m:studio 2.4d in use on SA Sports Hall of Fame

#21

GUI hassle: The Soft Mapping block can really do with a PopupList of surfaces instead of having the user type one in. But this is a minor GUI issue.

Once I realized I needed to type in a surface name (messiah has a handy warning message in the viewport which tells you there’s no surface assigned) I was up and running and I’m pleased with the results! WOW! Real-time cloth without any hassles! OK, I haven’t yet put it through stringent tests like clothing a character, but I recall the pain of doing a vertical hanging flag in Lightwave for a project a while back . . . :banghead:

So here’s a Quicktime movie (355KB) for you guys to watch. This took me about 3 minutes to set up, with lights and materials, after I learned how to assign a surface to the Softbody effect.

This test is based on the messiah docs tutorial with an added rigid body in the bottom right corner of the flag.

Tip: One thing I noticed is that scrubbing through a cloth simulation produces different results than playing through it frame by frame. To see the simulation accurately as it will render, press play in messiah and do not scrub fast.

#22

Thanks for allowing us to look over your shoulders. And yes you’re correct in that the simulation can appear different - it’s because it is a real-time simulation. In can be slightly different each time as well. That’s why soft body/cloth cannot be rendered in other packages until it is baked somehow usually with .mdd. :slight_smile:

#23

Since I’ve committed myself to using messiah on this project from start to end (not touching Lightwave at all for setup and render), I’m obviously learning much and I’m amazed more than before at the simplicity and power inside m:studio. Of course some of you have had this revelation long before me, but now it’s my turn, and you get to watch. :slight_smile:

I have rather lengthy experience in various other apps, the longest of which was Lightwave and 3DSMax. Of those 2, I personally enjoyed Max the most. When I saw messiah the first time, it reminded me of Max. However, for me messiah just has not been as intuitive to use from the get go. Max I could always fall in anywhere and just figure it out as needed. For me, messiah has had a steep learning curve to get the paradign shift to kick in. Digital Fusion had similar initial difficulty. It’s like trying to see those garbled 3D print images which look just like a strange mess of patterns until you see it and from then on you always see it. Anyway, you guys may have had different experiences.

I’m starting to experience m:studio more as a major-league app instead of the small niche app idea that get’s thrown around here a lot.

#24

I’m starting to experience m:studio more as a major-league app instead of the small niche app idea that get’s thrown around here a lot.

Good to hear. A few quirks hold it back in places and its video card issues as well. Its great to see this over the shoulder look:)

#25

medal_01.jpg714x454

This render test took 2min on a 2.8GHz P4 at 720x576 (above image is cropped). Rendering on 2.4d seemed 9 seconds faster than on 2.4.

Is the noise in the shadow ok? And I’m curious what made the render take 2 minutes? Can we have some details on the scene?

#26

If you want the medal to look more like metal, I recommend more contrasted reflections.

Otherwise you seem to make good progress! :thumbsup:

#27

I trust that pmG will get bugs and quirks ironed out with a vigor and the last few remaining major lacking features put in.

For now the shadow is OK, but these are merely test renders to sort out materials and the design and texture maps of my models. Two sphere lights which produce soft shadows. There’s bump and noise mapping going on. Default AA was also on. As soon as I have the look to suit my vision for this project, I’ll post a scene breakdown.

I realized that myself yesterday, thanks for confirming it to me Thomas. I also need to drop the saturation in the yellow of the gold. Rather tricky all this. Finding HDRI probes that work nicely is another challenge and then testing them also takes time. Messiah’s Colour Corrector node is quite handy.

#28

Is it just me or does HDR Intensity (in the Texture | Image block) have no effect on the Environment map?

I use an HDR image for reflections.

#29

Yep, HDR Intensity is broken - I’m not even sure if it ever worked…

Thankfully the Color Correction node does handle HDRI rather well so you can use that after the HDRI and adjust the Brightness with it. To find the min and max of a HDRI, you can use ShowValues from the TLHPro Collection.

I also most of the time drag the Saturation down to zero for scenes like yours, since I prefer to not have color-changes from the Environment in that case.

It is funny, but I still find the original Lightprobes from Paul Devebec my most used HDRIS:
http://www.debevec.org/Probes/

To really use them, you better convert them to spherical maps with HDR-Shop, since messiahs probe mapping isn’t doing what it should… At least for me.
Those flat versions are also easier to modify.
I extremely recommend to have different versions of each with different Blur levels. If you happen to have Photoshop CS2, you can use most of the blurs on HDRIs to get interesting looks. PS is still rather limited with HDRIS, but at least you can copy and paste image parts around and use the copy-brush (almost all other brushes don’t work).

For your scene, KitchenProbe desaturated maybe with some vertical Motion Blur applied could give an interesting look. Maybe upp the contrast with the Curves in Photoshop…

But yes, getting reflections right - especially for more than one angle - can be really tricky!

Good Luck! :thumbsup:

#30

My render time is now 1m50s.

Decreased both the colour saturation and value, also decreased reflectivity, but HDR contrast is unchanged.

Compression artifacts around the lion’s bump map were cleaned up - client provided a shabby lores JPEG image and the original graphic designer doesn’t respond to my e-mails so I can’t get a hires TIF or something - don’t you just hate that?

Thanks for the HDR tips, Thomas. I tried HDRShop’s unwrap and then used a Sphere instead of Sphere (Probe) but the results did not impress me. I’ll play some more when I setup the full scene.

I am using the Color Correction node to kill colour saturation on the HDR probe.

Sharp AA edges on bright HDR areas still bother me.

#31

It is always hard to get good reflections on such flat objects, but essential is something dark in there. I used Google with “Medal” and came up with these links :

http://www.wpi.edu/Admin/President/Medal/Images/medalfb.jpg
http://www.photo.net/photo/pcd3610/veroi-rome-medal-14.4.jpg

I’m sure there is more, but they show what I mean…

If you can, do the text and lion with displacement instead of color.

You can also put some black planes in space to get dark reflections on predictable parts of the medal…

I think I still would reduce diffuse and up reflections.

The lion looks great now!

Yes, the AA is a real problem. A higher AA Threshold and then a higher AA setting may help, but I have the same problems here - a real showstopper.

As soon as TLHPro 1.1 is out, you can try some Ambient Occlusion on the displaced metal to give the cavities more contrast… may be too slow though…

Cheers :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

#32

I’ll consider my options. I’m trying to remain true to the client’s artwork of dark on light. Dark on a medal usually is something which is embossed into the metal.

I’ll remember this for the final scene setup.

Did that and here’s the result . . . me very happy for now :slight_smile:

medal_04.jpg701x464

Perhaps Taron could script a fix and release 2.4e, uh, really soon?

I thought about AO. I’'ve done some tests with texture maps that do a similar thing.

#33

Very nice - now maybe put in a bit of yellow tinting into the reflections again - but maybe it is my monitor, here it looks a bit too red.

And maybe rotate the HDRI 180° on Heading to get rid of the pinch-reflection over the lion head?

Otherwise I think you very close to nailed it!

:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

#34

Different and Higher AA settings do nothing to lessen the aliasing on bright HDR edges. I’ve now tested different types of AA and higher settings up to Level 10, which increased render times 9-fold compared to Level 3, but did not improve the edge artifacts.

Bug: When using a Spherical (Probe) for the environment, rotation of the probe (in the Transform block) does not work at all - broken, kaput. Workaround (1) is to switch to just Spherical (and using an unwrapped HDR image), then rotation is fine again. Workaround (2) is to parent everything in the scene to a NULL and then rotate the null to change reflection angle.

#35

Yep, confirmed, sorry for the missguidance.
AA is close to broken for my needs in 2.4d.

Probe mapping never worked correctly - you absolutely need to be able to rotate the image… :banghead:
There is also other issues with the Probe mapping, since there are 360° Probes and 180° ones (see http://www.debevec.org/Probes/ for more info), messiah only takes care of the 180° ones…

Cheers!

#36

That pinch turned out to be a faulty texture map which governs reflectivity: Instead of the lion’s head texture map, some finger trouble on my part got the HDR probe as a planar map in there! That’s sorted now and an animaton test shows the gold really coming alive. I’ll run a render overnight and post in the morning.

Here’s another render with the kitchen probe and slightly less red . . .

medal_05.jpg714x489

To solve AA problems, I rendered this at double resolution (which pushed my render time to 7min) and then scaled back down to the required resolution using Digital Fusion. I also selectively added the highlights in DF.

The slight artifacts seen on the text are probably due to pixelation of the bumpmap. I’m considering replacing the bumpmapped text with modeled text.

Anyway, that’s enough fooling around with gold. Time to get into the rest of the scene.

#37

Wow, getting better and better.

For the Bump map, it may help to blur it a bit in Photoshop (~1-2 pixels gaussian blur, but only the bump). Bump with HDRI can be tricky.

On my monitor it is still a bit reddish for gold and depending on taste, it maybe needs a bit more gold-saturation in the end (customers want mucho gold for their money :wink: ).
But that is very good already. :thumbsup:

I don’t know if it is just the JPG, but I notice banding in the floor gradient. You may consider rendering to Tiff 64 bit or OpenExr instead of 8/32 bit images if you have Digital Fusion or AfterEffect Pro.
DFX and AE Std. don’t support those formats though.

Or if you have a Mac, buy Shake for the price of a plugin now … :rolleyes:

Cheers,

#38

Glad you like it. I’m done fiddling for now. I know it can be better. I’ll play with settings again once the medallion is in position in the final scene. I’ll have to see what the reflectivity issues are then.

I agree with the saturation, but the red?? Are you sure it’s not just your monitor? Anyone else think the gold is too red? Perhaps its my monitor although I’ve had compliments from Cinesite UK when they visited South Africa on the accuracy of my monitor relative to their film recorder LUTs.

Definitely the JPEG. I did not save as best quality so that I can conserve server bandwidth. Once I start posting the final images, I’ll up the quality so that you guys can crit me good.

That’s just the problem you see, I don’t have a Mac. I’m strongly considering a long overdue upgrade to Fusion 5. I’m still running Digital Fusion 2.13 for what . . . nearly a decade! Time flies! DF is a really good app. I can upgrade to Fusion 5 for $995, not bad considering the $4,995 price of a new licence.

#39

medal_08.jpg719x573 

3D tweaking is like a very bad itch . . . :)

I pushed up the saturation and pulled down the diffusion even more.  Modeled a simple corrugated floor and changed the probe.

The HDR artifacts were really BAD on this one because of the bright uffuzi probe, that’s why I scaled it down, but still not good enough (didn’t want to scale down too much otherwise we loose all the pretty eye candy). Render time at 720x576 was nearly 5min.

I’m studying studio photos of watches to see their reflection setup. I can probably still improve on this . . . itch . . . itch

Update: Rendered the image at double resolution 1440x1152, then scaled down 50%. AA is default Level 3. Render time was 15min. AA artifacts are still visible. Would need to render at 4x oversize and then scale back 25%.

#40

The gold looks fine…no red problem as I view it.

Best,
Rick