Grand Space Opera 3D Entry: Brian Linwell

#141

hey brian, yeah oshiroii seems to be napping – life got in the way no doubt.

Your piece has become quite surreal. Reminds me of some collage work I’ve seen from the early 70s. Not a bad thing, particularly since you have a traditional painting background, right?

I think the surrealism is due to the 1-point perspective. The buildings angle towards the center, as does the steps the singer is standing on, causing the singer to look almost as big as the buildings. In fact, are they? I haven’t read all your descriptions but shouldn’t the singer be half the height of one of your building’s windows? If you do end up shrinking him down, then you would have to change the camera angle to get him back to the filling the frame as he does now, and then the scene might look more “real”. The ship and ther space art also look too big.

On the other hand, you could also manipulate the perspective even more to make it more surreal by rendering all the objects separately, compositing in photoshop or whatever and manipulating their scale more.

What about the singer’s adoring audience?

And what’s a “fokker”?

#142

That sounds like it should work. I can’t wait to see the texture. As for the reflection, you can use hdri, it works well for reflections.

#143

markw7- Hmm, very interesting idea about actually placing the singer in the
actual scene to scale! I hadn’t thought about that. Thought I’d get the same
end result with a bigger singer as with a really up close camera, but now I’m
curious! I may experiment. As for the perspective, that’s up to the camera,
but as you say maybe a to scale singer would get the many-point perspective
appearance going. Cool. I should try that, thanks! As far as the red Space
Fokker ship goes, that is to scale, crashed right into the building. The singers
audience is in front of him and out of camera view. This outdoors act is being
filmed. A Fokker is a famous German WW1 airplane. The German’s biggest ace,
The Red Barron flew an all red tri wing Fokker. He had over 80 kills. You can
do a search on Fokker and see pictures of this beautiful plane, which inspired
my 3 wing Space Fokker. Thanks for your help.
wow, thinking more about the perspective, I really like your idea of manually
shrinking the perspective! This surrealistic touch could be really nice. Gotta try both.
Got some work cut out here…
OvidsMuse- Thanks. What is hdri ? I plan to just put some walls with windows
to his side, off camera, for some reflections. Something real simple.

#144

Cool. Hope it helps. :thumbsup:

As for the perspective, that’s up to the camera,
but as you say maybe a to scale singer would get the many-point perspective
appearance going.

Once you get the singer to scale and then drop the camera down to street level you may have a difficult time framing everything with the default camera values, but you can select the camera and change it’s Focal Length to widen the field of view.

A Fokker is a famous German WW1 airplane.

All this time I thought it was a modified curse word!

#145

markw7- We’ll see which method works best with my scene and
software and time. There is actually a TV show comming out about an imaginary
family in the US called the Fockers. Slightly different spelling, a c is used. The
t.v. station said if there actually is a Focker family in the U.S. we can use that name.
They found one so the show is a go.

#146

Great work on your scene, I’m liking how your setting your scene up so far. Can’t wait to see the final textures your going to add, it will surely bring out your scene even more. Good job on the atmosphere. I hate dealing with atmosphere, can never get it right. :slight_smile:

#147

Hey Brian,
Your story is definitely unique, I like the feel of the image it too , it grows on you after a while. Keep at this.
Mike

#148

marcw7- I tried putting the singer in the scene to scale but If I place him
a reasonable distance from the buildings the shot doesn’t seem to work.If I
then close in with a normal lens so he is as big in the scene as I want, the
buidings are too close, you only see a section of a wall. If I use wide angle
here, to get him this size the buildings are reduced too much. The only way
I got a close to what I want shot was to place him VERY far from the scene,
which in itself is not to scale, and use a longer lens, or was it a normal lens…
whatever it was putting him so far away was out of scale to the scene anyway.
And here the angles of the buildings were exactly the same as my original setup.
I don’t know if I should bother putting up the renders. Anyway cameras are just
not capable of getting this shot with everything to scale, as they do not function
like the human eye in the extremes of my experiments. I think the way I set up
my scene actually is fine. I should do the texturing. By the way, Rick Fichter,
the director of photography in Top Gun and many other films, taught me how to
light and shoot miniatures. He also shot the Robo-Cop movie. The wide angle is
used precisely because it artificially distorts backgronds and shrinks them. Even
parts of a close up model get distorted this way, giving them a larger than they
are illusion. Stuff behind the model shrinks tremendously. So I bet a building is
composited in post. Not very to scale of a set…haha. The working alternative I
tested, involving placing the singer way,way away from the set and using a regular
(or was it telephoto) lens, is like I said not to set scale anyway and produces
the exact same building perspectives I did by instinctively enlarging the singer.
Whew…Maybe the human brain does some fancy post compositing of it’s own,
maybe this is a clue we are in a matrix. Maybe tricks.

#149

You learned that lighting thing??? wow! :applause:

#150

The only lighting he talked about was that with a wide angle lens you need
(and here we are talking real world cameras and lights)
to increase the depth of focus to create the illusion that the model is big
but right here. To do that you need a tiny aperture. But with a tiny apperture
you need a lot of light to get a well lit scene. Just discussing a tie in with
wide angle perspective distortion. I might experiment with it some more after
the challenge though. Maybe I missed something. I just ran a few tests. Not shure
which camera angles I used because the software used numbers like 3.2 or 9.2
which relate to camera angles.Need the time to find some reference chart or
where it is explained.
These wide angle lens tricks could make a spaceship model look bigger.
But the singer is a normal sized person standing. So the wide angle lens would
only make the background buildings artificially distorted and smaller.
For instance take my Opera ship. I just shot it with whatever camera angle
was set up in my software at the time. Not to smart. If I was to do it again,
I would use a wide angle camera on the model to fake converging parallel
lines over a long HUGE distance, that of the huge spaceship. This should make
the ship appear huge. I’ll try it next time, don’t think I got time in this challenge.
This is why I like these challenges. Challenging me to try new stuff. By the way,
Rick also shot the movie, “The Right Stuff”. Director of photography. I haven’t
checked lately though.

#151

Put a texture on the helmet. Texture was painted in photoshop. I think I will just use it.I also did a test render on the red shirt, need to change it. Looks like I still got a few things to finish. And I have to touch up his face.And and and…

#152

comming along nicly Brian… have you considered adding some procedural layers over your painted textures to “dirty” things up a bit…keep them at a minimun though…this my look good on your characters…Happy new year and …back to worK… :thumbsup:

#153

hi there! nice work done here since my last visit. It’s looking better and better! Maybe try to cover the starfield with some gradient. so that less stars is visible in the bottom(and more of some color there).

#154

yep Brian , it looking better and better , the rendering and textures are great !

:bounce::bounce::thumbsup:

#155

essencedesign- Happy New Year! Yes, I may add more proceedural textures…I should
have upgraded Lightwave instead of buying a $1000.00 Warwick Corvette Bass guitar,
but I’ll upgrade soon. I’ll be using the Bass and my Warlock six electric too to record my
GSO theme, after the challenge though, for my animation. That heavy growling German
Bass (especially down tuned) should go good with the Big, Heavy theme.
arturro- Thanks. I actually was coloring stars on the final big size image last night. The
render shown here is the smaller render with stand in stars. And thet are clunky!
[color=deepskyblue]gulliver3- Thanks. I really am new to texturing, so I appreciate that! I was actually[/color]
surprised when the helmet texture could be positioned perfectly with a “V” arround the
top, so it’s balanced perfectly on both sides of the helmet. but the singers angle only shows one side. That was only a 100 by 100 pixel texture, to get it sized right.
at 300 dpi, and it looks even better in the final resolution. I’m gonna really like getting into
textures. Gotta get Leighs book when I upgrade. My final size render at 32 bit Tiff for some
reason makes the backgroung clear. When I add a black base background in photoshop
the blue volumetric light looks ok but doesn’t blend quite as well as with the background
rendered at the same time. Not quite the delicate blending of light. So i’m trying to find
out why my black background isn’t rendering!

#156

Still working on the background post.

#157

The model of the skyscraper building now shows some damage from the Space Fokker Ship which crashed into it. And I tested the Opera Singer at a smaller size. Do you think it looks better with him smaller? Can’t believe I somehow missplaced the full size star background I was working on and have to start again! Not that big a deal.

#158

looking good brian the fog does nicly add depth to your image…maybe some more “pieces” comming off of the building,some smaller,some larger… :shrug: …keep on going,you are a new friend to many of us here… :thumbsup:

#159

Looking nice. The debris adds a nice touch. Keep at it brian.

#160

Debris and building damage add a nice touch to the image.
There’s something that’s bothering me though. Would it be possible to fill the empty space behind the yellow building? Right now it feels more like “old western style movies” where all you see are the hollow façades along the main (and only) street, lol.

Good luck man. In the meantime I am taking a 2 day break and I will return to my image on monday :buttrock: