Danger Planet!

Danger Planet from Justin Burks on Vimeo.

Justin's Blog

Oahhh... oaaahaha.. almost!

Here's a crowd test. There's over 1400 characters in this scene and it renders fairly quickly. The composition of this shot turned out really great.

Plants

Palace

Working on the look for palace. Came together in a day.

Dedicated Farm

In addition to utilizing most of the lab computers, we've added a dedicated render farm. 168 hyperthreaded cores and 336GB of ram. It's already having a huge impact on the images we're making.

So when the entire system (farm+lab stations) is maxed out, we can run 138 frames simultaneously, each with a memory cap of 8gb. If we had less demanding memory requirements, we could split and double or quadruple the concurrent load. So that's 138 times faster than a single machine.

Giant

Help yourself

Pluggin Away

Converted the shaders for the elephant and cheerleader today. As far as major characters, just the other two ladies left.

Progress Meter

Seq 3 Render

It has problems galore, but it's a start.

Password. If you worked on it, you should know it.

Seq 3 off the farm

Put about 30% of the shots back up for fixes or flicker. I think they're all off now. We got 16 more nodes added to the farm. We also got some capital approved for a dedicated farm, so hopefully we can do that this summer.

On to the compositing.

Old man shot

Fixing a couple issues with flicker in eye. This is with nuke vector blur and zblur.

Inspirational lighting

Keep going guys! I can't wait to see the final.

Render elements

Decided pretty early on not to do traditional passes and just try to get the shots close in lighting. This is due to the primarily GI based lighting. Would have to put stand in geo to get color bounce. Plus, the surfaces would still need to be displaced to get proper shadows... This isn't the right project for that workflow. There has been so much crap pushed down the line over the years that it would be nearly impossible to get consistent render layers. I'm going to work on implementing the multimatte functionality in vray for later sequences.

In any case, we're rendering zdepth and velocity to add both effects in nuke. All going into linear tiled exrs.

All Seq 03 on the farm!

I thought this day would come about 3 years ago. Then 2. Then 1. Then I quit thinking it would happen and just tried to work when I had time. But now...

Thanks to Yannick, Sequence 3 is lit.

AND 15 SHOTS ARE ON THE FARM!

Going on vacation with the fam for a week, but wanted to get this done before I left.

Comments

I'm to stupid to figure out how to get blogger to lay things out properly, so I'm making a new post because I'm also lazy.

Most of the shots play from a single location in this scene looking up and down the valley. What's a bit scary is the shots were composed in layout without knowing the full frame, so I don't know how much we can/should cheat the backgrounds. Hopefully, they'll just disappear behind the characters for the most part. That's also why the images a 'beat up' a bit with flat contrast and blur stuff. That's so I can preview how much detail will be toast, and not worth worrying about.

I was looking at the first post on this blog. 5 years and counting. Oops. That's what you get when you try to go to school and work on projects. Or teach.

Environment Scouting

Env Getting Closer

Been adding vRay fur for grass and vRay proxy objects for trees. Need to do some tweaks on a shot by shot basis, but feeling like we are getting close!

Had to blur the image a bunch since the sampling was adding noise, but if you scale it down, it seems to be working. Also, the colors are goofy because I had to take it into photoshop to do a couple paint fixes and it was in sRGB, so I used HDR toning to get the colors back, so it looks over saturated and a bit funky.

Lighting tweak

Tweaked color space.

Lighting

Getting closer with lighting. Ran into a bug with maya and our cache system. We had reached the hard coded limit for open files between vRay and maya. The folks at Chaos group were kind enough to include a workaround in their release version.

Yannick Amegan has been working on lighting. Been getting closer to getting a look dialed in.

I've been struggling to get the linear workflow working properly in maya. Vray is set up for it, but it's been a real challenge getting maya to cooperate. If you've done any reading on linear comp/rendering, it's pretty complicated if you didn't plan for it from the beginning. We definitely didn't plan for it, but now it's making a big difference.

A little more inpiration

Some more lovely things.

Check out this link for more.

Finally Rendering

It's been a slow and painful process, trying to squeeze the time in to get this rendering. Family is in Australia, so I've been working 14's.

Spent a solid week getting qube running. Total pain. I had to write a custom command template in python to submit the standalone vray jobs. It's like writing out a rib, everything is contained in the file except textures.

These absurdly simple frames are taking 45 minutes on 8core 8gb. There has got to be a way to optimize this stuff. The hair looks pretty great I think. It's just a fractal/bump/trans/ramp/falloff shader. ... got a support ticket in to vray to fix the lack of mip_mapped displacement. It broke in the beta i'm using. (which I'm using because normal maps were broken in another build)

only 18 frames, so don't get your hopes up. (I'm also fixing the SS flicker)

Seq3_2 from Rocky Road on Vimeo.

Inspiration

Here's some more great pieces of inspiration.


Carl Haag's "Cairo".


Charles Robertson's "Cairo"

Found @ One1more2time3's Weblog