HARDCORE MODELING!: 80's cartoon: Smurf madness!

#121

Vive les schtroumpfs!

A Small update. Posted a wireframe this time cuz it`s been a while. Worked out the jester coat and added laces, tweaked the hat, worked out the leggings. I basically just extacted the clothes out of the body mesh then edited the extraction.

For the wireframe render I made a barycentric projection. Essentially it takes all polys and overlays them one on top of the other in the full 1 to 1 UV space. From there all I did was apply a grid texture. A simple workflow, only the line size is determined by % of the overall grid size, which is in real world units. The result, unfortunately, is that the bigger polys get a fatter line width so it’s not uniform, but for this, it does the trick.

Now into zbrush for detailing.

-RAge

#122

Damn, FICTIS is right! They really do kinda look like Scandinavian trolls. When this thing is over, you’re gonna have a whole horde of creepy Smurfs. lol
Do you have any plans with them beyond the challenge?

Btw, I am surprised that Americans know the Smurfs at all. Usally they are so overexposed to domestic crap like GI Joe etc that they dont even look at stuff from across the border unless its Anime.

Cheers!

#123

I’d love to keep working on them past the challenge. There’s no way I’ll have time to bring them all up to a high detail pass, so for this challenge I’ll be leaving them all at mid level detail. I’d like to get much more detail into the Tree village, for example, with a whole pile of instanced generic smurfs in the background walking accross bridges etc.

I’m really excited about the next challenge, though, so after that who knows if I’ll still have the inspiration to work on them some more. I certainly hope so, but my inspiration is a fickle thing.

-Rage

#124

so true. Animate them after the contest!:applause:

#125

Did some detailing all night. I would have done more except for youtube…Damn you Flight of the Conchords for being so funny when I have work I want to get done!!
I also couldn’t resist a little polypainting after looking at jesters on corbis.

-Rage

#126

Hehe, looks great Rage. This angle makes the collar look strange but I see how it’s supposed to look further up.

You guys must not be aware of how major major major the Smurfs were in the US. I liked em for a bit but my brother and sister went nuts for them. Smurfs were just as big as GIJoe or Transformers for the younger crowd.

#127

Thanks Wyatt. I appreciate it.

Today was a sad day for me when I finally admitted to myself that my eyes were way bigger than my stomach, so to speak. My eyes being my inspiration for this challenge, and my stomach being the power of my computer.

Last week I tried getting my completed smurfs into my environment. Not even close. Since then I’ve been going through my scene element by element to try and maximize efficiency. Still a no go. I am quite disappointed, but such is life. It looks like I’ll have to wait until I get my i7 920/GA UD5 cpu/mobo combo to be able to take this to the level I want.

I still haven’t given up though. I’ll spend the rest of the week taking Jokey Smurf up to high detail (because he is my favourtie) and time permitting, will do the same for Chef, Papa, and Smurfette. There will be no diorama, unfortunately, but Character sheets instead.

Dammit, I am determined to finish one of these challenges!! Arg!

-Rage

#128

Maybe you could render them separately and re-composite them afterwards? You have to finish this, it’s gonna look so strange and also so intriguing…

#129

I was thinking that as well. thing is, I still need to have everything together to generate shadow outputs and whatnot. Displacements still have to be attached to get accurate shading passes. I’ll give it a try tonight. Cross fingers and hope it works.

-Rage

#130

Can you render in segments? Lightwave allows you to render the frame in pieces if need be hardware wise. Don’t know what program your using but most do that I think.

#131

Hey Joel,

Good to see you are keeping up with the modelling/sculpting. The Jester outfit is looking good and the creases looking convincing :slight_smile:

Hope you get the scene put together and don’t suffer any headaches in doing so!? Will you be using XSI/modo for the final scene?

Scott

#132

@Wyatt: I’m unsure what you’re talking about. I’m using modo and the modo renderer is quite efficient. It renders in buckets so as not to load everything into the renderer. I still don’t seem to have enough memory though. It starts to choke with the environment and 2 smurfs in it. Forget about 3. If I remove the background environment, I can get 1 more Smurf in, but no more than that. I know for a fact that it’s the displacement maps that are taking so much room. I’ve brought them down to the lowest resolution that I can and It’s still too much.

@Scott. Welcome back to the challenge mate. I will be using modo only for rendering. Otherwise I’ll have to go through the whole process of refamiliarizing myself with Mental Ray’s node-based system, and I haven’t got the time. Once you get used to the shader tree; the way it works and the power you can harness out of it, it’s hard to go back.

At this point I believe my only option is to get more detail into the Smurfs I have done and Render them out on individual platforms, like a model collection.

I’ve wasted a week trying to work this out, so now it’s time to get to the real work! I should have updates by the AM. Thanks for the comments and encouragement guys.

-Rage

#133

Well, in LW when you exceed whatever the memory limit is it divides the frame into separate segments automatically so as to reduce the overhead. Then at the end it reassembles the frame to create the image.

Buckets… that’s interesting. :smiley: Seems there must be something like that in Modo, IDK.

#134

Oh I see what you’re saying. The buckets in Modo are something similar to what mentalray does. Essentially, depending on your resolution, your frame gets broken into buckets at render time. It renders 1 bucket at a time/core, hence it loads into memory what it needs on a per bucket basis (or something like that). Some things, however, such as irradiance (global illimumination), geometry, etc it needs to load up all at once. From what I understand it’s basic ray trace rendering. Scanline does it differently, but I’m no techy and this stuff is beyond me until I have a couple years spare time to really study rendering techs :smiley:

-Rage

#135

Is your scene only choking at the rendering stage?

If so you should look into the geometry settings tab, Micropoly Displacement is prob the area you need to look into. I’m pretty sure Brad did a video on optimising this on the lux site, made perfect sense when I watched it way back when.

In fact I’ve just checked my video section and I have a copy if you want it? 16Mb and I can put it on my server for you if you’re interested!?

#136

Lol Thanks Sam. When I ran into the isssue, the first thing I did was head over to the luxology.tv and rewatch the video to follow Peebler’s suggestions.

Let me Clarify my situation a little.

I work graveyard shift full time at the front desk of a Hotel in Montreal to ensure steady income (starting out as a freelancer with no former experience save school is a little unpredictable). I do most of my work during my shift, seeing as I have about 7 out of 8 hours with nothing to do. Got modo installed on a portable hard drive that plugs into a usb 2.0 port. The pc is made for clerical work. It has an onboard video card which is quite limited in the openGL department. It also only has 1 gig of ram running windows Vista business edition, which doesn’t leave me much room. In short, my problem is in the rendering department, but also navigating the scene in GL gets tedious prety fast.

I am also a strong believer in family. My Girlfriend (might as well say wife, though its not official) works days, myself Nights, which doesn’t leave much time for us together, so I sleep when I get home so that I can be awake in the evenings with her where we do what most couples do: Enjoy time together.

My Pc at home is around 3 years old, built from parts that are 4-5 years old. It can handle the scene better, but starts chugging at around 5 Smurfs + Environment. The problem is, Every time I plug in my hard drive at home to work, I have to recreate all the paths to all my files because the drive letter is different (H: at work and G: at home). Also, as much as I love 3D, I don’t think I have it in me to work on it 7 hours a day at work, then another 5-6 hours at home, day in/day out. It would get old prety fast.

Basically, what it comes down to, is that it’s my own fault for not respecting the limitations of the computer I work on when I conceptualized for this challenge.

Thanks a ton for the offer, though Scott. It is much appreciated.

-Rage

#137

Well I can certainly respect all of your reasons. (I’m watching a Pokemon movie with my son instead of working on my project :D) Good luck bro.

This may help, maybe. If you don’t have an H: drive at home then change the drive letter.

XP Path
Control Panel->Admin Tools->Computer Management->Storage->Disk Management
Then right click the G: drive and select “Change drive letter and paths.” Pick the H: drive and there you go.

I don’t have the Vista instructions memorized but I expect its not too much different.

#138

Hey Joel,

I hope you aren’t going to be too busy with the Easter Holidays so you can push for that extra time needed to work around your system! Good luck…

#139

are them smurfs gonna make it? :smiley: Goodluck!

#140

Hey guys. The Smurfs are indeed gonna make it!! It’s been a while since I updated, mostly due to the fact that I haven’t been working on this out of frustration. But By Friday I will have A model collection up of Jokey (dealing with normal issues right now for some weird reason), Chef Smurf, and Papa Smurf. Possibly Smurfette if she can make it. I am working on them at home, now, so I’m not getting a lot done because of distractions. With the amount of work I threw in, it would be a damn shame not to post anything.

@Wyatt: Thanks for that little bit of information. You have no idea how much work it’s saved me.

@Samartin. Thanks for the encouragement Scott.

-Rage