athlon X2s I’ve got sitting here… because they just can’t handle displacement/mia_material_x/bokeh/final gather in the same shot unless I take the time to plan everything out in dozens of layers.

mia_material reflections and bokeh are incredibly expensive to render.

Anyhow, I’ve got a wallclock on this raw plate here that says 17 minutes a frame, with a frozen final gather that took over an hour. And only one machine here that’s capable of rendering the stuff. :banghead:

Ah well. I’m going to cheat my held frames and I’m using camera moves very very sparingly.

Here’s the raw plate of the robot medium to medium closeup dolly shot, before any color work, occlusion or polishy stuff, and it’s turning out really well I think. Not sure it’s worth close to 20 minutes a frame on a quadcore (and an hour a sequence to bake a single FG map), but tuning the reflection quality etc any lower or interpolating the reflections just makes it look like mud.

#28

Hi Trey,

looks great! I think you really captured the feeling of the original scene.

I’m no mental ray guy, since I’m using V-Ray, but these render times must be killing your workflow… I would love to see some moving footage because of the grain and the reflections. Maybe the grain allows for lower anti aliasing settings, or lower sampling on the reflections!!!

Anyway, really nice work!

#29

Dude this is looking INSANE! Great work so far, hope you are able to get it rendered in time, best of luck!

#30

Thanks for the encouragement, guys!

I blew a whole day tuning renders for the tradeoff in reflection quality/grain vs render time and any lower than I’ve got isn’t acceptable quality-wise on the reflections, so I just bit the bullet and fired off a batch render. I’ve got 3 more shots to get in the can, so I’m just going to do another RGB pass so I can adjust each piece separately in comp.

To be honest, it’s mostly the bokeh depth of field that’s slowing this shot down (well, half that and half mia_material reflections), and I suspect that Maya/Mental Ray aren’t actually paying any attention whatsoever to my reflection recursion limits.

Long story short, all the new toys (mia_materials, lens shaders) look really really nice, but they’re kinda buggy, performance hogs and absolutely horribly integrated into Maya’s UI, which makes tuning all the more difficult.

How many places am I supposed to tune reflection recursion on a single shader? Object level? Shader level? Render globals level? Is it actually paying attention to any of em? heh. :hmm: