Short Film Collaboration: Discussion and Concept development

#61

lanosrep1: You guy really have a hard time reading, don’t you? Please take me out of that list.
SOUNDS like someone needs a hug. Group hug everyone? Group hug.

#62

Will do. Sorry to offend… it’s just that your expertise would be very helpful!.. Your more than welcome to help down the line if you so choose. That was just a list of users who have responded to this thread so far… not a sign up list…appologies! Good luck on your current work… it looks fantastic!

#63

I agree… I thought of the alignment with Pmg too! I will have to ask about that…
If you could explore Lunar more… i would appreciate it!.

#64

Thread facts:
This thread is now in the top 11 for most viewed and top 9 for most posts on this forum…in just 3 days. I think that says alot… at least there is a desire to do something like this!.. Thats cofirmation, in my book… Onward.

#65

Houdini modeling here! sounds good to me.:slight_smile:
Just a wish, of course.

#66

what domain name should this be registered under?

#67

Something universal, so that the site can be used again for another film if it is so chosen.

Think something like Project Orange.

OpenStudio
ProjectIdea
AnIdeaAnimated

#68

Good ideas… like the suggestions… Lets see what response we get from Pmg before taking the plunge.

#69

Ok… to expound a little on the story idea started by Kurshad and evolved by Taron…(how dare I) How 'bout we make it more personal… the “artist” is the main character entering the Labyrinthian (read cave-like) world of 3D faced with the daunting task of picking the tools, (like a warrior chooses his best weapons) that will enable him\her to become the artist of his dreams… Full of hope and wonder, but soon exposed to the reality which is software hades… Then we see the characters as described by Taron…(in the Labyrinth)…each “software” character vying for the attention and ultimate seduction…the purchase!

The artist runs home to start using the spanking new toy, only to find that it was all smoke and mirrors!.. (been there done that!)

#70

What reaction? Name it the project pilgrimage (HAHAHA)

#71

Lets pick a day this week and hold our own daily sketch to come up with ideas. We give ourseleves the topic and we each do a concept sketch of the same idea.

I like the idea of a guy falling out of a plane passing all the 3D Software people. Every person could get the chance to animate as we could make the rigs very fun and intuitive to use.

#72

Sounds good…

Yes… I think this is the one we will probably start with… \

#73

I thought I’d drop off a little encouragement…this guy I had done and animated on Monday, pretty much just on the side, too. I’ve recorded the entire modeling session, which took around 50minutes (havn’t even looked at the recordings…hehe…) …then later that day I gave it a Zbrush make-up between worldcup games…and at night I decided to rig him up a bit to check out how this dirty quicky model moves, animated him a little and use the opportunity to play with softbody dynamics again, which was a complete and total blast! I’ve learned some nifty tricks that way, which I will use very, very often now…[just use hold, if you wonna do skin wobbles, deactive Struct, Shear and…eh…Flex) I will show and share all of this later and stuff like this, little strange but cool discoveries will most certainly pop up during that production all the time, I’m very sure!
I can’t wait for all of us to find and share these things!

OH, yeah…the clip…ok…I shall present to you:

Zwerg (german for dwarf, but I also called him Larry), the man of the future… (or why there’s no Eve in his world):
Zwerg

Little more info on the rendering:
3min30sec per frame on 2Ghz Opteron Workstation
(radiosity on Monte Carlo, Gi Samples: 3, AA: adaptive 2)
layer output for Color and Depth
(although I also did output a few more for my ZbornToy tests)

compositing -
My own color correction tool (Taronite - ColorCorrector)
Frischluft’s Lenscare - Depth of Field(Philipp www.frischluft.com )
ReelSmart’s motionBlur (love it)

Oh, the background I did again in the gap between two worldcup games and today I’ve added some grass to it all (can’t stop looking at that silly thing and was in the mood to add something), which made me figure out another cool way of doing stuff. Very convenient. If you want to make good old-fashioned polygon grass and you want to use Lightwave’s modeler, you just pick your terrain piece and select the areas you want gras on. Since I use a lowres cage for the terrain, too, I then subdivide those cut-out-pieces after they’re copied on another layer until it’s fine enough for the amount of grass I want. Jitter X and Z a little is good. Then I select the areas on those areas that should get larger grass, cut them out and paste them on yet another layer. In a new layer I make my little grass leaf (tube with three sides and one vertical intersection in the middle, make sure the bottom polygon (facing down) is deleted, you could make the tip polygon a different surface for selecting later to style it more easily) and copy it to paste it in another layer. Now I should have terrain in layer 1, subdiv pieces for small grass in layer 2, pieces for large grass in layer 3, one leaf in layer 4 and one in layer 5. On layer 4 I make a pointcloneplus with larger sizes and the large-grass-points layer 3 in the background. On layer 5 a pointcloneplus with smaller sizes and layer 2 (small grass) in the background. The cloning with random rotations (heading -180, +180; pitch -5,+5;bank -5,+5) should already do pretty good for the styling, but selecting the tip surface allows to use magnet and vortex tool to do some very quick and neat stylings. Since each leaf of grass only has 7 polygons it all is still super fast to deal with. In messiah you can even turn on the metanurbs without any noticeable slowdown, really. But I actually found that it looked much more funny without the metanurbs turned on in the renders…kinda neat.

This tutorial could have been from 1996, really, I’m sorry, but it’s just kinda funny how much one can forget how easy things can be “the hard way”, really. It’s so damn silly to depend more and more on fancy labeled tools that are supposed to do all these things for ya’. Although I can see myself writing a little plugin that generates that nonsense…but still. It took me virtually 35 seconds to put that grass into that background (after about 5 minutes of thinking about the easiest way of doing that…hehe).

#74

Looking good Taron! :thumbsup:

What would really encourage is if you could share the scene file so we can check out the setup, from lighting and rigging to materials. It would certainly help me learn more about efficient workflow, even if I’m not as proficient with m:studio as you.

#75

True very true taron, there is no need for fancy tools that can do the samething when it just takes a little thinking. I mean you can make tools in modo like “shell” but your methods you’ve taught Chris & I over the years make me confident I can model just about anything I want in the most efficent way possible.

There is a plugin for light and a tool in modo called mesh paint that does what you describe above (even with stylus pressue and tilt).

I can’t wait till next week when hopefully we can start some concept sketches for this piece. We just have to keep it simple, just like what you did here. I think everyone should get the chance to explore the animation capabilities and understand the renderer of messiah through this project.

Can you show me how you did the terrain on this piece? I would love to see how you did that, it looks almost like a plate of photography.

#76

The scene wouldn’t help you to really understand the workflow. But me describing it to you will!

  1. model lowres geometry of character and environment.

  2. do zbrush session with both and save out displacement maps and export uv-mapped objs

  3. load into messiah, rig character with bones (muslces and IK).

  4. use softbody dynamics (don’t forget to write the surface name in) and meta effectors to weight where you want the softbody to be! (I have it on belly, chest and chin)

  5. use one single light, if it’s outside and just lit by sun!

  6. use radiosity for the rest, don’t go high with the samples if you don’t need it. Most movie type of stuff can hang with some grain, if it fits the style. You can always render out fine stuff later.

  7. activate atmosphere material and use the SpeedHazer with a gradient, colors matching the background color and alphas to blend those over the original color (get well controlled haze!)

  8. leave AA adaptives sampling on 2

  9. think about what kind of layers you might want for compositing and turn’em on. Modify Depth to appropriate min and max values… I use a Null parented to the camera and move it along Z to figure out where depth should start and end (measuring).

  10. hit F10 and go play some games or watch soccer…! :smiley:

That’s the workflow! :wise:

:thumbsup:

#77

The terrain took roughly an hour to make, too. It’s really almost exactly the same procedure like with a character. The only hold-up is to figure out what you want…sometimes laying out things in 3d from the top of your head can be a bit challenging. Zbrush is really the key to the curious details. Then a little bit of logic for the coloring, also done in Zbrush and that’s all…

Adding the grass later really brought it higher, though…and was fun!

#78

Thanks for sharing, Taron. :thumbsup:

Your text description is better than sharing the scene - really motivating.

#79

Timur, that is a brilliant name,
yeah falling from sky is kind of pilgrimage is not it?

#80

Nice Taron. I like.