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

A long night

Was up until 4am working on this pig. Was getting terrible results. Came back in this afternoon and was able to get the structure of the image working.

Point of focus. Layering. Color and value contrasts. That stuff allowed the tech to work.

So after re-sculpting again, again, and re-

texturing again...

Progress.

Updating Environment

No matter what I was trying, I couldn't get the environment to render in a reasonable amount of time. MentalRay died. Vray did a bit better, but couldn't handle the textures, even when they were multi level mip map exrs.

Bit the bullet and started this workflow: Combine existing rocks into clusters. Regenerate seamless mesh in topogun. Generate a subdiv in topogun. Create new UV's for the section. Repaint rock textures in mudbox. Export 30k-100k meshes for direct rendering. Getting a SERIOUS speed and memory boost by avoiding subdivs and dynamic tessalation. The memory footprint for the geometry is only 130mb now.

Need to tweak dirt shader, it's too intense, and the grass placement needs some work, but finaly there. Moving on to the wide shot. Cringe!

But the render time is only 5mins. Very doable. Will quadruple with characters and HD. But still in the realm of possibility.

There is a tiled normal map mixed in there and some procedurals to keep it working for the closeups. That way we don't have to swap out maps and have several different versions of the scene.

Progress with VRay

Still having trouble with displacement, but getting much better look and control with vRay.

Inspiration

Hope all is well with you guys. Here's a little something to keep you going.


The image above was found here.
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