International Log posted:

Question for you Cubicle, since you seem to be into archvis up 'till your elbow:

I've got an animation to make of a pretty heavy scene of part of a city. 5 apartment blocks with each about 5 mil polies Xreffed into one scene with a Vraysun, lit by a VraySky in GI override, and a spherical HDR as environment backplate since I'm still too stupid to put in a proper background in an animation.
All of the bricks have a normal map, and I have around 80 evermotion tree vrayproxies stuffed in there (not xreffed), and in the final animation I'm planning to put in Populate people to make it not seem like a ghost town. Now I was wondering how you would approach this? What I know so far to keep frame times down is:

Exclude trees from GI (trees are all instances)
Precalc GI maps (lightcache and irradiance map both set to use camera path)
Set reflection depth to max 2 or 3
Turn filtering off for bitmaps? (not sure if this helps, the idea is that the image sampler does all the work)
Render out the people as a seperate pass and comp them in Sony Vegas (no after effects here)

Have DMC sampler set to 1/4, noise threshold 0.01, and this is what comes out at 9m33s rendertime:



Also, the animation is about 2 minutes long with 5 different shots, and I have 30-odd i7 12gb workstations to use as a renderfarm at night.

EoinCannon posted:

Sorry I can't post wires, all the files are lost except that render. I can tell you I sketched out pieces in zbrush and retop in max with wrapit, pretty simple topology with 2 iterations of smooth. Used the shell modifier in max for most pieces. The layout for the design was painted in Mari 2.0 then redone as vectors in Photoshop.

I learned lots about armour!

EoinCannon posted:

Thanks heaps but I'm in Australia :/

EoinCannon posted:

Oh cool, I'll definitely try that, thanks
*edit* Doesn't recognize anything unfortunately

EoinCannon posted:

Oh cool, I'll definitely try that, thanks
*edit* Doesn't recognize anything unfortunately

EoinCannon posted:

Something that won't be finished due to my recent SSD crash.
Based on a German suit of armour I found on the net but modified to fit a woman whose head I had also modeled and subsequently lost.
The designs were inspired by the real suit but redesigned with a sessile oak leaf motif
The shield was pretty early on in development.

sigh...

The new SSD is a Samsung which I'm informed is more reliable

EoinCannon posted:

Odddzy posted:

How did you do the chainmail around his groin area?

Odddzy posted:

How did you do the chainmail around his groin area?

forelle posted:

This is really nice. How'd Mari work out for you? We're always looking for marketing material so if you have anything you'd like to show us let us know.

EoinCannon posted:

The chain mail is 3dsmax hair and fur emitting from a fairly even grid topology instancing a geometry ring angled so they interlock. The resulting hair converted to mesh and skin wrapped onto simple Geo. Materialbyelement modifier to randomise mat ids. It's a bit messy tbh

cubicle gangster posted:

that sounds like its way more complicated than it needs to be. Do a flat array and use the max surface deform (one of my favorite underused tools) next time - or if you're in z brush it has to have something similar. Smash out a low poly instanced mesh in max that smooths at render time, if I remember correctly you use vray, so memory shouldn't be an issue with that.

Jewel posted:

A question! With stuff like this:



How are the paths and dirt patches usually textured/modelled?

Would the entire surface be grass, then the dirt patches and path is geometry (path is curved geometry) overlaid slightly on top of it, with them being transparent so you can see the grass through? Like this:



Or would the path and dirt textures be applied to actual polygons on the mesh (so the path would probably be curved in the physical texture), and the texturing has the actual grass on the side of the textures?

Not sure how this is usually gone about, and I'm interested! I can't tell if the path tiles or not.

Also what about the tiling grass? If I went with the first option, would the mesh for the grass be something like this? (More cleaned up though)



Which is then flattened out and uv mapped so it's stretched out 5x+ past the bounds enough that the grass texture tiles to get the size right?

This would be for a game so you don't want to have to swap out textures much, but for something with a tiling texture like that is it better to literally have a single polygon for each tile of the texture (and pack the grass into the model texture itself), or do what I did there and swap to a separate "grass" texture for that. Judging by the background behind the scene, there has to be a tileable grass texture that takes up the full 0-1 UV space, so. I don't have much experience in tiling textures when UVW unwrapping a mesh rather than the standard way of 3D programs just plopping down materials wherever and setting the projection, however, so it's always been kinda foreign to me.

Sorry if anything's confusing! I'll try and explain some things in better detail if you need vv

Also excuse the bad diagrams

concerned mom posted:

Really I think the way you've described it in method 2 is how they've done it. I just wrote up a huge thing on it but frankly I think that's how they've done it. They might have some blend strips in there or maybe combining the grass and path with a decal but It looks quite a simple solution. They've done a nice job though.

cubicle gangster posted:

odddzy - there are some great details on that. 6 sided hard objects going into a curved surface can tell you made it to test yourself. Would love to see an unsmoothed wireframe.

mutata posted:

They could have done it in a variety of ways, and personally, examining it closer, I think there are some neat proprietary blending tricks they're using. I can pick out tiling in the path and the edging, but within the tiling there's variations that are breaking it up.

That said, the way you have it laid out is definitely possible and practical. Just remember that you can put multiple pieces of a texture on one texture sheet so while it might seem impractical to have a texture for the edge of the block, a texture for the end of the path, and a texture for the other end of the path, it is NOT impractical to have a single texture file with all 3 of those elements on there. Also, the blue mesh in your drawing isn't necessary. Consider this:



The yellow would be a mesh textured with the grassy blend and the grassy trim applied to the edges. The red would be a floating decal mesh wrapped on top of the grass block and with the hard edges blended out with vertex alpha or something. The path edges could be placed on the same texture sheet as the tiling cobble path texture. Again, I'm not saying that this is how they did it, but this is a way to achieve the effect.

I get the vibe that you seem to be thinking that polygons are somehow restricting where they can or can't put something. It's the other way around. They don't have to worry about ending the path at a specific strip of polygons, they would just put polygons where they want to end the path. Don't let polygons control you, you control the polygons!

Jewel posted:

Yeah I know re: having multiple textures in one image. By texture I just mean "part of the UV space" I guess, except for the path and grass which I'd assume would be on different files (because they tile, and usually that means extending off the edges of the UV space).

The thing with your way is, on the top it'd be "Dirt path texture with alpha on the edges to let the grass show though", and on the side it'd be "Grass texture with alpha to let the dirt underneath show through", which is a bit weird and why I didn't think they'd do it that way.

mutata posted:

You're over-complicating it. Here's what I was saying above mocked up really quickly:



This uses these 3 textures:


(Applied to the top face of the base cube)


(Applied to the edges of the base cube. You can see in your source screenshot that there's tiling in the edging grass AND the dirt that it's growing on.)


(Applied to the path. The uvs are stacked on top of themselves to achieve the tiling and the edge faces are mapped to the top and bottom parts. The extra ring of polys is to provide for an alpha blend to get rid of the obvious hard edges.)

Again, I think they have a bunch of other blending going on, but this is a way to achieve the same effect without wasting tons of time trying to reverse engineer what is probably achieved using internal, programmatic tools or engine features that you don't have access to.

Jewel posted:

The thing is I'm programming this too so I do have access to engine features

You might be right with what you've got though. Some of the smaller detail nuances like the dirt not tiling the same as the bricks is still getting me, but otherwise yeah I think I agree. Also I doubt there's any internal programmatic tools because there's really not many paths in the game, it's only one or two small levels like this, so it must be some small hack.