FXWARS! TESLA - Trey Harrell (Tribute)

#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:

#31

By popular request, here’s a few seconds of each of the shots I’ve got in the comp/post stage now.

Only the girl closeup is really final, the other two are still in “rough but almost acceptable” form until I manage to get the rest of the shots in the can.

http://www.treyharrell.com/fxwars/wip/comp-examples.mov

Worth mentioning that I’m going after the original intent of all of the effects like the rings… they’re not meant to look realistic, just vaguely organic and stylized (and they’re way not done yet).

Haven’t decided if I’m going to do an animated displacement morph for the transformation, or just do some alpha/crossfade trickery that’s more like the original yet. Time will tell, I guess.

–T

#32

This is looking terrific. Seems you are staying true to your goal.
I had to open the file with VLC player as Quicktime wouldn’t.

#33

Thanks for the heads-up. I reposted the video.

Probably happened because I used ffmpegX to make an h.264 because Quicktime Player/After Effects blow out the gamma. Must have missed a switch.

–T

#34

Ok, I’m about 3 days behind where I wanted to be at this point, with one last sequence to animate & render :argh:

The good news is if I can’t complete that part on-time I should be able to recut everything without it. Won’t flow so well though. Curse paying gigs!

Anyhow, here’s the final transformation sequence, with a reasonable level of polish. The actual morph clip still needs color and more paintfix work (no time to rerender), but it’s close to where I want it to be.

It was pulled off with animated displacements, lots of paintfix/roto and some excessive use of traveling matte sleight of hand. I decided that there wasn’t enough time left to pull off growing long hair on her convincingly, so I’ve left it all under the helmet. Paying attention to the bot’s topology would have saved me a TON of time having to meshwarp some of the face into smooth transitions, but it wasn’t really an option given how fast/how much stuff I’m trying to pull off here.

Again, I’m going for a stylized, early-scifi aesthetic for all of this. Trying to match the intent and direction of the original effects pretty closely, but still allowing myself room to do things like the morph effect. A cross-dissolve like the original would have been much quicker. :stuck_out_tongue:

Longish clip here (with a little of the score I’ll be using):

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

A few caps:

#35

So, I spent half the day trying to coax my file server back to life after a blackout / power surge took out the power supply and the videocard (yay PCI-E power!).

Spent a little time this evening trying to find a fast & easy way to get the doctor character rigged, shaded, rendered and animated in two days and I think that it just ain’t happening if I’m going to get any sleep or get any screaming clients off my back :shrug:

The rigging and clothing are my big time sink on this. I’m pretty decent and modeling, shading, lighting and comping, but a character TD I’m not. I can muddle through, but not nearly fast enough after losing so much time lately, and I doubt I’d have time to polish it up on par with everything else that’s done anyhow. Besides, who the heck wants to paint joint weights while they’re tired and irritated?

Gonna recut what I’ve got already together, give it another round of polish and call it done.

On the up-side, I think that my rendering bottlenecks and dying file server might just convince the wife of my urgent need for a new core i7 box or two. :smiley:

–T

#36

Well, I’ve recut the piece to compensate for the additional cutaways I didn’t have time to fully develop. These could still use a little more polish, but I’m out of time!

Thanks to everybody who commented, and good luck to everyone who makes the finish line (and to those who haven’t yet)!

Here’s the final full rez movie (Quicktime H.264, 720x540, 24fps):

http://www.treyharrell.com/fxwars/teslafinals/TREYHARRELL_FXWARS_TESLAV1(720x540).mov

Here’s the YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaExIf1ZOKk

I’ll post the B&W alternate here once I get some time to massage it some more. That was the original concept, but looking at them both, I think there’s more of myself in how the color version played out.

–T

#37

Great job Trey!

#38

Thanks man. I’d have probably killed myself to get that last sequence done by Friday if I knew we were getting an extension, so I’m happy to have it in the can now after a couple cuts and I can focus on some client gigs that have been languishing. :wip:

Glad an extension was posted, though. I really want to see more people’s stuff finaled.

The biggest lesson to take away from these challenges is when to let go of stuff that’s good enough to meet the deadline! (That’s also hardest part to come to terms with, and I’d have kept polishing till the very end of the very last extension if I let myself)

–T