Some of my C4D work...

Hey Josh. I think some post CC work is in order?

I'd gray scale the whole thing first then reintroduce some color depending on the mood your after.
Then add some blur on the mountains. They are too sharp in contrast to where in depth they would appear to be.

To compensate for depth in the shot, maybe add something in the foreground, like a tree branch or something and add dof blur if you want.
There's nothing wrong with your work so far per se, it just needs more post work to bring it home.

It's probably the most overlooked aspect of 3D that I'm aware of. Post work is more than often the other 50% of what it takes to make a 3D effect look convincing. I can't stress how important that is.

I have examples of plain blah 3D work and with a little post, voila, cinema movie magic.


CGIFest has an expert in post compositing that's ready to help out in the CGI fest area to help you guys out with this stuff if you need it. He's on standby at the moment.

Depending on how the next few entries look, I may suggest to Towerfan to pull him in for a briefing.
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Hey Gord thanks for the comment. I forgot to mention I made the scene purely for the smoke not the landscape to show a potential client. As you pointed out their is a lot wrong with the landscape at this point I was using it just a place holder.

I agree post work certainly makes the magic happen!
 
Looks good, one note on the animation though, it will help sell the weight and realism if you changed the way it falls a bit. In real life most things will never drop to where they hit the ground the perfectly flat. One corner will always be leading a little bit, so if you angle it slightly then animate more of a bounce it will look as if it has more weight. Not too much because you don't want to make it look too light, but just a bit.
 
Yeah, after I posted it I tried it really quick, the angle does make it hard to see it. I'd have to watch the Ford spots again, but I guess they really exaggerated it to camera to sell that kind of motion.
 
Yeah, his scenefiles are a really great resource. You can learn a lot by just sniffing around in there for a while. They have a blog too, but it hasn't been updated in a while. Here's the link if you want to follow it.

EDIT: Looks like he's updated it...

http://hypatv.blogspot.com/
 
triplej96 said:
Another scene a more finished piece. Its a mock indent. I will be entering a similar one for the CG fest 2 as well. I'm sure you can see what commercial I got the idea from.


Click watch in HD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qqVR0TIu20&feature=channel_page
Click to expand...

Great work .... love this 3D stuff :)
I did notice one thing though. The cracks on the ground seems to come after the dust is fading away. Somehoe they seem to grow and get deeper when the dust is covering them.
I would guess that in the reality the cracks should be there as soon as the heavy block hits the ground. What u think ?
THX
CIPO
 
Hey Josh. I realized afterwards the mountian was just standing in and the smoke layer was the test, so sorry for making a big deal over nothing. :beer:

I liked the particle tests you did at your vimeo site using AE plugins. I played around with some particle effects recently and, boy, smoke is up there in difficulty.
Pretty hard stuff unless it's in B&W or colored B&W which is so much more workable.
I was using the end scene from Indiana Jones: Crystal Skull as a reference in a recent test. Man, those CG guys that did that scene with the UFO leaving, sure have chops. It's beyond me at the moment how to get a decent smokey cloud effect, lol. As far as I can tell each setup is customized to that particlur shot, but still, damn.

But your particles FX look like they have potential and that is one of the harder things to pull off conviningly in 3D so hats on your progess.
 
Hey Gord thanks very much for the kind words! I agree particle effects seem to be very tough and that is a great vfx scene in Crystal Skull as you said!

I just wish Cinema 4D had something like Fume FX, Afterburn, or Rayfire.

Dpti looks promising for C4D. I guess most big movies use Houdini or Maya for the particle effects and sometimes Max....never C4D.
 
Here is a little more advanced human to particle test. This is just a short clip of the scene with just the particles. I'm using the same video footage as the previous post.

Link
 
I've kind of played around with the same thing. But I was doing ghosting/fluid effects in RF4. I've thought about the sand effect. You have RF4 right? You could use a volume emitter to fill a human object, then animate it out I suppose and let the particles fall.
I couldn't find any recommendations online for sand particle physics settings so that may take some time.

At any rate, once you import the particles (no meshing), maybe assign a simple 3 point triangle in C4D, possibly with a 'look at camera tag' and a brown(random) color to each particle and motion blur the crap out it. Probably a good 40hrs experimenting, haha.

In my ghost tests I imported a C4D human model into RF and used an object emitter. If the models polys dont emit, you have to scale up the model in RF because they are too small.
Sigh, and the default method of import exporting: C4D/RF is what, .01/100? But I use 1:1 now. Man, it's a big subject because RF's particle behaviour changes with the scale of objects and it likes big numbers as it's behavour also changes with smaller numbers (real physics) but whatever floats your boat and works.

If you get a chance to view 'GNOMON - Introduction to Sculpting Fluid Dynamics' do so. :thumbup:
 
triplej96 said:
Dpti looks promising for C4D. I guess most big movies use Houdini or Maya for the particle effects and sometimes Max....never C4D.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was looking at DPIT, but unfortunately it hasn't been released yet. I downloaded the Houdini Apprentice edition and some getting started videos on fluids to give that a go. Haven't gotten a chance to really get started, but I'm hoping too soon. Have a few ideas I want to try.

Your second particle test looks cool, how'd you do it?
 
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Thanks Andrew. You are referring to this test right. I use AE and trapcode particular. The main thing needed for my second particle is a lot of rotoscoping and to paint a a clean bg plate.
 
Raptor365 said:
You have RF4 right?
Click to expand...

Thanks Gord for the tips. I just have RF4 SE its a special edtion that came with a 3d world mag a while ago its limited to 50,000 particles other than that its fully functional. I'm sure I could achieve this in C4D without using AE but for this effect to work well in C4D I think i would have to matchmove the actor then build/animate a cg human to follow him.

It sounds like a challenge I just might have to try sometime soon!
 
triplej96 said:
Thanks Andrew. You are referring to this test right. I use AE and trapcode particular. The main thing needed for my second particle is a lot of rotoscoping and to paint a a clean bg plate.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that one. I've never really played with Particular and deflection layers much. I'll have too look into that one.

Regarding the human dissolving shot, you'd just have to rough in geometry, like super rough, then emit particles from it and clean up the rest in the comp. I wouldn't even worry about a rig, just do some nulls for rotation and such and go frame by frame. You probably have only a few seconds before the dissolve would be complete.
 
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