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SubNat
Nov 27, 2008

Awesome, thanks for the video, it came in just as I chucked it off to print. Very nice and concise microtutorial.
Really curious to see how it'll compare to the OSM/minimalist design once it's done printing.

I guess I was just entirely in the wrong mindset after messing around with the problem for a while, thanks for setting me straight everyone.
That's what a week of backend and build pipeline/server work will do to a poor 3D dude brain.

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SubNat
Nov 27, 2008

And prototype done. Thanks again for the help.

I'm honestly a bit impressed that there's even a bunch of individual trees casting shadows.
It's not as clean as the OSM one, but all the tiny detail is super neat to inspect in person. (And is probably going to be even cooler when there's a square meter+ of them on the wall.)

The main downsides to the Gmap/Earth based model is that it's over a decade old (2012, supposedly.), and that there's an exaggerated seam between each north/south aligned strip due to the importer, but some of that can be cleaned up by me manually adjusting those for the final model.
(You can see the seam cutting across some of the flat rooftops.)

BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe
Looks good! What's your process for bringing in the Google tile? I thought they had newer high res versions available

SubNat
Nov 27, 2008

They do have the 'photorealistic' tiles, but those are probably still limited by the base quality of the dataset. The captures done around here were done a decade or so ago, just looking at the state of a couple construction projects.
Here in Norway a bunch of smaller places don't even have 3d models for buildings, just for terrain. It's probably very different in denser areas with more population.

No super advanced process, I bought a plugin for Blender aaaages ago called Blender OSM, back when a couple clients wanted more of a view/surrounding terrain in their VR scenes. (https://github.com/vvoovv/blosm)
If you grab a Google Earth 3D tiles api key (There's a 3 mo trial when registering with a card), it can also import the 3D tiles via the new api + model system they have.
After that it's just a matter of using the plugin to select a rectangle on a map, and start the up-to-hours long import if you took in a large area (Depending on resolution vs size, no dynamic LOD fetching here.), and presto:

Great for filling in a backdrop, or getting some landscape, but you really don't want those buildings to be more than a few pixels big in a end product.


There are probably a number of other alternatives to getting good 3D tiles, I've used Cesium in some unreal projects, for example. (Cesium and Google Earth stuff have fairly strict ToS/Licenses though.)
While the tiles are neat the license forbids a lot of use cases, including any kind of caching or offline use. You're only really allowed to use them for visualization where you download them every time/per user.
Something I mess around with a bit as a personal thing, but the licenses make them hard to use for VR since you have to redownload so much every time (not to mention having to rely on their streaming setup, instead of being allowed to optimize/bake your own variants.)

Cesium is better there, but the whole 'no caching/offline/altering' issue limits the usage outside of PCVR/Realtime stuff that has the overhead to deal with it. (They do support on-premise hosting, but I think no offline meshes still. Can still be useful for UE renders though I suppose.)
Most of the work stuff I do nowadays is standalone Quest, with no guarantee that a user can sit around waiting to stream in a gig worth of terrain every time the cache expires.

e: Yeah, I grabbed a snippet of London, with the same 'max quality' level. It's just that the dataset for my region is old and bad in comparison to newer captures. (Or simply build better from regions with better coverage, however it is they generate these models.)

SubNat fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Nov 28, 2023

Odddzy
Oct 10, 2007
Once shot a man in Reno.
I'm late to the debate or whatever it was but as a point of personal experience: all the AI friendly people I've worked with are all the people with the least talent in the craft. It's sad to hear them say things like "here's something I made" and believe it earnestly because telling them that they didn't do anything always makes them defensive.

ImplicitAssembler
Jan 24, 2013

Odddzy posted:

I'm late to the debate or whatever it was but as a point of personal experience: all the AI friendly people I've worked with are all the people with the least talent in the craft. It's sad to hear them say things like "here's something I made" and believe it earnestly because telling them that they didn't do anything always makes them defensive.

If we talk about 'machine learning', my experience is very much the opposite. Very talented people seeing/making a tool to make their/our work even better.

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
Yeah there are a lot of very valuable ML based tools coming out that are pretty exciting.
I think the crux is people call them what they are though. Odddy is talking about people who generate 'AI art' and even though the math is identical it's a totally different focus and can be judged/shamed appropriately.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
Some of the most talented artists I know have leapt onto Midjourney for use as concept references, and sometimes a bit more than that when there's a time crunch.

Generally on the down low though since there's such a stigma around it. I do agree that the people championing AI art as and ends unto itself seem to be a different crowd though

sigma 6
Nov 27, 2004

the mirror would do well to reflect further

ImplicitAssembler posted:

If we talk about 'machine learning', my experience is very much the opposite. Very talented people seeing/making a tool to make their/our work even better.

Thank you. The fact that there is a stigma attached is very telling. On that note:
This is very impressive IMO.
Sorry for the insta link OP.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0Opo-sqs05/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

quote:

I'm using Womp 3d for the modeling, Krea ai for the realtime ai view, Magnific ai for up scaling and details and Stable Diffusion video and Runway for the animation.

Sagebrush posted:

i've been poking around with AI tools to generate texture maps and it's uhhhhhh surprisingly good at it. the resolution isn't quite there yet, but it's usable for many purposes

like i was putting together a kitchen scene and i wanted a hand-painted enamel gilded art nouveau plate.

"art nouveau pattern, vines, green and gold, gilded, circular outline"



erase the background, a little processing to crisp it up and make the metallic and bump maps out of that, and baby you got a stew goin.

it's the world now. parts of it really suck but it isn't going away. gotta figure out how to use it well rather than just going all crunchy and living in the woods.

This is really cool! Some of the most impressive stuff I have seen is AI processing textures.
CGMonk / CGmonsastary has some cool tools.

sigma 6 fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Dec 1, 2023

Doctor_Fruitbat
Jun 2, 2013


Koramei posted:

Some of the most talented artists I know have leapt onto Midjourney for use as concept references, and sometimes a bit more than that when there's a time crunch.

Generally on the down low though since there's such a stigma around it. I do agree that the people championing AI art as and ends unto itself seem to be a different crowd though

The stigma of committing theft from fellow artists, and the fact that any AI portions left in the finished piece can't be copyrighted so their employers will go loving apeshit when they find out.

Koramei
Nov 11, 2011

I have three regrets
The first is to be born in Joseon.
Not entirely wrong there, although i highly doubt it’ll ever get found out, at least the use cases I’ve seen.
Just very much disagreeing with the notion using the tools implies a lack of talent. The artists I know using it that way could draw all of this and better (and have, many times), but it’s such a timesaver and useful ideation tool that they took to it quickly.

sigma 6
Nov 27, 2004

the mirror would do well to reflect further

Koramei posted:

Not entirely wrong there, although i highly doubt it’ll ever get found out, at least the use cases I’ve seen.
Just very much disagreeing with the notion using the tools implies a lack of talent. The artists I know using it that way could draw all of this and better (and have, many times), but it’s such a timesaver and useful ideation tool that they took to it quickly.

Thank you again. I have a an airbrush artist friend which switched to AI for reference because downloading copyright free 4k images was a drag and lacked creative control. Recently his work was featured in an international airbrush magazine and truth be told, it's about the craft, not the reference.

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
Sigma you don't have to keep evangelizing ai, thanking someone for writing a positive post about it is so bleak. Did you personally create it? I don't even know what you're doing.

It's the 3d CG thread. Can be bold the 3d part of the thread title.

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Doctor_Fruitbat posted:

the fact that any AI portions left in the finished piece can't be copyrighted

For real?

1. If it's true, can you link an article about the court decision on this?
2. How much of a change do you have to make to the image for it to become copyrightable?

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
You can just Google 'can you copyright ai art' and read the endless results about it

cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Dec 2, 2023

dandybrush
Feb 7, 2011
I'm so sick of pro generative AI/ML poo poo. CG trader have also just announced that they are opting everyone who sells stuff on their site into scraping automatically unless you change your settings.

I don't understand why people want to automate the fun, creative part of art when they argue for people using AI for ideation. Especially when the machine is just spitting out a bunch of stuff that makes no sense because it can't understand what it's regurgitating. Give us better automated tools for UVs and other tasks sure, but I can't help lose respect for anyone who advocates for using an algo powered off stolen art to 'create'.

SubNat
Nov 27, 2008

*pat pat* cubicle gangster, I thought your presentation was really interesting, I just didn't have the time to catch it until the discussion had slid on.
It was actually brought up to me by a couple colleagues at work not long after it went live. (Though partially in a 'goddamn, see how these rich people live.' context, even though we're all XR developers.)

I probably won't be in the space of 'gorgeous HQ rendering for selling in' in the future, but it's interesting to see the challenges involved in jumping in 'so early', as UE5 still hadn't matured enough yet, and you just kinda have to brute force it (as one often does in PC rendering.). Really felt the 'VR lighting vs Offline lighting' because back when I worked with the architects it was a huge loving struggle getting a nice, consistent, and 'fine' look through a project. While getting compared with 'but hey, this other guy made this master bathroom here look gorgeous after a few hours iterating on just a single shot, why can't you just make it like that?'
Lighting and, for the lack of a better word, 'compositing' a space for VR is a wildly different process than doing it with a 2D image.
Atleast the lack of teleportation in your project put a hard stop to people just flying off the beaten path immediately.

A lot of useful things to keep track of, since I'm probably going to have to deal with streamed PCVR come next year to branch out the userbase for the projects I work on.
I'd like to show more stuff I do in the thread, but everything I do at work is NDA-ed up to my hips, or more commonly NDA-ed and very ugly. (Since I primarily focus on 'ramming as much as possible onto a poor Quest.)
We're talking I have to get permission from a boss + data owner often just to take a couple screenshots from say, a subsea drone sim I made in UE5, to show on stand.
And my personal time stuff is either stuff for 3D printing, or mediocre scenes in Unreal set up just to be the blurred-out backdrop of yet another monster fuckfest.

Anyhow, discussions about AI never really go anywhere useful, because of the many and very disparate uses and users. And the discussion always gets heated because a lot of people have personal stakes in it.
I kinda wish we could just have a soft ban on the topic unless they're specifically tools to use in a 3D workflow, but even just asking for that would immediately invite discussion about where to put that line, so it's easier to just not do it at all.

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea

SubNat posted:

*pat pat* cubicle gangster, I thought your presentation was really interesting, I just didn't have the time to catch it until the discussion had slid on.

That's not what I was referring to, it was before that.

But yeah, the team at pureblink did a great job on the UE side of things. I figured their section and Alex's tech but at the end would be very interesting for people here.

cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Dec 2, 2023

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
A film I posted a few weeks ago just won best real estate film at the cg architect awards.

Here's the link if anyone missed it.
https://vimeo.com/dboxglobal/fairmontphoenix




This is the one I wrote a now deleted post about a few up, but it's been referenced already after I deleted it so I might as well acknowledge it.
I know it's probably not that impressive to people who work on games and movies but making this and doing something a bit different for real estate meant a lot to me, and as sad as it is, having it mostly ignored by a bunch of people (except for one!) I've posted alongside for 15 years felt bad (esp when I was in a really bad mood about something unrelated and a little drunk) and I had hoped a couple would at least get why I was excited to have pulled it off. I just wanted an excuse to talk about it and tyflow and doing work.
Anyway, doesn't matter anymore, now I'm gonna get a glass trophy to put on my desk and I'm fuckin stoked about that.

cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Dec 6, 2023

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
I apologize for not saying anything previously. I saw the original video and thought it was gorgeous, and it still is. You absolutely should be proud of what you've accomplished here.

Gearman
Dec 6, 2011

Definitely missed it the first time. Congrats! You should absolutely be proud, because that is an awesome reel. Top notch lighting and animation and rendering work all-around.

mutata
Mar 1, 2003

cubicle gangster posted:

A film I posted a few weeks ago just won best real estate film at the cg architect awards.

Here's the link if anyone missed it.
https://vimeo.com/dboxglobal/fairmontphoenix




This is the one I wrote a now deleted post about a few up, but it's been referenced already after I deleted it so I might as well acknowledge it.
I know it's probably not that impressive to people who work on games and movies but making this and doing something a bit different for real estate meant a lot to me, and as sad as it is, having it mostly ignored by a bunch of people (except for one!) I've posted alongside for 15 years felt bad (esp when I was in a really bad mood about something unrelated and a little drunk) and I had hoped a couple would at least get why I was excited to have pulled it off. I just wanted an excuse to talk about it and tyflow and doing work.
Anyway, doesn't matter anymore, now I'm gonna get a glass trophy to put on my desk and I'm fuckin stoked about that.

As someone who works on environments in games, this stuff looks like a TON of work. Great job, the results look fantastic.

And it was a good rebuke, properly-deserved and well-delivered. No worries.

tango alpha delta
Sep 9, 2011

Ask me about my wealthy lifestyle and passive income! I love bragging about my wealth to my lessers! My opinions are more valid because I have more money than you! Stealing the fruits of the labor of the working class is okay, so long as you don't do it using crypto. More money = better than!

cubicle gangster posted:

A film I posted a few weeks ago just won best real estate film at the cg architect awards.

Here's the link if anyone missed it.
https://vimeo.com/dboxglobal/fairmontphoenix




This is the one I wrote a now deleted post about a few up, but it's been referenced already after I deleted it so I might as well acknowledge it.
I know it's probably not that impressive to people who work on games and movies but making this and doing something a bit different for real estate meant a lot to me, and as sad as it is, having it mostly ignored by a bunch of people (except for one!) I've posted alongside for 15 years felt bad (esp when I was in a really bad mood about something unrelated and a little drunk) and I had hoped a couple would at least get why I was excited to have pulled it off. I just wanted an excuse to talk about it and tyflow and doing work.
Anyway, doesn't matter anymore, now I'm gonna get a glass trophy to put on my desk and I'm fuckin stoked about that.

God drat that looks amazing!

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
I wasn't fishing but thank you guys. Flew up to the NYC office last night for our holiday party so getting into the studio to watch the results and celebrating with everyone is wild.
Do follow aeph on Spotify and socials if you like the music, and check out the work he does with ash thorp too!

I feel embarrassed about being whiny about it but also I just remembered I signed off the deleted post with 'maybe this thread deserves to be taken over by ai chat' lol. I got to get my poo poo together. I don't have any active coworkers in this thread anymore so I can be a bit more transparent but I tried to make a pivot into vfx and environment art a few years ago and just got absolutely ghosted.
I imagine most people in this thread dealt with this but COVID really forced me to think 'is this the lane I want to stay in with the rest of my life'
Pitching this project was so important because it was such a different way of thinking about real estate, finally turning in something that kept me on my toes and challenged me was the most excited i'd been about my job for years.

cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Dec 7, 2023

BonoMan
Feb 20, 2002

Jade Ear Joe
The VFX industry is just a cruel cruel mistress. It's insane how many talented people can have a hard time there. I know you're not fishing for compliments but your work is seriously top notch and jealousy inducing. And you clearly have a fantastic eye for just aesthetics in general. That video is AAA work. Getting ghosted was probably a blessing rather than getting ground into dirt in the poo poo world of VFX!

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
Yeah I likely wouldn't have followed through but it was still pretty disheartening. I thought ILM at least would want to talk to me, instead of an immediate 'you are not what we are looking for' rejection. They are max users, use tyflow, big environment specialist team...

As far as checking my worth went, it backfired pretty hard!
Fortunately I'm at the point in architecture where I can make the jobs what I want them to be, so it's all good.

ImplicitAssembler
Jan 24, 2013

VFX production experience is key and without that unless you do something (r)evolutionary, ILM is very unlikely to talk to you, except for a junior role and they take on very few juniors as it is.
For anything else, you really need to have some unique. Most people I've seen side-step into VFX came from a more tech background.

roomtone
Jul 1, 2021

by Fluffdaddy

(and can't post for 16 days!)

I'm using Max for coursework and I just sort of hate it. Everything smells old, the UI is impossible to parse without explicit instructions. Stuff I use every minute has to be setup in the UI or hunted down in some weird menu, while stuff I will never touch floods the screen at all times.

I wanted to clear some UV seams today in the UVW Unwrap modifier, which should really just be a right click and 'clear seam' but actually there are four buttons in a pop-up menu for it called stitch and none of them worked! Cool. The actual modelling interface is so clunky, too.

I'm just venting, I have to use this software for the course I'm doing when I'd rather be using Blender or learning Maya. It feels like a zombie software that's only around because older workers/educators don't want to switch to something new. I'm sure if you already know what all the icons mean and where everything is, it's very powerful, but it's horrible to learn.

roomtone fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Dec 8, 2023

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
^ as a huge max fanboy, you're not wrong, but max does have a sort of unique experience with learning it when once you know something is possible, and understand the logic of how the interface is organized, it's quite easy to guess where features might be and becomes fairly intuitive. It's kind of impenetrable at first, but there is a payoff, deep inside the core of it. Knowing both I find blender more fragmented and disjointed.
Learning one package when you're already familiar with another can be tough too, because you spend the whole time thinking of what you'd do in the other software and trying to translate it, instead of sinking into how the new software wants you to work with it.
Although no comment on the UVunwrap tool. best to think of that as a standalone thing that's running inside max. I have to pull up the help files every time I open it.
There's a script called UVtools that makes a few things much nicer to do - https://hqdetails.com/shop/uvtools. I rarely have to open the traditional unwrap dialog and can do most things I need to using this.


ImplicitAssembler posted:

VFX production experience is key and without that unless you do something (r)evolutionary, ILM is very unlikely to talk to you, except for a junior role and they take on very few juniors as it is.
For anything else, you really need to have some unique. Most people I've seen side-step into VFX came from a more tech background.

I've done green screen shoots with motion controlled cameras, planning, tracking, managing the shot, keying and comp, managed 10 people across some hairy jobs, do my own pitches, project management and budgets - and the majority of the cg myself across them.

Like I said it doesn't really matter anymore, but it's pretty funny that I could have spent 3 months modeling trash for the background of an avengers movie and they'd suddenly be interested. Ridiculous industry.

cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Dec 8, 2023

ImplicitAssembler
Jan 24, 2013

cubicle gangster posted:


I've done green screen shoots with motion controlled cameras, planning, tracking, managing the shot, keying and comp, managed 10 people across some hairy jobs, do my own pitches, project management and budgets - and the majority of the cg myself across them.


Yeah and the VFX production pipeline is still a completely different animal. It's not so much the actual technical skills, but 'how to work in a VFX environment'.
You would still be heavily mentored for the first show or 2 and being a jack-of-all-trades also isn't helping you.
I'm not at all trying to diminish your skill or your work, but the mindset, approach and mentality in VFX is different. Shots with a 1000 revisions happen! Not often, but they do. (This is through layout to comp). On one of the Avengers shots we did, there was more than 30 FX artists involved...and that's just FX. The scale and volume of work is just so much bigger.
If you want to make the transition to VFX, you need to look at the smaller boutique shops and/or commercials, where you'll have a more comparable finished quality.

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
Fortunately, I don't, so let's switch to talking in a complete abstraction of this idea (not about me or anyone in particular trying to make the jump)
But... i'm not sure why you think 30 artists on a shot and a thousand revisions would make someone from another industry so incompatible with it. Images that take over a year to finish through 40 rounds of feedback are commonplace, what's a few more?
Maybe you're right and it would just completely break people from other industries, but I just don't see how having to open shotgun and the same scenes a few more times than you hoped makes for something so fundamentally different. Especially in an industry like ours where we're presenting directly to and reacting to the whims of billionaires who do not give a gently caress about the feelings of anyone on the creative side, or how much it might pain them to throw away months of work. You need such a thick skin to start presenting in meetings.

And again - this isnt me making a case for myself, i'm just trying to dig a little deeper into what exactly goes into the 'you wouldn't get it, it's too different' mindset.

EoinCannon
Aug 29, 2008

Grimey Drawer
Most of the people I used to work with in VFX are unhealthy, divorced, nomadic etc. I'm glad I funny do it anymore. You have to love movies enough where the trade-off is worth it. Although maybe it's better now, and the shop I was at was probably dysfunctional at the time.

mashed
Jul 27, 2004

cubicle gangster posted:

Fortunately, I don't, so let's switch to talking in a complete abstraction of this idea (not about me or anyone in particular trying to make the jump)
But... i'm not sure why you think 30 artists on a shot and a thousand revisions would make someone from another industry so incompatible with it. Images that take over a year to finish through 40 rounds of feedback are commonplace, what's a few more?
Maybe you're right and it would just completely break people from other industries, but I just don't see how having to open shotgun and the same scenes a few more times than you hoped makes for something so fundamentally different. Especially in an industry like ours where we're presenting directly to and reacting to the whims of billionaires who do not give a gently caress about the feelings of anyone on the creative side, or how much it might pain them to throw away months of work. You need such a thick skin to start presenting in meetings.

And again - this isnt me making a case for myself, i'm just trying to dig a little deeper into what exactly goes into the 'you wouldn't get it, it's too different' mindset.

Ultimately what big studios are largely looking for is a cog that they can cleanly slot into their vfx machine. You probably do have all the skills that you need to succeed in a large studio like ILM or Weta but the hiring managers / recruiters are getting a ton of resumes and reels from people that have worked at other large VFX studios already. They don't need to take a chance that your related but not 1:1 directly related experience will work out when they can hire someone else that ticks their boxes more closely.

Implicit's suggestion about more boutique studios is a good one in that they are looking much more for individuals and people that can wear a bunch of hats and are usually more open to people from outside the VFX industry.

ImplicitAssembler
Jan 24, 2013

cubicle gangster posted:

Fortunately, I don't, so let's switch to talking in a complete abstraction of this idea (not about me or anyone in particular trying to make the jump)
But... i'm not sure why you think 30 artists on a shot and a thousand revisions would make someone from another industry so incompatible with it. Images that take over a year to finish through 40 rounds of feedback are commonplace, what's a few more?
Maybe you're right and it would just completely break people from other industries, but I just don't see how having to open shotgun and the same scenes a few more times than you hoped makes for something so fundamentally different. Especially in an industry like ours where we're presenting directly to and reacting to the whims of billionaires who do not give a gently caress about the feelings of anyone on the creative side, or how much it might pain them to throw away months of work. You need such a thick skin to start presenting in meetings.

And again - this isnt me making a case for myself, i'm just trying to dig a little deeper into what exactly goes into the 'you wouldn't get it, it's too different' mindset.

Ok, so maybe *you* can deal with and would adapt straight away...but a lot of people can't/don't. Tthe scope of the projects, the pixel loving, the required quality, ever changing schedules, deadlines are still, I bet, at a scale that would take some adjustments.
The only ones I've seen who have adapted with a minimal amount of adjustment, have been people from the commercial industry, and while the scale of their projects is a lot smaller, the pressure is often way higher and the finished quality is comparable.
Further, where would a person with your skillset fit in?. By far the majority of people in VFX are specialists and highly specialized at that.
CG supes, are predominantly from either a comp or light background and usually very tech savvy. (And need a thorough understanding of the pipeline).
Finally, it also comes down to being familiar working with pipeline at that scale and more importantly, how to work around the pipeline when this don't work (and feed the work back in). This will vary depending on your job, but it's still a large chunk of your job. This can vary from being a complete nightmare (MPC) to moderately pain in butt (Sony).
All this is stuff that isn't hard to learn, but it's still stuff you need to learn, along with all of the above.

dopesilly
Aug 4, 2023
cubicle gangster I've been following your work for a while and as a games person I'm always impressed, VFX studios are absolute morons for not picking up your kind of skillset. If you consider games/virtual production I think you'd be able to make some pretty beautiful realtime environments/archviz in UE5 that might set you apart (but imo your portfolio is probably plenty good for virtual prod). Virtual production seems like it's receiving a lot of funding and there may be more opportunities out there for that. I went to school with an architecture major who did similar work to you working with hardass billionaires, and now he does matte painting (essentially enviro modelling/texturing + kitbash + photobash) and works on some pretty big budget movies. VFX companies are gonna be eating up realtime artists, if they aren't already.

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
Do want to clarify again I'm not looking to move, at this point it's a theoretical discussion, but I do appreciate the points raised and I bet theres a few lurkers really enjoying this discussion. Way way back I picked up so much being a fly on the wall in forums while people chatted about things I wanted to be involved in!

I might keep asking some more of you implicit - i really enjoy digging into people passions and this back and forth, just wanted to do a quick post to close tonight, I've got a crazy busy weekend.

dopesilly posted:

Virtual production seems like it's receiving a lot of funding and there may be more opportunities out there for that.
Thanks!
Our studio has actually being doing a fair bit of virtual production on real estate projects, it's way easier than full green screen. I think we were the first in our industry, we've done 4 films with it now.
We are actually lined up to test a new solution for virtual productions which is going to change it in a BIG way... Probably not hard to guess what the future of it might be! I am insanely excited about what it means for the workflow though.

cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Dec 9, 2023

Alterian
Jan 28, 2003

roomtone posted:

I'm using Max for coursework and I just sort of hate it. Everything smells old, the UI is impossible to parse without explicit instructions. Stuff I use every minute has to be setup in the UI or hunted down in some weird menu, while stuff I will never touch floods the screen at all times.

I wanted to clear some UV seams today in the UVW Unwrap modifier, which should really just be a right click and 'clear seam' but actually there are four buttons in a pop-up menu for it called stitch and none of them worked! Cool. The actual modelling interface is so clunky, too.


Max was my first tool I learned. I used it for years and years. Then the college I teach at decided to switch over from Max to Maya. I really don't have a preference for either. They both have their good and bad but boy I wish I never had to see the pop up "non manifold geometry" ever again. :argh: This is never an issue in Max. I am trying to get my department to move to Blender, but I have pushback.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



cubicle gangster posted:

A film I posted a few weeks ago just won best real estate film at the cg architect awards.

Here's the link if anyone missed it.
https://vimeo.com/dboxglobal/fairmontphoenix




Very nice. How did you do the the timelapse exteriors (the clouds in particular)? All max/tyflow/vray? Or something like Terragen?

cubicle gangster
Jun 26, 2005

magda, make the tea
Thanks!
Used the built-in vray clouds for those!
https://docs.chaos.com/display/VMAX/VRaySun#heading-Clouds

Didnt plan to leave them in at all - switched those on and keyframed some values really early in the storyboard process - with the idea that we would use terragen, matching the camera and rendering them properly as a pass there, but as we built up the scenes and left them in over additional drafts it didn't seem that important to swap them out. The shots being fast and having lots of depth of field helped, and I think the vray clouds are more convincing in timelapse motion than still, weirdly. One huge benefit to them is there's basically no hit to render time.

There are some visual artifacts I can see that wouldn't exist with Terragen - and Terragen would have made much more varied and interesting clouds, but even though we were putting everything we had into this film to push ourselves, a really key goal for me was to also make sure it was still profitable - new licenses and days of learning and slow renders for a tiny incremental upgrade most wouldn't notice ended up pretty low on the priority list.
There's a part of me that loses a little respect for work that does something new, but finding out it only got where it is by the team taking a bath on it - managing a client is so important and a lot of people (in arch viz especially) think the holy grail is to not have clients anymore.
This is the same as finding out a video game or movie was made by a happy team that got stuck in together and didn't have insane crunch, it's nice when something is good and sustainable.

cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Dec 12, 2023

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Ccs
Feb 25, 2011


Another thing to note about vfx is that its nearly all left America. And the ones that remain in the UK and Britain are working as fast as possible to move everything to India. Its the stated goal of 2 of the largest vfx studios that by 2025 80% of all shots will be done in India, and the only people left in Canada and the UK will be seniors and supervisors. Which they kind of have to do because between debt load, interest rates, and the gap in work due to the strikes, if they can't get that business plan working then they're gonna go under.

Virtual production and previz are probably the last jobs that will leave the west, as they need to be near where things are actually filmed, or near the creative people who call the shots. Lately there has been a big push at the largest studio to get previz all in the UK though instead of doing any in California, as at least the UK has tax credits they can utilize. And the large places like offering clients previz in addition to finals so they know they got the project sooner and can use previz as the first round of layout, and avoid a lot of annoying ingesting of files from outside vendors.

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