CADA Showcase

My Mask Maker renders ended up being used for the CADA showcase (yay!).  The showcase itself was a huge success.  Thanks to all the industry folk who made it out to see our work and grab up the talent.  And a major congratulations to class of 2012 for kicking some serious ass.  

Oh btw

My program director asked for some stills from Mask Maker.  So I burped up these two for her, which are really unfinished.  But you can see that a linear light setup + mia material makes an enormous difference in comparison to last years renders.  Gearing up to post thesis stills soon.  Stay tuned.

Control Room Shot

So I've completely failed at getting anything done over the winter break, and am now scrambling to get everything off my chest before I dive into the void that is thesis. This was the final for my Materials class last semester - it is also one of the million shots in my thesis.

The reason I didn't post this shot earlier is because I had a bitch of a time with my specular pass - it was a combination of having a slow camera move, perpedicular camera angle, tight geometry, and lights hitting those edges at almost a 90 degree angle.  I tried everything from loosening edges, to upping samples 1:3, filter to mitchell, I blurred my HDR, clamped my HDR, took out my HDR..  Then I got rid of the MR framebuffers and retextured everything with Maya blinns.. Still no dice :P  My teacher suggested I render at full HD and change my anti-alias contrast to 0.04 (magic?).

While going through all this, I noticed that geo with the carpaint shader had absolutely no buzzing - no frame buffer magic, just took out the base color and left the spec/specspec on.  So in my last ditch effort to save this pass, I retextured the small buzzy things with carpaint, rendered at full HD, took out all shadows, changed the angle of the lights, and blacked out the problem geometry because it ain't worth my time and... voila!  CLEAN SPECULAR PASS.  Even if there is buzzing, you can't see it with the flickering lights.

Well that was a shit show.  Anyways, here's the shot and the breakdown.

Control from ikonoklasm on Vimeo.

Le breakdown from ikonoklasm on Vimeo.

Thesis thesis

Needless to say, I haven't finished the Mask Maker project.  But I will use the models in my thesis..

Anyways, I'm not going into details on my thesis concept because it's abstract and nobody cares.  The short of it is that I'm doing an architectural piece where I'm designing 5 spaces and doing a fly through.  Yes this is influenced by Alex Roman's 3rd and 7th, but I'm going for a more dream-like aesthetic.  We'll see if I can pull that off though :).

The spaces consist of a submarine, a greenroom, changing rooms, a theater and an atrium.  It begins in the submarine filling slowly with water and once submerged, the camera transitions into a dreamworld of realistic architectural spaces that have surreal elements and impossible shapes.  The transitions between rooms will also have to be clever and seamless, it is all about giving a sense of confusion and weightlessness.. But I'll get into concept discussion later.  Like I said, we'll see if I can pull it off - if not, at least I'll have some pretty arch-vis stuff.

I did one shot of the submarine for my Materials class last semester which I will post shortly.  Ironically, the main reference I used for the submarine, turned out to be a reactor control console from the Manhattan project ("Slouching Towards Bethlehem", photo essay by Martin Miller).  The first image below is the reference, the second is a rendered still.

B Reactor Control Console, Source of Nagasaki Bomb Plutonium, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, WA 1944

I will try to post my progress as I go.  I'm still not sure what I'm going to call it.  At first I first titled it "Control", then "Submersion".  But in light of recent events, I may change it to "Subversion".. (nerdy pun, I know :)

Final(ish) Forward Tracking Shot

This is the final composite I handed in this week.  It's a little dark with compression but close enough.
I ended up not really using my RGB light passes, I added a warm tint but that was it.  I used Nuke's Defocus node for the lens blur, and Erode to get some bloom on the highlights, but I still want to experiment and see if I can get a really shallow DOF for my other shots.  I've been told Frischluft is really good.  I stuck a bluish vignette on the edges and that's pretty much it.  I will probably add some film grain, or clean up the actual shadow grain in my renders.  From an artistic stand point I'm pretty happy with it, but from a technical stand point there are a few things to tweak.

I'm hoping to bang out the rest of the shots in the next few weeks.

Venetian masks: WIP from ikonoklasm on Vimeo.

RGB Light passes: forward tracking shot

A quick explanation of RGB passes for my non-CG friends.  In CG you're generally dealing with RGB (additive) images, where red green and blue values (black to white) are stored in separate channels within the image.  These channels can be extracted in most common image editing programs like Photoshop.  In compositing programs like Nuke, you can quickly pipe these channels into different "effects".  It's a quick and easy way to separate objects and lights, and apply color grades or whatever to just those things.  This is obviously not the final render, it is a render pass that is composited over other passes to create the final result.

On a side note, I love Nuke.  Or maybe just node-based systems - they basically work the same way OOP works, except with a nice node graph representation - no chasing function calls and parameters and forgetting where you are in the stack.  It's all laid out with a high level visual representation of what the hell is going on.  It would be a pretty cool way to write code too, keeping things a bit more conceptual.  It is certainly good for debugging, and I know there are all sorts of tools out there, but they have horrible GUI's that could only sprout in the mind of an engineer.  But I digress...  there are pretty pictures to see.

For the pros, you probably noticed I left my specular and reflections in the light passes.  That was an accident which I had to fix in compositing.

Venetian Masks: RGB light passes from ikonoklasm on Vimeo.

Light tests with camera animation

I've been busy with school/work, and never got around to posting these light tests from a few weeks ago.  There are no textures in these shots but it is fun to see what it looks like in motion.  I will probably rework the shots after school is done, and slow the camera a bit when I have time to focus on this project (gahh I cannot wait!).  There are also more macro and rack focus shots planned, but these are the three I'm pushing for the sake of time/sanity.  The color grading is off from shot to shot, as I was playing with RGB light passes in Nuke and have apparently not wrapped my head around linear workflow.  I'll post those too since they're neat to look at.  This week I am scrambling to finish textures and compositing (and finals).  More posts soon.  Wish me luck!

Venetian mask project: light tests from ikonoklasm on Vimeo.

Initial lighting passes

I spent this week finalizing the composition of each shot and doing some initial lighting.  There is not enough time in the day for this.

I'm using maya spotlights and area lights, no FG or IBLs (as of yet).  I tried to keep the raytraced shadows to the key lights and depth maps for fill, but each shot requires something different.  You can spot the grain in some areas (shhh!).  I'll continue to tweak, but plan on getting some feedback first.

One of the easier shots to light, there's not much going on other than some bright top lighting and fill.  The camera orbits 1/3 of the way around a table of masks.

I thought this shot would be the easiest to deal with, but I'm never right.  I rearranged the scene multiple times before finally settling, only to find that getting fill/bounce into all the crevices was near impossible without light linking everything.  There are still vary dark areas but I'm hoping to get better results in Nuke rather than to continue noodling lights into the AM.  This is to be a rack focus.

This will be the vertical track.  I probably spent the least amount of time on this shot, as the composition and lighting is pretty simple.  The wall is curved and I'm using the medico and pulcinella masks to get some parallax.

This is the first shot I composed and lit (you can probably tell too).  It will be a forward tracking shot along the wall - this is frame 1.  It took a few days just to compose, and I had to model a few extra details to get some variation going in the middle masks.

Same shot last frame.