Ok, don’t know if i’m supposed to give ideas or “art direction” 
But i though it might be cool to add some kind of transition between the base statue and the lady, like using Mr Nitro to fragment the polys maybe adding some luminance or glow, if you’ve seen the Dervish plugin thats the kind of effect i’m talking about.
sorry if this is non-sence i’ve not been following…
Reuben
hi reuben. i know the transition is quite poor right now. i plan to add some more rubble and more heavy stone fragments. i do not plan to add a light or glow, after all they are just two statues, one hidden inside the other, no magic or something
i have a pretty good picture in my mind how it SHOULD look like. i don’t know if i have the time to reach that look, i allready streched the patience of my wife to some degree
and i have to take care of some paid work, too.
the rules of this contest don’t make it any easier, i am used to render in layers and use compositing tricks and tweaks. things that take only minutes in photoshop or after effects ( i really like to composite even stills in after effects) need some more planning and testrendering and tweaking and again testrendering and so on.
but like i said earlier, this project allready paid of for me.
and here is a screenshot for whoever is interested of the project in its current state, together with a little detail addition.
Hi Bronco,
Very nice work so far. I was blown away by how much progress you’ve made.
How did you go about making the rocks? They look great.
Thanks,
Mike
thanks mike.
the stones are actually quite simple. the noise factory shader does all the tricks!
look:
this is just a standart ubershape sphere, a little streched and deformed and the shader. that’s all.
here is the project:
Stone_Project (zip)
Hi Bronco,
Thanks for posting the project file, but I have a small problem, I 'm at EIAS 5.5.
Oh well, something to look forward to when I’m able to upgrade.
~Mike
cool, I thinK I might use your stone in my project as well, hope you don’t mind…
regards,
Loon
no problem with that, go on and use it.
i think this project is as much about learning and discovering new techniques as it is about fun and that star wars stuff brian is offering.
Wow… thank you for being so generous. Most of my stuff has been architectural in nature, and that rock as a base will give me something new to experiment with. (well, when I get upgraded from v5 that is).
-Steve
my pleasure.
you should really consider the upgrade. i stayed pretty long with version 5, too.
only a few days before this challenges started i bought the upgrade for a paid project which screamed for GI. but even without GI the upgrade is great, openGL feels so much faster!
2 million polys? pfff, no problem! no need to dial anything down, it just flys.
The rocks does a great job of livening up the image. Would like to see the textures on the bottom half of the girl.
That’s ROCKING.
Thanks for sharing.
well, the girls textures (or materials) are in no way finished, not even close. i am not very happy with that.
if you talk about the legs, they are made of the crumpleR shader and dirtlayer lite. 2 layered dirtlayers inside diffuse tab (one color set to no alpha on the upper layer) and crumpleR and another dirtlayer lite in bump.
maybe i just post the project file here after the competion is over, i am not sure right now.
back again.
i haven’t done much over the weekend. just played a little with the GI settings and camera angle. i think the renders so far lacked some dynamic. i like the look, but it seems much too static. just to try something different:
i had to adjust the clouds a little to match the new perspective. i think it’s an improvment.
now the GI settings. somehow i managed to produce a 8hr+ render hit for a test render i did friday night.
turned out it was the details factor. there was not even that much difference in the picture, but the render time just skyrocketed.
now i render, according to rules, in passes:
backdrop and clouds: ca. 20 sec.
image2mesh landscape: ca. 1 min
the rest: ca. 11 min
everything 1024x576
the templates are just too small.
so, i hope i find the time to put some more stuff in the pic i have on my mind.
see ya next time around
I had to keep the template reasonably small so that people could upload to CGTalk if necessary. What size template would you consider to be adequate? Perhaps the next contest could adopt that size.
hi brian,
i think the templates should offer at least 1000 px working area on one side.
somewhere on cgtalk i read that for the official challanges a print size render is requiered (somewhere around 2500px on the smallest side). they want to force the people to pay attention to details which are only obvious on the large canvas. i think thats a good thing.
obviously this is overkill for wips and screenshots (and for our small contests here, for that matter), but the finals should be larger than now.
maybe you should reconsider the whole template.
right now the working area isn’t really working for extreme aspect ratios. too much white on top/bottom or left/right and too little picture in the middle.
i’d say, scrap the frame, make an info field mandatory (left or bottom, white text on black background, text at least 8pt). the requiered info right now is ok, maybe include the program version.
something like this:
info suggestion
maybe we should relocate this into QA so some other can chime in, too.
your call.
uwe
The suggestion is a good one. I realize that for print resolution, you’ll need much more than what I provided. I just wanted to keep file sizes small for those who do not have a place to store large files. The CGTalk file size limit is 94k.
Go ahead and post your template suggestion if you wish. I’m fine with the idea of altering its dimensions if it serves the contestants better. I just want to make sure that the info bar remains intact and people can read the necessary information… and oh… I’d also include at least some kind of frame around the picture. I think it makes it look a little better rather than having the image flush to the edge.
i am ok with a frame, but it has to follow the pictures aspect ratio, not the other way around. i think everyone here is capable of doing this in photoshop.
