The 3DCG Thread: Revenge of the NURBS

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Creative Convention > The 3DCG Thread: Revenge of the NURBS

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

Hey guys. I'm fairly new to the world of 3d; I've only been using Maya for about 7 months, mostly for motion graphics work, and a little bit of stylized VFX work. My question is, has anyone gone from using Maya to Cinema4D? If so, how easy is it to adapt?

To contribute to the thread, some absolutely amazing recent work by Nervo:

http://www.thiagocosta.net/dneuron.html

edit: Royale's first ever showreel:

http://www.weareroyale.com/site_work/reel08.html

IHeartBoobs fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Jul 11, 2008

# ¿ Jul 11, 2008 00:43

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 01:19

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

sinc posted:

Adawait, the model looks nice in general but I agree that the face has some serious scary-issues. Hard to point out why exactly, could be in the geometry too.

Gromit, yeah, that's very much possible. It gets hard to see the work with fresh eyes after having stared at it for hours, so it may actually look completely different than originally intended. Using reference photos would be a useful practice, probably.

Continuing my RenderMan experiments... not finished, but it's something:

This one's about all kinds of translucency stuff like SSS. The interesting feature (for me) is that skeletal structure that's showing through the skin... the bone geometry is rendered as a separate pass and then accessed (by screen/NDC coordinates) in the shader and blurred according to the surface distance from the skin. Of course it could be done with distributed ray tracing, but that would add either a lot of noise or a lot of rendering time. Done this way, it adds maybe half a minute even with large renders. I guess this is the kind of trickery that is preferred in actual production (this was inspired by some Siggraph RenderMan course notes by Pixar). The effect is more interesting in animation, because the internals actually move in parallax with the viewing angle, so it makes the volume look much more 3D and translucent than with SSS only. It might be a bit too dark in this one and the modeling isn't too good, though. The nose looks weird at least.

The whole thing is controlled from Houdini, which is a really interesting and powerful package as people here have said. For example, it doesn't appear to support RenderMan SSS out of the box, but it was really easy (well, once I got the hang of it) to set up a rendering operator network that automatically renders the irradiance passes and runs the point cloud filter programs when needed. I can imagine it's pretty powerful with the particle and dynamics stuff, but I haven't got that far yet.

It's quite fascinating how you're going beyond simply using SSS to indicate translucency. I'm still a bit confused though as to how you rendered the skeleton. Was the opacity/blurring based on distance done in houdini itself using utility nodes of some sort? Wouldn't you be able to do the same thing with a z-brush pass in post?

# ¿ Jul 20, 2008 04:35

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

Gromit posted:

I'm not going to derail this any furhter, but I don't think I'm into this genre enough to start. The trailer made me *not* want to see it, and I'm unlikely to want to have to read a book in order to "get" the movie. Perhaps this is fan material only.

Getting back onto 3D, does anyone know why the Burly Brawl scene in the Matrix sequel looks so poor compared to what 3D could do at the time. Did they have to rush that scene or something? All the guys in it look like plasticine. I thought Wallace and Gromit were going to show up.

I'm guessing it's simply that their 3D artists sucked. Uncanny valley aside, if you look at the 3D stand-ins for the human characters in King Kong,(ie. the scene where the girl is hanging from the vines while King Kong fights off the dinosaurs,) you can't tell at all that they're CG. Plus, any time you have camera moves and zooms that are as smooth as the ones in that scene from The Matrix, it's pretty much a dead giveaway that it's CG.

On another topic, am I the only one exploring Cinema 4D right now? The GI in Advanced Renderer looks so incredibly good for stylized motion graphics related animations. I can't get used to the sub-d modelling though. :/

# ¿ Jul 24, 2008 05:21

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

Heintje posted:

re Add: I'm pretty sure it's Linear Dodge.

This, or screen. Normally used when comping stuff like reflection passes.

edit: Actually, Photoshop now has "(add)" written beside Linear Dodge.

IHeartBoobs fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Jul 25, 2008

# ¿ Jul 25, 2008 04:58

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

spottedfeces posted:

Anybody have a nice grass tutorial they'd be willing to share? Not clean-cut grass mind you, but the wild stuff that possibly would hide velociraptors if left unchecked.

What software do you want to do it in? I know how to create pretty realistic grass in Maya using fur.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2008 17:27

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

Paint effects can be good but can require a lot of tweaking to not look like a preset. You can attach a hair system with dynamics (ie. turbulence) to a fur description to make it look like it's blowing in the wind, and it's very fast to calculate/render.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2008 21:10

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

spottedfeces posted:

Have you got a tutorial I can look at or am I just going to have to fiddle with it? I've never really used fur all that much.

Let me try to do a screen capture.

edit: I'll get this uploaded later tonight

edit 2: here you go: http://www.mayzis.com/furtutoriallq.mov

IHeartBoobs fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Aug 3, 2008

# ¿ Aug 3, 2008 01:20

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

Chenghiz posted:

That was really informative and good, thanks a lot!

I asked a while ago and didn't get any responses, but how would I go about animating snowfall and rainfall in Maya? Also, I';ve been using a directional light a lot lately to approximate sunlight, using ray tracing and the Light Angle attribute at 5-10 degrees. However I don't see many references to this particular use and I'm wondering if it's because I'm stupid and there are better ways to do sunlight, or if it's just because of the added render time.

Infinite lights and spotlights are both viable solutions for creating sunlight. If you're going to use them though, remember to include some sort of ambient light to replicate the SKY light as well.

There is also a method for creating an automated sun and sky light in Mental Ray, called Physical Sun and Sky, which produces very nice looking and accurate results. You should definitely do some research on that with google, as there are a lot of resources available discussing it.

As for snow and rain, I would suggest getting familiar with Maya's particle system, though both of those are quite easy to do in a 2D compositing application.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2008 00:40

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 01:19

IHeartBoobs: Apr 20, 2003

I finished my first reel today. It's a mograph reel so there's some 2D stuff on there, but most of it is 3D motion design. Hopefully you guys will appreciate it.

http://www.mayzis.com/finalreelforweb.mov

# ¿ Aug 6, 2008 02:58

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