Where would we be without shakes?

What would our film look like if we didn't have shake? Something like this:


And here we are in the land of dystopian green. There's a few errors to address pointed out in the image below...



...now comment, you bastards!

Deglossed around the edges

Here's a new version: better reflections, slightly dodgy AE comp instead of Shake... Animation isn't quite as embarrassing this time...


Refined rendertest...

Shadows need to be tweaked to an agreed level. This is much less on the stylized purple, more to a darker blue.

Bugger'd hand and dodgy textures fixed too. Reflection now only on the outer gloss at about 0.2 reflectivity. Shiny.


H264 compression washes out the colour something fierce.

Textures are GO!

Hokay! We can render now! I figured out what was causing the Vram to spak out every time we tried to render a scene with more than one character in place.

2 things:
Texture size
Texture location

As fantastic as the ARNE server is for centralizing everything, it can't quite handle being used as a texture cache as well as a computer can by itself. The solution is dragging the project across to the scratch and rendering locally. The trick to making this work is making sure we move any updated files back to ARNE when we're done, and double checking the project settings each time we start up - which we do anyway...

I've resized all the textures down by an average of 50%. In some cases, even more. Now that the computer doesn't have to Unwrap, filter, light, layer and render 4 4096px square textures per character at 2 characters per screen, it can actually render a frame without crashing!

Here's a bit of maths for scale - an average scene before would calculate about 201326592 bytes of information per frame. That's 0.2 gigabytes (200Mb) of data streamed over a network into random access memory for textures only. Not including lighting, shadows, geometry or visibility calculations. All that cache data is processed to make the single .tga file, which is barely 7Mb...

Now, the same looking thing is only 12582912 bytes. That's only 12Mb (0.012gb) of information to play with for a render. Much easier. The only difference is the texture dimensions.

To prove my point, this is what a production render looks like. Ignore the dodgy reflections...

planks in a trench

Buddy Flick

Working on previs most of today. This is another test of the rigs, another few tweaks and fixes, plus some useful paraphernalia to promote the film. Neil and I did these ones, did you want to do another one Brad? We left space on the board.




There's still some minor texture tweaks to make to:
-Blue & Orange's ears
-Orange's neck line
-Bump texture on Orange's face
-Orange's eye specular and reflections are doing something funny. I'll get to fixing that soon.

I think Blue's texture is ok for the moment...? I changed the file format from .jpg to .tga and we made his eyes brown again.

Orangey goodness

Here's Orange. Just because he's badass. I changed the size of his gun and updated all the textures to his most recent iteration.

Also, his hand was broken. I noticed while pre-vis-ing...

Refer-a-Ninja

Remember Mini Ninjas? I can recall being quite excited about it, maybe some time last year. Then it was forgotten...

...Then I found it for $30. It is so freakin' awesome!! You should definitely play it, but more relevant to this - have a look at the art style. This is very much the rendering style I think we should be aiming for. I'll bring it in to uni some day, so we can play and have a good look at it.

Pump Ya Full of Texture

Blue's finished texture and bump, can be fiddled with later depending on shots etc.

Falling short on cash, but not on physics

Well, it works. Whatcha think?

It's on vimeo too.

Cheap expensiveness

Ok, the title doesn't make any sense. But basically I've got the wallet dynamics down and ready to go...ish.

I'd better do that shot myself, just in case something goes wrong.



Whatcha think? Just a dummy texture on the photo until we have something else to go with.

Camo?

This is my hat in the ring regarding Camo on the rabbits. I'm a little iffy either way. Brad was right that it does make it a little busy, but by the same token the plain orange might be... well, too plain.

Ideas?



One idea later, this is what happened. Brad suggested that the bigger camo-style shapes work better, and perhaps take it down 30%. I took it a step further and took it down to 50%... 30% looked too similar.

Bump N Text 01

So as you guys can see the texture I did that bombi slapped on his animation in the earlier post pulls the texture around its neck a bit(im still workin on this).

It may not seem like much but it has alot of work in it. I'm going to go on a rant here...

Ok so first I did the texture and stuff, including an 'army' like pattern on his cloth although when i finished it, it just looked off. Just this morning I deleted the whole pattern and have decided it should be plain orange. Why? Because it draws emphasis off the whole form, there's so much value and shape in his arms then the rest of his body that it just looks ridiculous. This is my opinion but I'm feeling pretty strong about it at the moment.

Also since we are creating 3D, a medium that can look extremely plastic looking at times I first decided to try and give some bump on his fur....which turned out to look like he was made a grass or had just been beaten with a the end of a metal cleaver. So I thought about it and came up with the concept of 'bump noise'. If giving him a bump on his fur looks weird, I would need to imply that his fur is actually smooth and everything else is dirty and gritty. So the concept of 'bump noise' is to break up the shapes of his clothes and helmet (maybe even the environment to some degree) with a very light gritty texture. You can see if on his helmet, and that same texture is applied to everything but his fur.

Also did alot of tweaking with his cloth bump which I think has turned out quite nicely, now all I have to work on is his scratches and bump for helmet and vest. I also changed his eyes to the same green in the concept art cause green goes well with orange(you can see it on a colour wheel).

Thoughts or anything ive missed out on?

Same noise, pretty texture

Same clip as before, except this time he's textured and moves his hands a little. Texture is still only rough, but it gives a better idea than just a flat orange.

Rendered with a single Maya software pass and a single directional light with a 2 degree angle for raytraced shadows, depth 5.

Enjoy!

Orange Texture test

Legging it

Leggy run cycle

Modeled, rigged, textured and animated in 2 days. Given, it still needs to be tweaked and fixed, but not a bad effort I thought.

Yes, there are still some dodgy paint weights. Yes, there's a seam along the inside of his pants. Work in progress...

TARGA CAN GO SUCK A BIG FAT...

OK! So it turns out .tga sucks for textures. It doesn't save a proper transparency map. Use .png for anything with a transparency map. Or just another .tga map if you really want to. I might.

We'll still use .tga for exporting the final renders. Just not for texturing.

Trench Post Final

I do 3D good!:P

Barber Dwyer

One last prop for today. Well... 2, really. Some barbed wire, available in 2 lengths! The shadow is retarded, but hopefully it won't be noticeable when we use it.

Completely stumped

Another short prop post. This time it's a dead tree. And no external maps for this one, no sirree, this is all procedural texturing. (That means it's faster to render and a smaller file size!)

I thought it would be funny to blow a hole in it too.

Dead tree...

Brick wall prop

I did this at home on ye olde maya 2009. It should go into 2010 with no worries. Procedural texture with a targa bump.

Brick wall.

Orange's Family Photo

Hey guys, tell me what you think.