Modelling a spitfire, I hope.

No posts in this forum in 4 days??? What the hell are you guys doing?

Here's a few abstract things I've experimented with briefly on the side while getting side tracked on the fest scenes. They look like total **** with the compression Photobucket puts on them. They look great at full res. Almost a disgrace to post on pb. But what the hell. (4 days???)
The vids are ABSOLUTE NOTHING. Just crap I did screwing around as a foundation for other ideas.Passing thoughts as I was working on other things. WTH.







Oh, if you have not seen 'The Ore' by one of our fellow dvxusers, visit:
www.TheOre.net

I have the DVD and they rock.
 
Hey Raptor, been working lately (long hours) hence I've not had any real time to spend doing 3d work.

However I'll just post some silly tests I did a day ago. Note the idea was to get good results using the shortest render time (since it was for animation) and not a still , thus time was very critical.



I've learnt that rendering for stills and rendering for animations require different approaches. I've learnt about faking GI, and using scanline in a more effective way to achieve better animations.

Anyways my long term dream is to make an all CGI film, but at the moment I'm at the bottom of that mountain looking up.

I'm learning everything as I go along.

I've hit a big fork in the road, should I go all out CG or, shoot people agaist greenscreen?

Its real people vs CG people.

I'm stuck at facial rigging, its really hard to get things to work right.

The picture below was part of a test to get motion capture data to work with the model (which I downloaded as a free sample) also basic skin shader (in vray) the texture was low rez, as was the model, but for test purpose its all fine.

face.jpg


I know I can model and texture a near photoreal person, I think I can just about get motion capture data (using multiple cameras, and solving in PFtrack which can do basic motion capture)

But the hurdle is getting facial rigging to work, then there is other hurdles, hair and cloth simulation for the character (I can do cloth simulations) I don't think with ALL that mesh and simulation I can get any workable pipeline going, great for stills not animation. I need a different approach.

Been looking at machinima, I was looking at Half life 2 engine with GREAT interest, it has lip sync to audio and face posing tools, as well as real time lighting PLUS HDRI :O !! BUT this route means I have to learn a new topic, (I've got the modding part covered as 3ds max is used for it). however another drawback is the final quality will still look like a game (a very good game) which is no surprise since it runs in a game ;).

Sorry for the LONG post, not to hijack your thread, but thought I'd give you an idea was happing in my 3d world......
 
Hey Anhar, thanks for the post. I think these shots are more deserving in your own thread but thanks for putting then here.

I was a grumpy guss towards beddy time last night. I had worked all day and when I got home I broke the button on my last pair of pants. The rest don't fit anymore. Belly. So I was at the mercy of someone getting me another pair so I could go out. It was a long but otherwise productive day.

That girl almost looks cg but the movements would suggest motion capture. Not sure at this res if that is a real girl or not. The last photo is obviously photo textured, something I prefer myself, if that is the aim.

I've played Half Life 2 on XBOX and loved the story line and visuals. Just wathced (moments ago) Children of Men and saw some similarities. Half Life 2 could be made a feature film.

I figured alot of you guys are working but 4 days just bugged me last night.
Like I said, grumpy guss.

The Polar Express -2004 is one of my fav animated films. Ofcourse it's Pixar and always been a fan of Disney. Those guys are leading edge.

I'll maybe have some posts soon of stuff I'm working on but I have to be carefull not to step on my brothers feet. He has not yet officialy posted a thread for our short, but we have some out-takes and joke commercials we did while doing the scenes for the short. It's tempting but I cannot post anything at the moment.

Anyways, thanks for dropping in Anhar and glad to see you taking an interest in the video end. There's more money in commercial cg like what you've been doing, but we can still have fun doing vid's on the side right?

P.S Post your next stuff in your thread. I don't need this much attention. :)

/Actually Anhar, why don't you offer your services to some of the festival participants. Alot of those newer people need help. There's never any pay at first but deadlines give motivation to get things done and also gets your name out there a bit more. Just a thought.
 
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Just for the 3D guys.
Okay, here's a still of a side-commercial we did yestarday while shooting the other scenes. You'll have to use your imagination. If you come up with a good slogan, PM me or post and we might use it with a credit ofcourse. (He's flying a ww2 spitfire in combat, reached down and grabs a beer and turns and ...)

ken_smilin_small.jpg


Might be a still from a sequence, not color corrected or adjusted yet.
Looks like a bit of jitter there but things are in motion. We'll see.

cloud_top.jpg
 
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I've now posted my stuff over.

Is the clouds animated or just still? looks very good either way, did you get a good key out of that fabric?

Looking forward to your work man.


woops, forgot to say the girl in the video is real.. hehe :) would be worrying if she looked CG!
 
The clouds are 3D volumetric. There is a fly though but the shots been put on hold while I work on the new green screen files. I'm in render hell and will be for a few more weeks to come. I didn't like the sun flare anyways. Back at that next week I hope.

The green screen:
We have a better one but the material length was not long enough.
The one you see is from a roll that we thought had a different size. Thus it's taped together. Not very good at all. I eventually got a resonably good key using garbage matts and keying the original image onto a clean green background using Ultra 2. I did it that way so it was easier to handle in the compositing end. The shots have several layers and this method seems to work for me at this point. I am looking for a better solution for later on.
I have a problem with Ultra not allowing image sequences for input and I'm not squezzing up my still sequences to suit ultra, then unsqueezing ect.
 
man, you should give combustion a shot, its diamond keyer is really cool, I got real crappy web compressed stuff to key almost near perfect..


Oh yes good old ultra, used it once, not a bad product bit buggy but workable.
good work otherwise. Would love to see that fly through when its possible.
 
1 week to go before spyfest. So I figured wth, we don't have an official thread so here's a few grabs of my plane. It's pretty obvious I've tried for the old footage look. And that is a real guy (actor/friend) in the first shot. In fact it's Ken in post #44.


hn1x4.jpg
 
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Impressive, I think you executed that very well indeed!

How did you composite the pilot, did you track the plane and placed the pilot (shot on greenscreen?) and then layered the window frame in another pass and placed on top? so was it like:

bottom CG plane (without window frames)

Greenscreened pilot layered on top of 1st layer (cropped and tracked to CG plane layer)

Window frame final layer.
 
Thanks Anhar. I'm still playing with the grain and various settings. Hard to get it just right.

-The pilot was shot against a green screen. I brought that footage into Vegas (or was that Ultra 2) and chroma keyed the green out onto nothing. I rendered as a 32-bit image sequence that included the alpha channel. I used either .bmp or .png files. (The reason I forget is I use both.)

-In C4D I assigned the image sequence to the material color channel and also assigned it to the alpha channel (opacity in max) which used the files alpha transparency.

-Next it was a simple matter of assigning the material to a plane that had the same dimensions as the pilot footage and scaling it to the proper proportions relative to the spitfire model. Then I just stuck the texture directly inside the cockpit and oriented it.

Depending on the angle of the camera and the angle of the footage I adjusted the face of the texture to almost always point directly at the camera.

So in a way he really was in the spitfire. The model (which now included the pilot footage) and camera were animated together.
 
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gotcha, yea "billboarding" (its not the official name but its what I call it) the same way I did the girl in that low poly scene test, damn I forgot about that method, I guess it makes sense as nearly 90% of VFX is 2.5D and not strictly 3D! :)

Cool,
 
Raptor, this really came out. Looks quite authentic. I like your 2.5d technique with the pilot. Seems a heck of a lot easier that modeling him, even if at a distance from the camera. I'll have to remember that for the future. Great work!
 
Thanks Tower. ( I took hi-res stills of the pilot on all of the axis just in case I had to model him).
I was not able to pull off my big hoped money shot. I always aim for that dream shot and take what I get along the way.
In the end I never quite nailed it 100% but a couple of the sequences are on the right track. I learned alot and got something done.
We'll see how many lashes I get on the 1st.

At this point I'm thinking I'd like to skip the 3D entirely in the next fest and focus entirely on story telling but that will last about 2 weeks into it then I'm saying stuff like "you know what we need is a big stinkin UFO that comes in and blasts the crap out of these guys and..." and, well, you know how the rest goes.

Oh, now I have to make a poster. Does anyone want to make a poster in photoshop for me? Matt? yoohoo... Matt? I've got till tomorrow before upload.
It's for spyfest so nothing on a printing scale job.

...in the meantime I'll try one myself.
 
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Matt you should do it :) boy I've been watching Raptor whizzing back and forth doing stuff, just watching him has made me break into a sweat! man hes been taking on that VFX shot of the message bottle (been following from a far), so major credits go to him man!
 
Well I'm starting to relax. Think I'll take a few days to enjoy the festival but I'm already thinking what am I going to do next, Ha. Maybe I'll look at that Mograph module that oneinfiniteloop used in his clip.

And I should prep that model so people can download it if they want. I tried the file in max but some of the structures have too many polys for max8 so it rejects them. So I may have to reduce the poly count on some parts so it is max friendly.

Anhar, don't look for that cloud fly-thru. It's not there. It was going to take 1 week 24-7 to render it so I scrapped it and did an approach/intro shot then a less than believable side shot. Oh well. Deadlines are fun though.

I'll post a link when it's made available or you can watch the spyfest area and download the vid from there. In fact why not watch all of the spyfest entries?
I burn about 10 shorts per DVD and watch one DVD a night.

Anyways I'll get back to taking a break now. (I think I'm getting addicted to this place.) Must.....stop....posting....must...move legs....see....sunshine....
nah.
 
......Updates? I was hoping this wouldnt happen! Get all the way to the end, and it just stops. Its the 14th, can you post the sequence/final composites and models?
 
The scene was in a spyfest entry called 'hoffnung'. It's about 30 seconds long.
I assumed anyone interested would have gone there to view it but
you may still be able to download it here...

http://www.dvxfest.com/spyfest/loader.php?id=12000

if not it is now up on youtube (contest is over now) at a lower res here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fF-MVQyMYg

Thanks for the interest.

/.....
A bit unrelated but I also did two shots in Mike Petro's 'Briefcase...

http://www.dvxfest.com/spyfest/loader.php?id=2048

The one shot you wont see as it was a lens/spot removal thing on the briefcase.
The second shot, is where the hanger door opens and the two girls
are standing on the runway. The cloudy sky behind them was put in by me.
 
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Oh cool, that was good, I liked the part when the plane crash dives, how did you do the smoke/clouds part (the animated ones, not static ones)?

Also how did you do the ground was it some google earth texture map or something? It was very good!
 
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