Digimator's Renders

Moved to a new location..

2010-10-05T04:09:00.000+08:00

I've moved the blog to the following address:

www.neerajpattani.tumblr.com

This blog will not be updated anymore. All future posts will be posted on the new site.

Lighting & Compositing Demoreel 2010

2010-03-06T14:05:00.000+08:00

Visit here to watch it in HD.

Melon composite in Shake

2010-01-10T13:08:00.000+08:00

It has been a while since I was busy with my school's final year project. I made the decision to use Shake as my compositing package so I had to learn it. I decided to take my old melon render passes and try compositing them with a different look in Shake. Here's the result:

The color correction nodes are slightly different than those from Fusion so I'm still trying to get used to it. Also, I find myself slightly uncomfortable with the masking tools. In Fusion, I could use an elipse mask tool to create a vignette and it was that easy easy. In Shake, I had to create a RGrad node and use that as an alpha channel on a black color node. I don't know if there is any other way to go about doing this, so if anyone has any suggestion, do let me know :)

I've also set-up a YouTube account for my final year project: www.youtube.com/angelafyp

My blog for my final year project is still ongoing: www.angelafyp.blogspot.com

Final Year Project (FYP) Blog

2009-11-08T15:05:00.000+08:00

I'm now onto my final year project in my school. I'm required to make an animated short. My main focus on that would be look development, lighting and rendering.

This is the address: www.angelafyp.blogspot.com

All my development work, from concept to completion, for that project will be posted on that blog. My personal works will still be posted here.

Cheers!

Procedural Displacement

2009-11-02T21:36:00.001+08:00

I was messing around with displacement shaders using mental Ray when I decided to test it out by creating a rough rocky mountain texture.

So I went onto creating a NURBS plane and sculpting it briefly to block out the shape.

I created a displacement shading network. I mostly used 3D textures provided by Maya and had them interconnected.

I set up the mental Ray physical sun with final gather turned on. When I did my first test render, the displacement did not show up correctly. So I went to the approximate editor to increase the displacement quality. Boy, the render time was expensive!! Roughly 20 minutes. Here’s the result.

Neon & Chrome Update

2009-10-17T12:57:00.001+08:00

I updated the shading to tone down the reflectivity. I also added the poster textures. And for a test render, I added a few area lights with quadratic decay as the tube lights, two spot lights for the car headlamps, one over soft bluish fill light and rendered with final gather. Again, it’s a rough piece:

I need more colors in the scene. Right now, it looks very desaturated and dull and the focal point is not established correctly in the scene.

Neon and Chrome Challenge

2009-10-16T02:15:00.001+08:00

So I finally finished the fruit bowl scene which was modeled by Dan Wade. The original image is uploaded here. Comments are critiques are most welcome.

With the fruit bowl challenge done, I decided to work on another one of Jeremy Birn’s lighting challenges on CGTalk.com – Neon and Chrome. The challenge can be found here. This scene is modeled by Christophe Desse and Matthew Thain.

So the first thing I did was to UV map the pieces of geometry which were going to have texture details. Next, I moved onto creating the procedural textures for the walls and the pavement.

This is what I have so far. The car has a car paint shader applied to it. Also at the moment, everything else has a blinn shader applied to them and the surface properties have not yet been tweaked. I also finalised my camera placement before I started UV mapping. I decided to light quickly and turn on final gather to see what the render would look like roughly. Here’s the result:

The only texture that is hand-painted using Photoshop is the road texture. Everything else is procedural. The reflections and other surface properties definitely need tweaking. I’ll continue to work on the textures further tomorrow.

Fruit Bowl Almost Complete

2009-10-10T14:43:00.001+08:00

I had time yesterday to work on the fruit bowl scene. I created several passes for the render - key light pass, fill light pass, rim light pass, global illumination (GI) pass, z-depth pass and an occlusion pass. I also decided on my render composition size. I wanted an extremely wide composition. All the objects in the scene are procedurally shaded, except for the bump map on the leaf which was painted using Photoshop.

For the keylight pass, I had one directional light casting yellowish sunlight with slightly harsh shadows.

For the fill light pass, I had about 46 spot lights in a dome casting soft blue light with soft shadows.

For the rim light pass, I isolated the fruits only and placed a spot light behind them. I also had it adjusted to show off the subsurface scattering on the grapes.

For the GI pass, I had three spotlights emitting GI photons only from different directions at the fruit bowl. I had also enabled final gathering to achieve better results.

This is the ambient occlusion pass.

And this is what the final result looks like. I added fog and a vignette to bring focus to the fruit bowl.

However, I wouldn't call this done because of one minor mistake:

One of the cherries is floating above the plate. This was pretty frustrating. I should be able to be done by tonight.

Adjusting lights on Fruit Bowl

2009-09-27T13:12:00.000+08:00

I received feedback from a friend of mine about the shaders - banana texture looked too stretched and the cherry reflections looked too sharp. So I worked on these shaders and finished up the rest of the undone ones.

So now that I've got my shaders all set-up procedurally, I was changing and revising my light set-up. I made the shadows of my key light softer and reduced the intensity of my dome of fill lights. Here's the before and after comparison:

Before

After

The shadow quality is still not there as you can see that they are noisy and jittery. Since this was going to be an outdoor scene, I was thinking of having the shadows of trees and leaves be cast on the scene - as if this bowl of fruits was laid on a picnic mat.

Hence, I plugged a noise texture into the light as a gobo to cast an irregular pattern on the fruits. Also, I removed my keylight, which was the directional light, and replaced it with a spot light. I made it emit photons for global illumination to work and here's the result for now:

The shaders definitely need some tweaking. There;s too much color bleeding from almost every fruit, especially the apple.

This is it for now. I plan to refine the lighting and shaders much more.

Fruit Bowl - All Procedural Textures

2009-09-25T20:45:00.000+08:00

I decided to texture this entire scene procedurally to see how closely I can match the textures of the object to that of the real world. Hence, I removed the banana bitmap texture and created a procedural shader for it from scratch. Then, I made a shader for the cloth as well. Right now, it's pretty simple, but I blocked in the basic colors.

Here's the shading network for all the procedural shaders in the scene:

Also, I decided to change the lighting. I removed the HDRI globe. I created a directional light and adjusted the parameters so that the fruits can be take the best possible form with the shading and shadows.

After that, I created a dome of about 45 spotlights covering the scene and set that to cast a soft blue fill light.

I then rendered the scene, which took me 8 min 50 sec to render, without any final gathering or global illumination. Here's the result:

The scene looks a little overexposed. Some of the shadows are still too harsh and some things in the scene have yet to be shaded.

I plan to work on adding indirect illumination through global illumination later on after I complete shading every single object in the scene.

Shading Grapes using Subsurface Scattering

2009-09-22T02:50:00.000+08:00

I made a shader for the grapes. Done procedurally with subsurface scattering.

To see the subsurface scattering in effect, I placed two spotlights, one at the back and one at the front of the bunch of grapes. It took me quite some time to get the look right as this is my first time doing subsurface scattering. But in the end, this result satisfied me for the time being. Here's the shading network:

And here's the scene update with the rest of the fruits and backdrop with the same lighting set-up of one spot and one HDRI dome:

Now that I've gotten the shader of the grapes somewhat there, I think I would be more confident on handling the shader for the cherry. A lot of the objects in this scene would be procedurally shaded, hence I was thinking if it would be a good idea to shade everything procedurally, including the bananas and highlight that on my reel.

More later. Feedback and critiques are welcome. Do email them to me.

Bowl of Fruit - Lighting Challenge from Jeremy Birn (www.3drender.com)

2009-09-21T05:47:00.000+08:00

School work has finally finished and I'm having a short break, hence I'm working on my lighting reel.

I came across this website, www.3drender.com, owned by Jeremy Birn, the author of the book, Digital Lighting and Rendering. He hosts lighting challenges on the site for people to download the scenes/models and practice their lighting on. So I decided to download the oldest challenge, the bowl of fruits.

Modeled by Dan Wade

I thought this scene would be a good start to practice my lighting and shading on. Hence, I started to shade the models. I first started with the bananas. They were NURBS, in fact, most of the scene is NURBS. So I converted them to polygons and started to do the UVs. After which, I went downstairs to eat a banana and take photographs of the banana skin for use as textures.

After I handled the banana, I moved on to shading the apple. This was done procedurally. I then did the pear, which was also done procedurally. The pear was a polygon, so I converted it into a NURBS surface and then started shading it. This made my texturing process a lot easier. Here's the shading network for the apple and the pear:

Just to see the kind of look I was getting, I plugged in a HDR, added a spotlight and rendered with mental ray. Here's the result:

If anyone has any feedback on this, please write to me so that I can try to improve the shaders. Also, the cloth texture is a placeholder.

More later.

Warrior - School Assignment

2009-09-17T23:31:00.000+08:00

This is what I did for my school assignment. Maya and mental Ray. Based on a character sketch I did. Took 25 mins to render. NO post-processing. I was supposed to use ZBrush to add some details to the armor, but I did not have time.

New Portfolio Site

2009-09-15T23:16:00.000+08:00

I set up a new portfolio site:

www.neerajpattani.daportfolio.com

This site will contain my best works. Of course this blog will still be in progress.

Cheers!

Melons - Edited

2009-09-03T12:57:00.000+08:00

I received feedback that some of the melons were floating. And the shadows were a little too blotch due to final gathering. Hence, I fixed the floating melon and increased the final gathering quality and the point density. It took me 1 hr 15 min and 45 sec to render just the beauty image.

Melons - Complete

2009-08-26T01:52:00.007+08:00

I changed the camera resolution and angle to get a better view. I also changed the dark green stripes to be even darker. I changed the orientation of some of the melons for a better composition. When I was satisfied, I rendered them in four layers:

I composited all the passes in Fusion. I felt I was loosing the contrasty feeling in the image, hence I color corrected it slightly to get that feel. Depth of field was also added to enhance composition and focal point. Image uploaded here. Comments are most welcome :)

Melon Shader Update + Render

2009-08-25T22:38:00.001+08:00

I decided to work more on my melon shader and expanded the network. Here's what it looks like:

Basically, I added more variation to the patterns and somemore overlays on the dark green stripes.

Next, I thought that since I was going to do a tutorial on how to make this shader, I figured it would be good if I did a nice render for the front page. Hence, I created a scene filled with water melons of shapes and different sizes and placed them on the floor. I adjusted the shader properties to get the look and feel of a melon surface.

Once I had my rough composition, I decided to light up the scene. This time, I used a HDRI dome as the key light rather than fill. I added another spot light to act as a fill from the front since the bottom half of the melons would fall under shadows. This helped, but it was still dark. Hence, I added another spotlight and light-linked it to only the melons and not the floor. I rendered in 3 passes and composited them in Photoshop. Here's the test:

3 Render Passes composited with a vignette - No other post-processing

I'm pretty satisfied with this image. I did not want to light it evenly as I wanted to maintain some contrast in the image. The floor was also procedurally textured. From feedback, I realised that I need to make my dark green stripes a little darker. Also, I was thinking if I should re-work on my composition and do a higher-res rendering.

Melon Shader

2009-08-23T01:13:00.002+08:00

Been a long time since I updated this blog, due to internet access.

So anyway, my school requires me to create a tutorial on some advanced aspect of animation. So I was thinking if I could do a tutorial on creating a watermelon shader procedurally. I was very inspired from a book on RenderMan that I have and it shows how to write a watermelon shader from scratch using code. ( Name of the book is The RenderMan Shading Language Guide by Don Rudy Cortes and Saty Raghavachary)

Though I don't want to code, I thought it would be interesting to cover the importance of procedural textures and the Maya hypershade and shading networks. So I looked up for a few reference images and started to work on creating a shader right away. Here's the result:

And here's the shading network for the above melon:

The current layers I have in the shader are: (from bottom-most, a noise layer, veins, dark green stripes and some fractal bump-mapping which looks over-used) I also added a ramp to create the poles of the model dark and black.

This is not a complete shading network. I plan to add a lot more to the network to bring out the subtle details of a melon. I was also thinking of exploring subsurface scattering, but at a much later stage if time permits.

Sci Fi Robot

2009-08-03T12:16:00.008+08:00

Well, so I was having a pretty boring Sunday, so I decided to do something. I was searching online for some pre-modeled scenes to practice my lighting on when I came across www.3drender.com

From here, I downloaded the sci-fi scene, modeled by Juan Carlos Silva. I tried a few lighting schemes, but I wasn't too happy with it. I planned a pre-visualised a camera move, but it wasn't turning out too good. Then I realised why everything wasn't working - I did not have any focus in mind. There's no point lighting a scene without a focus. And since a robot was included in the scene, I thought why not make that the main focus?

Thus, I planned a short animation sequence in my mind, for which I needed to rig the robot. I began. This was the first time I rigged something which was organic, non-organic and moved on wheels all at the same time. It was a very challenging procedure, especially because I wanted the robot to have a very cartoony appearance.

Robot in its default rest position

Robot with first pose test

Robot with second pose test

I paid a lot of attention to rigging the wheels because I felt that since it had no legs, the wheels would be very important in conveying emotions.

That's it for now. This took me pretty much half a day. I have yet to paint the skin weights.

Robot and rest of the sci-fi model: Juan Carlos Silva from www.3drender.com

Interrogation Room

2009-07-28T13:06:00.007+08:00

So I finally did some lighting on an interior scene created by someone else. In this case, Naf, my classmate, made the models and textures for this scene and the layout was done by her too. I requested her if I could do the lighting on it and she agreed fortunately! :)

So I got started. I knew that I wanted to give this place an uncomfortable feel, hence I chose my color palette and decided to start lighting. I also did a simple camera animation with some changes in focal length as I wanted to play around with the depth of field in post.

I used final gathering. Also, I felt the need to render the scene in different layers as the chair in the foreground wasn't getting enough backlight and my focal point was being affected. Hence I added a spotlight and rendered the chair as a separate element. I also added a zdepth pass for compositing depth blur in post.

After the render (using mental Ray), I brought everything to Fusion and composited everything. I animated the lens flare by hand, but after a while, it got tedious and it wasn't so accurate either. So, I motion tracked the last few frames of the shot and had the lens flare follow the track. The tricky part in this whole compositing process was of course to animate the depth of field effect.

Here's the final footage:

(if the video below is being cut off, please visit www.youtube.com/digimator to view it.)

Rings

2009-07-20T20:47:00.004+08:00

I decided to do dedicate something to my girlfriend, and I had this idea of two rings. This is not the final image. I plan to work on it more to tell a story by adding more elements and working on the lighting to give the mood and feel.

Modeled in Maya. The textures are 4K each for the ring because I wanted the quality to be pristine. The diamonds need a little work though. Rendered using mental Ray. No post-processing done as yet - pure render spat out from the renderer.

Toon Rendering

2009-05-30T17:09:00.006+08:00

Recently one of my school projects required me to do a short animated film in a group. My role in the team was modeling/lighting/texturing/rendering/compositing. The film was basically done by animating characters traditionally and the backgrounds in 3D. To have a consistency in style, a stylized look for 3D rendering was required. Hence, I began my research in toon shading using Maya. I faced a few problems such as lighting and getting the shadows right, but I fixed most of them.

This car was modeled by my friend, Gregory Poon. I constructed the set, did the mountains background in Photoshop and rendered everything using Maya software. Finally, everything was composited in Fusion. The original clip has camera shake, which I did using an expression to randomly offset the camera's position.

The exterior set of a gas station on a highway just before a death valley in the United States. The shadows were blurred during compositing in Fusion. Entire shot done by me, including concept, layout, modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, and compositing.

The Death Valley sign. Still facing the issue of jagged-edged shadows.

These two are interior shops inside the gas station. For the first shot, everything was done by me. The hand is the same hand used in the previous iSellfish project where the shop-owner puts the bag of fish on the counter. For the second shot, the character was designed and traditionally animated by Angeline Chong. The rest of it was all 3D and done by me.

I'll update here once the video is uploaded on YouTube.

Z-brush Old Man

2009-05-28T00:55:00.004+08:00

Okay, I've been really busy with school stuff and preparation for my summer internship at MIT. I'm trying to get some stuff uploaded on YouTube but I'm facing problems. I'll fix those as soon as I can.

Anyway, I had been playing around with Z-brush in more depth. I started working on the default super average man provided by Z-brush and started sculpting it to make him look like an old man.

I used my Wacom tablet to do this. I've only worked on the neck-up area. I have yet to modify the nose, ears, cheeks, chins and pretty much the rest of his body. I'm pretty happy with the result, however I do wish to continue working on this elderly dude once I have the time.

Legrand-Simon LS-60 Complete!

2009-04-17T00:12:00.004+08:00

It's finally done.

I wanted the plane to have a showroom look, as if it were on display on a turntable. I changed the lighting set up. I made a three point set up. A spotlight as the key, the HDRI dome as the fill and another spotlight as the fill. I set up the renders in 5 layers, including z-depth. I had ground occlusion and plane occlusion as separated passes so that I could lower their intensity during compositing.

It took quite a while to render - at least 2 days. I then jumped into Fusion (I love this program) and composited everything:

And then I thought, why not do something different? Thus, I played around with the zoom lens of the 3D camera and rendered my image in few passes again. During compositing, I gave it a different lighting feel:

Hope you like this image. It can be found here. Do feel free to comment on this :)

Interior Updates

2009-04-13T01:32:00.003+08:00

I decided to adjust the shaders to give it a better look. I changed all the blinn shaders assigned to the body of the plane to car paint shaders. Then, I adjusted the window settings to have refractions and such. I did not assign the car paint shader to the wings because I thought the wings shouldn't be so reflective and have that car paint look, so I left it as blinn and adjusted the reflectivity settings to be low and blurry.

Next, I moved onto creating the interiors. Some of the textures of the outside could be seen inside, so I had to model some parts to hide that:

Plane with Interior

Brighter Interior

I shall continue to refine the interior tomorrow :)

Aircraft Test Render Turntable

2009-04-12T17:02:00.002+08:00

This is a rough lighting set up for the aircraft that I'm working. To view it in HD (ie much sharper quality), please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcgN2a5rshs and switch to HD mode by clicking the HD switch at the bottom right of the player :)

More Lighting Tests

2009-04-11T02:19:00.001+08:00

I received feedback from my friends that the previous renders made the plane look like a toy plane. So I scaled it up, switched on the HDRI background and adjusted the camera angle :)

Lighting Tests on the Aircraft

2009-04-10T23:18:00.002+08:00

Sorry, I was just too excited to light up my aircraft :D Here are a few test renders. Definitely need some work:

All the images are rendered with mental Ray and with HDRI lighting. The details on the wings are through the use of bump maps. I still haven't changed the tail color yet. And, I feel the wheel color don't quite suit. On top of that, I've yet to model the interiors.

Can't wait to finish it and render it :)

Decals & Stickers on Windows

2009-04-09T15:26:00.004+08:00

I've been having fun at textures and I just decided to go with the flow. Since I wanted the plane to have a sports kind of look, I went on to texture the windows and the windshield:

Since this would have been my first attempt at texturing a vehicle properly (other than the spaceship previously for which I had strict deadlines to adhere to), I want it to signify me. I want it to represent me, and what I do. So if you observe closely, my name and my identity is all over the place. If you look closely on the front part of the plane on the side, I made a decal that says "supporter of:" and then the logos of the various software I use such as Maya, AE, RealFlow, Photoshop, Fusion and boujou. This is meant as a subtle humour kind of thing. All the decals and stickers textures are made in Photoshop.

What I'm most proud about this process is that I went on to UV map every single aspect of the plane, even the windows and the windshield. Notice the black lining on the door frame just before the window starts. That is supposed to be the rubber strip for the seal. I'm very proud of this personal project. More to come soon :)

Legrand-Simon LS-60 - Texture Progression

2009-04-08T17:40:00.004+08:00

Its holidays for me at the moment, and I thought I would finish some of my incomplete works that I did not get a chance to touch due to school projects.

So anyway, I carried on to texture my aircraft. I wanted to go for a very sports feel - as if its a sports airplane with decals and stickers all over. At the same time, I wanted to give it a circus feel.

I had to UV map every part before moving onto Photoshop. I'm starting to get used to the UV mapping process after working a lot on it during my school projects for the past two months. Here is the update:

That's all I've done so far. The wings aren't textured properly yet. I still have to UV map the wings and the wheels. I plan to remodel the propellor because I received feedback that it looks too small and puny. Once that is done, I would model the interior and texture whatever that is left.

Still a long process, but shouldn't be a problem. More later :)

iSellfish Test Animations - Compilation Video

2009-04-03T22:58:00.003+08:00

Here it is... finally...

Apparently YouTube did not allow my audio to be played, so the audio that you hear belongs to YouTube. Feel free to comment :) Enjoy!

If the video cant be viewed here, do visit www.youtube.com/digimator to view it

Been busy - 1st 3D Short Film

2009-04-02T03:34:00.007+08:00

Hello everyone. I've been busy for the past two months. My friends and I have been working on our first computer animated short film as part of our end of year project. However, neither of us did not release anything on the web because we decided to follow strict rules of keeping production confidential until it's finished. Even though submission have passed, we did not manage to complete the film due to unfinished renders. Hence, we're going to continue working on this film until it is polished and finished.

I've just finished creating a short video compilation of most of the things that I've contributed to this short film. The video mostly consists of early test animations. I'm trying to get it uploaded to YouTube. Once it's done, I'll post it up here.

Meanwhile, let me share with you a little about this story. The people working on this short production are Dion Heng, Gregory Poon, Angeline Chong, Wendy Chan and myself. This story is about four fishes who are strongly bonded and are living in a fish tank in a fish shop. They are the last fish to be sold as the shop is having a clearance sale. The story takes a turn when a little girl by the name of Sarah walks in and chooses a fish for herself - the leader of the fishtank. Seeing this, the others do all they can to save him. I'll leave the rest for you to find out when we finish the film.

Here are some of the things that I created for this film:

Fish Net - textured in Photoshop and rendered with raytraced shadows

Ceiling light in the fish shop

Flower pots - for exterior set of the street

Initially, our story involved a boy character by the name of James. So I modeled him in Maya. The main issue was his hair. I had never done hair before. We did not have enough time to do hair simulation. Hence, I decided to model it out of polygons. However at first, it turned out extremely ugly so I decided to use paint effects approach.

James' hair - paint effects

But this method lagged the entire system and I figured that it would be a hard time when it came to animating and rendering. Moreover, we were planning to use mental Ray to render the entire film but paint effects aren't supported by mental Ray. It could be solved through compositing (which is what I did in the case of the fish tank interior where I had paint effects weeds rendered in standard Maya software and the rest of the scene using mental Ray and then everything was composited later) but it would give rise to unnecessary problems.

Thus, I decided to try modeling his hair using the polygon approach again, and this time, it did not turn out that bad.

James' hair - polygonal approach

As for the shop layout and design, we initially thought that a checkered floor with newly painted walls would look good. But then, the shop was having a clearance sale. It wouldn't make sense for it to look new if things were meant to be cleared out. Secondly, the checkered floor texture would look like somewhat in the process of UV mapping where one would apply the checkerboard texture. It did not look right:

Initial design of fish shop interior - fans modeled by Gregory Poon

Thus, I changed the entire look of it by making the floor wooden and the walls brown to have an old feeling to the place. There were way too many things in the scene. I had dressed the set so that it would look natural. Of course the props were done by my group mates. I tried some lighting tests using mental Ray:

Lighting test - without props

I wanted the shop to have a wet floor. It's a fish shop - there has to be water. This explains the wet looking floor above. However as you can see, there are no props rendered. This is because I turned them off. It lagged the scene and slowed it down tremendously. I decided to try it with props turned on though.

Lighting test - with props

Maya crashed eventually, stating that there was very little memory left for it to survive. So I decided to move on to tank lighting as we were running out of time.

For the tank lighting, I had to make it look like underwater. From my research and observation, I learnt that there are three things that would make a scene look like underwater:

1) Caustic Lighting
2) Atmospheric Fog
3) Floating Particulate Nature

However, I felt that due to space constraints in a tank, there normally wouldn't be atmospheric fog unless the water is murky. Hence, I took that point out. I jumped into After Effects to create that caustic light pattern as a texture which I plugged into the light in Maya. Here is an example. This is the first scene of the tank which I lit:

Image also uploaded here

This is the completed scene, rendered using mental Ray and composited in Fusion. I'll explain the breakdown in my next post as I still have to gather images to support my explanation.

Since I had time constraints, I did not try out global illumination or final gathering. I decided to stick with the traditional lighting methods of key, fill and caustic lights. For the key light, I used one directional light as the sun light. For fill lights, I used about twenty five point lights in an array with low intensity values. Lastly, I had five area lights with the caustic pattern plugged in from all directions. This is by far the most complicated light set up I've worked on.

That's it for now. I'll post more later - probably tomorrow or the day after.

Norman Georgio - 3D Character Model Complete

2009-03-06T20:33:00.011+08:00

So I finally finished my Norman character, complete with textures and an almost fully functional rig. I spent a lot of time rigging this guy, and I managed to finish all of it except his head. I did create tongue controls by figuring out which constraints to use and by a couple of set driven keys. I did not have time to do the paint weights properly, as submission was extremely near. So here are a few snaps of my dear Norman :)

Complete Norman model

Norman rig and controls

Pose Test

Pose Test

I was trying out a few blendshapes for facial animation. Just when I thought I was going on the right track, I realised that I had rigged the head in the wrong order, thus I had to delete all my blendshapes and re-do them:

Wrong set of blendshapes

Norman Head Close-up

Norman Facial Test

Here's a short animation I did on Norman walking. I did this is roughly two hours. It's not complete yet though.

When I get more time, I'll complete this properly with animation :)

Norman Update

2009-03-02T01:50:00.003+08:00

I have added onto Norman, my 3D character. I have modeled its clothes, shoes, fingers, legs, etc. All of these are attached to the body so that when I rig and bind it, everything follows. I am not intending to do cloth simulation, so I guess this method shouldn't be a problem. Here are some screenshots:

I started on the UV mapping for this character, and go stuck midway. It's hard as this is my first time doing UV mapping. Lots of work to do... shall probably continue tomorrow.

Night Scene Painting

2009-03-01T01:19:00.002+08:00

The line drawing was given to me. I painted it to make it look like a night scene. Done using Photoshop using a Wacom tablet.

Spaceship DR-2009

2009-03-01T01:02:00.005+08:00

I did all the above in one night.

I had the four orthographic views to create this spaceship. I separated the four images using Photoshop and alligned it in Maya. I used a NURBS spehere for the nose and roughly sculpted the shape before converting it to polygons. At this stage, I regretted doing that because I had a lot of edge flow to fix. I could have just used a polygon cylinder instead.

So anyway, I modeled everything from the nose onwards. I had lots of problem completing the last part of the spaceship, so I decided to use a separate polygon cyclinder instead. This workd out well. After finishing the wings and the landing-thingie, I cut up all the pieces and modified them for those different-panels-stuck-together look.

After the entire model was complete, I roughly laid out the UVs and textured everything in Photoshop. But apparently, I realised later on that the textures were in the wrong direction.

I brought everything into Vue and made a simple desert environment as the background and rendered the image you see above.

Here are more screen shots of my model.

Hopefully if I get the time, I'll re-texture my model.

Anyway, I made a teaser trailer kind of thing on my spaceship. Its called DR-2009 by the way :) It's completely rough. So just give it a chance :)

Aircraft Works in Progress

2009-02-23T19:39:00.001+08:00

I haven't gotten much time to update my aircraft as I had been busy working on other projects. I should be posting those stuff up here in a few days' time.

Meanwhile, here's a test render of my aircraft. Rendered using mental Ray.

As you can see, it's still in the development stage. I'm still creating the textures and shaders for this plane. More later :)

Norman Georgio - First 3D Character

2009-02-20T20:23:00.004+08:00

Norman Georgio

This is my first try at modeling a 3D character. It's a school assignment and it's still works in progress. I had not drawn my character out before modeling, but I pretty much had him in mind. I wanted to model an exaggerated American African. I was inspired by Samuel Jackson from the movie, Pulp Fiction.

So anyway, I started out with a NURBS model, acting as a guide for my final model. After shaping the shape of my head using the NURBS sphere, I converted it into a polygon and redrew some of the edges to make it completely quad. I started with the eyelids, then the nose, lips and ears. I plan to re-model the ears though.

I had to show my works in progress today so I smoothed my mesh and applied a subsurface scattering skin shader and rendered a few images for my presenetation.

And here's a quick turntable I made of Norman. It was rendered in two passes - beauty pass with subsurface scattering and the other with ambient occlusion.

I should be refining the character further. I do plan to add an Afro hairstyle, but then again, I may not. Don't ask me why I came up with the name Norman Georgio. I think it suits him :)

More to come later.

Underwater Concept Artwork

2009-02-11T14:12:00.008+08:00

I had to do a concept artwork for a school project I'm working on. We are doing this 3D short film on fish and I'm in charge of the underwater environments. For this concept artwork, I had to make a scene which looks like an ocean scene from a certain lighting set-up and yet it can look like an aquarium from a different lighting set up.

I went to the library and borrowed a few books on aquariums and oceans. Using that as a reference, I went into Maya and modeled two structures that look like reef or coral structures.

I made these structures from sphere. For the first one, it was mere extrusion of faces outwards incrementally to create the step structure. For the second one, I extruded a few holes inside. After smoothing these two meshes, I converted them into a soft body and applied a turbulence field. I played through the timeline until I felt that the meshes were displaced enough.

Next, I went into Photoshop to create a seabed and coral textures, which I would be using as a bump map.

Once I had my assets and textures ready, I fired up Vue and started placing my assets in place and creating the textures. Of course I have to mention that the program crashed many times during the process of creation. The hardest part was the lighting. I made a few test renders:

This lighting set-up was to give a very ocean-like feel to the image.

This kind of lighting set-up was to give an aquarium feel to the image.

Once I was happy with the balance of two, I rendered the final image at high quality, but not a very large resolution because of the time constraint I had to deal with. This is what the final image looks like:

Hope you like it. Comments and criticism are welcome. Do visit my deviant art page if you are interested to comment on it.

Weightlifter on CG Background

2009-02-08T15:21:00.001+08:00

Well, if anyone is curious...

This is one of the assignments I had to do for motion graphics class - though I think it has nothing to do with motion graphics but more to do with rotoscoping and visual effects.

The weightlifter was keyed out from his background. It was still too untidy at this stage because of the watermark BBC text that was superimposed on his body throughout the 15 seconds. So I had to mask out all the untidy edges. He still isn't 100% clean though. Oh well..

Next, I had to place him against a background. I wanted it to be original, so I created the background in Vue and placed the weightlifter on the rock. The camera in the weightlifter footage was moving, so I tracked it and linked the background footage to the track so that the weightlifter wouldn't appear to be floating on the background.

Finally, I touched up both the elements until it looked as if it was one whole scene rather than two elements composited (hopefully I was successful at this). This included color correction, adding the weightlifter's shadow and the classic vignette. out the sequence at 720p resolution.

The final rendered clip is below. Hope you all like it. Comments are welcome.

Legrand-Simon LS-60 Model Almost Complete

2009-02-01T23:21:00.003+08:00

I'm more or less done with my Legrand-Simon LS-60 aircraft model. I continued from where I left off yesterday. I modeled the wings, the landing gear and the tail. I made a temporary glass material to see through the glass windows. I have not added any interior detail yet, but I plan to later on. I feel happy with my workflow this time - it's like I finally know how to be organized when modeling.

After I've added in the interior details, I plan to shade it and light it up and it will be good to go for a nice render. Till then, here are the snaps of my current aircraft. Enjoy :)

Legrand-Simon LS-60 - Modeling

2009-02-01T02:42:00.007+08:00

I felt like modeling something so I decided to model a small aircraft. The blueprints were given to me. But I felt that it did not show much, so I went onto the net to find some reference images:

Once I felt that I had enough reference, I loaded up the blueprints in Maya and started the modeling process. I started with the front part and slowly built my way behind. This time, I was careful enough not to add too much resolution to tighten up the edges in the early stages as how I had done on my BMW car model. I completed the rough body blocking first. It was pretty tedious, ensuring the four-sided quads and things like that, but I managed.

Once I was happy, I separated the pieces. I made the door and detailed it, followed by the windscreen. Then I moved on to modeling the propeller. I kind of feel happy with this model because nothing has gone wrong yet (touchwood!!). I just have to clean up a few edges to blend in the pieces together nicely and tightly. Been working on it for the past 5 hours non-stop. This is what the result looks like at the moment.

It's 3 am now. Think I'll go sleep and continue the rest tomorrow =)

Helmet Painting

2009-01-30T00:19:00.002+08:00

I got inspired by the Lord of the Rings armours and costumes so I decided to paint something related.

I browsed through the net for some reference pictures. Of course at this stage, I want to practice my digital painting. So I came across a good picture reference and decided to replicate it by painting. The image below shows my progress so far:

I'm pretty slow at drawing and painting, so I decided that I'll take my time to do this. As you can see, I've drawn out the rough outline. It's not traced - I placed the reference beside my canvas and tried to copy the drawing exactly. I shall continue tomorrow with this, or whenever I get the time.

Temasek Design School - Promotional Video

2009-01-28T12:28:00.005+08:00

This was assigned to us as a final assignment for motion graphics class. Everything was created in After Effects, except for the textures at the start and end of the clip - they were black and white originally, I modified them to give them their colors that you see.

If viewed here, the quality of both sound and video would be very bad. To view in higher quality, please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcYC7t0mIOI

Once there, click on "watch in high quality" at the bottom right of the video.

Enjoy! :) Do rate and comment on it. Thanks.

Lighting Tests

2009-01-25T02:28:00.004+08:00

I decided to work my lighting. I hadn't touched Maya for quite a long time. I went back to my old scene of the living room. Since I had problems rendering it, I decided to export the models out and re-import them in another scene. I made the 4 walls, only this time, they were each a separate object. So the walls were made up of 6 planes.

Since I was doing lighting after a very long time, I decided to go slowly. So I imported the coffee table and the long sofa first and rendered through mental ray with global illumination turned on.

I thought this was a little bit dark so I adjusted the settings and re-rendered the image, this time with the side sofas included.

I textured the ground with the wooden material and made it slightly reflective. I also changed the settings so that the reflections would appeared blurred, as if the wood was newly polished.

It still remained too dark for me. So I textured the walls white and re-rendered the scene.

Too bright I suppose. Well actually, I'm really tired. I want to re-model the sofas because somehow they don't give me this feeling of comfort. Oh well, I shall try some other time.

Cliffs - From Concept to Completion

2009-01-23T12:11:00.005+08:00

I was looking at my 2D landscape that I had painted earlier on:

I decided to make into a 3D environment. So after analyzing the painting, I jumped into Vue and started sculpting the cliffs on the left. I used my Wacom tablet to do this. I made a depression for my waterfall, but sadly did not add it in simply because I haven't figured it out yet.

The Cliffs Sculpted

I had to spend a lot of time doing the layout and placing the camera. For some reasons, I could not get the perspective to be exactly the way it was in the painting - maybe the perspective in my painting was wrong. So I moved onto texturing. I placed ecosystems on all the terrains except the distant background one. I spent a lot of time texturing the water too. I was going for a realistic look.

Then I moved onto adjusting the atmosphere. Most of the time was spent here because I could not get the look I wanted right away. I tried many different kind of settings for clouds, sun, fog and haze and when I was happy with the settings, I turned on global illumination and rendered the image. Rendering time: 2 hrs 10 min at HD 720p resolution.

Feel free to comment on this art. It's uploaded on my deviant art page at www.digimator.deviantart.com.

Deviant Art

2009-01-21T23:08:00.002+08:00

Hello folks,

I've set up a page on Deviant Art:

www.digimator.deviantart.com

All my complete works, static of course, will be uploaded there. This blog will still be active :)

My first work in Vue

2009-01-21T12:29:00.003+08:00

I was playing around with Vue since I love nature. I formed a simple composition with the terrains and then played around with the ecosystem to get my forest and grass. This took a long time, for I was not used to the kind of numbers to use on different scales of scenes. Once I was happy with the textures, I adjusted the clouds and lighting and turned on global illumination for rendering. I added a cube and gave it a misty texture to give the ground fog as you can see. I rendered it at 720p and rendering took 1 hour 10 min. I wonder what's going to happen when I start animating in Vue.

Z-brush Creature

2008-12-23T13:59:00.010+08:00

I was inspired those hyper-realistic creatures from movies like Lord of the Rings and Spiderwick Chronicles. Thus I decided to try one of my own designs. I had no design in mind initially. I jumped into Z-brush straightaway and decided to experiment with the program. I started with a sphere as a base and started sculpting from there. I used a mouse as I don't have access to my Wacom tablet at the moment. This was my first time using Z-brush.

Digital Painting Continued

2008-12-07T00:00:00.002+08:00

I continued working on the digital painting where I last left off. I made it into a widescreen ratio.

To make the cliff more grand, I made the horizon line higher and shifted everything upwards. I felt that the water had too much green inside. Thus I color corrected it. Next, I went onto adding my main focus - the waterfall. Finally, I added more foreground cliffs with forest and vegetation details.

Painted in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet.

Digital Painting

2008-12-04T14:03:00.003+08:00

This is my first try at digital painting. It's a concept I'm working on as part of my school assignment. Basically, I'm supposed to create a background for character animation to be fitted in. Since I love landscapes and oceans, I decided to paint that. This is still in concept phase. It's not complete. I still have to add a waterfall from the cliffs on the left and make a few more changes to make it look more dynamic.

Done in Photoshop CS3, using a Wacom Intuos 4 x 6 tablet.

Audio Assignment

2008-11-22T22:23:00.004+08:00

Hello everyone. Been busy with school work. Recently we had this audio assignment, and this is what I did for my final assignment. Basically we ripped a clip from YouTube, Poseidon in this case because I'm an action fan. We took out all the original audio and replaced it with our own. Angie and I were in charge of this assginment. I was in charge of all the dry parts, meaning I did the crashes and explosions and things breaking - basically the first half of the clip. Angie handled the remaining half of it with the wet stuff - all the water sounds and things interacting with water. Then I mixed in the background score, which happens to be from the Dark Knight movie. Finally, both Angie and I adjusted the sound levels and volume and voila - that's our final product =) Enjoy!

Voice-overs (ADR):

The woman who says "What is that?" - Angie
"Connor, Connor!" - Andrea Lek
"That way's a valve, come on let's go!" - ME =)

Water through nParticles

2008-11-06T20:56:00.004+08:00

Hello. It's been a long time since I last posted here. Well, I have been onto something new- Maya 2009's nParticle system.

I had a lot of fun playing around with this new engine in Maya. At first, I had no clue how to use it, but soon it was pretty simple to figure out the techniques of using nParticles. It's very similar to Maya's other dynamics engines like nCloth or just plain rigid body dynamics - make your static object that's going to be collided with a passive mesh and the particles to collide with the passive geometry.

I read that water simulations could be done with this new engine and I decided to go for it. I modeled a simple tank and had the nParticles fill it up with fluid simulation properties. The rendering and calculating time was kinda expensive, that's why I have not rendered the animation yet. However, you can take a look at the rough shaded version of it and a single rendered frame below:

Crater

2008-10-11T15:21:00.003+08:00

I went to take some footage near my house. I wanted to create a meteor crashing on a road. I saw this tutorial done by Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot and I was very inspired. He created it using 3ds max, and I decided to challenge myself my doing it in Maya instead.

So currently, I am still at the very beginning phase. I tracked the footage in bojou - apparently I have to re-track it because it wasn't tracked properly for some reason. I created the crater in Maya, textured it with a photograph of asphalt I took and rendered it without lighting it. I took it into Fusion and tried to composite one frame and see how it matches up with the background footage - and this is where I realised that I have to re-track the footage and make adjustments to my crater geometry. For now, I painted out unnecessary stuff and made the final scene. Of course it's not complete.

Raw footage

Crater created in Maya

Final composite created in Fusion

Explosion

2008-10-08T00:47:00.004+08:00

I recently created this explosion in 3d Studio MAX by following a tutorial by Andrew Kramer from VideoCopilot. Amazing guy he is.

Well anyway, just to briefly describe my process - the basic method was particle instancing. I created 3 big debris pieces and 1 small dirt pieces and used particle instancing to emit these pieces of geometry that I created. I created a bump texture in 3Ds max itself. I did not know where I was going with the explosion - all I knew that I wanted to show the massive scale of the explosion, thus I made it slow motion by rendering it out at 100 fps instead of the usual 25. The rendering time was a killer - almost 2 full days, mostly because of the skylight casting realistic shadows. I rendered it out in two passes - the beauty pass and the z-depth pass. So here's what the beauty pass looked like:

Hardly any color information. However, I brought the rendered sequence into Fusion and added a gradient background and used a speedSix plug-in to simulate an explosion. This plugin is just supposed to give out light rays but after modifying it a little bit, I managed to get a slightly explosive look.

Then I went onto creating the source of the explosion - the meteorite, and timed it up so that the explosion happened at the correct timing.

I was quite happy that I managed to turn something with only grayscale values to something with slightly more color.

Below is the final version. Please rate and comment on it. Thank you!

Enjoy! =)

Fire Hydrant Complete

2008-10-04T20:55:00.003+08:00

I have finally, finally completed my fire hydrant visual effects shot after working on it for more than a month. Here are the details:

- Shot with Panasonic DV Camera
- Matchmoved using boujou
- Fire Hydrant modeled and textured in Maya
- Rendered 6 passes through Maya's mental ray
- Composited in Nuke

The matchmoving isn't very accurate though. I should have used trackers during the shooting phase. Oh well. Enjoy! =)

YouTube Update

2008-10-04T00:20:00.005+08:00

I have added some clips on my YouTube account.

www.youtube.com/digimator

Lighting Issues

2008-10-02T23:54:00.003+08:00

I am having a lot of problems lighting my interior set. I added materials and textures to my models. I set up a directional light as my sunlight and an area light as my photon emitter. But for some reason, it doesn't work. No matter how much I increase the photon value, the render still remains dark. Then I decided to take off the sunlight and use two area lights, one for emission and one for sunlight. Still did not work. Don't understand why. Having a bad day already and this is making it worse.

So what I did was used one area light as both sunlight and photon emitter and placed it behind the two windows and stretched it to fit the size of the two windows. Well, here's the render but it's still screwed up as you can see:

I don't understand why there is so much light between the two windows when the area light is behind the windows and is set to caste raytrace shadows. I decided to change the position of the light and went onto to doing a night scene.

For this, I modeled a light bulb and added a point light to it. I made sure that the bulb was set to not receive or cast any shadows in the scene so that the light can pass through it. I used this point light as my photon emitter also. However, when I tried to render, the photon emission went about a quarter way before it got hung there. I tried reducing the photon energy, yet the problem persisted. I even changed the point light to an area light, yet it didn't work. Very frustrating. So I just decided to use Final Gather to render the image and see what it looks like.

No, I'm still not happy with it. There is hardly any indirect illumination. Very frustrating and bad day, so I decided to close down Maya and continue working on it tomorrow.

Interior Lighting - Beginning Phase

2008-10-02T01:36:00.005+08:00

This would be my first time properly lighting a scene with Global Illumination with the proper theory of mental ray understood.

I added in curtains and windows and a flower vase with a few tulips on the on coffee table. I made a texture in Photoshop for the vase. Once I was happy with the modeling, I decided to get into lighting. Well, as expected, nothing went right the first time. Maya crashed on me, the lights did not give me any shadows, no GI seen even though everything was activated. Well, after fixing the normals of a few pieces of geometry, things started to work. So here's the first and very very extremely rough render:

There's only one light source - an area light behind the windows, which is giving direct and well as indirect illumination to the scene. However, some of the photons are screwing up as you can see between the two windows. I have no idea why this is happening. I was trying to get rid of it but failed to do so - so much so that I got a headache and decided to quit Maya and write this post of progress. Tomorow, I'll try fixing this issue as well do the following:

- add a glass material to the coffee table top
- add a chrome material to the table legs and the lamp body
- add wood texture to the painting frame
- make curtains translucent
- add texture to the sofa sets and the flower pot

As for now, I'll go to sleep. Been working for approximately 4 hours straight on this scene. More later.

Interior Modeling

2008-10-01T02:24:00.005+08:00

So this week, I've been doing a lot of R&D on lighting. The key thing to making believable visual effects is lighting. So I decided to go really in-depth into it and discover what mental ray for Maya can offer. I researched on Global Illumination and a little bit of final gather and certain mental ray features.

Well, to put my R&D into practice, I decided to do a little bit of interior modeling. I looked up some reference for sofa and created my own version. After that, I made the coffee table and the lamp purely out of my own imagination. I added the paint effects tree for the flower pot and added a painting frame on the ceiling.

I'm not finished yet actually. I still plan to add windows and curtains on the wall and other details such as the wire cord of the lamp, flower pot on the coffee table, cushions, etc. After I'm done with the modeling, I plan to texture my set and light and render it through mental ray using GI.

As for my hydrant - haiz, it's darn slow. It's still rendering. Shall post up the final clip when it's done.

Hydrant in Nuke

2008-09-25T21:07:00.008+08:00

Well, my hydrant is about 90% rendered and I was really getting impatient to get onto compositing. So I decided to just give it a try to whatever I had so far. But instead of using Fusion, I decided to try Nuke this time and see how different or how similar it was to Fusion.

Well I guess I did have fun using this program. Just that I find pulling the wires out of the nodes to be a little troublesome as compared to that in Fusion. Also, Fusion has this drag and drop function regarding the nodes to display in the view. In Nuke, I would have to pull a wire from the viewer to a node everytime I want to preview it. Definitely troublesome, but I guess I would get used to it.

I did not follow any tutorial on how to composite in Nuke. Based on my knowledge of Fusion, I composited the several CG passes and got what I wanted. Below you can see the node graph. It would have been similar to that of Fusion.

I'm still extremely new to this program, so I couldn't quite figure out how to get my z-depth pass as a Z channel integrated with the rgba channels. In Fusion, I would have to make use of the channel boolean tool. In Nuke, I tried using channel merge but it didn't quite give me the results I wanted. Color correcting was also quite tricky and complicated. But I kind of figured out my way to get the result I wanted.

Overall, I was quite happy with the result. It's still incomplete though - I still have to match the grain of the raw plate, adjust my reflections and specular highlights, etc. But I would polish it up once my render has finished. Currently, about 100 frames or so left to render from the reflection pass.

Mini VFX Project

2008-09-24T00:36:00.014+08:00

It's been quite a while since I last posted, and I'll tell you why. My hydrant renders kept failing as I mentioned earlier. But I found a way to solve things. I realised that my laptop got heated excessively inside, thus it shut off on its own. So what I did was put it on top of a book, so that there is more space at the bottom of the laptop for the heat to escape. Then I took a few wet cloths and placed it on the hottest part on my laptops to cool down the laptop. Funny thing you might say, but it actually worked! My renders carried on, although at a very slow speed. The diffuse, specular, shadow and occlusion passes are all rendered. The only one left is the reflection pass, which is less than a quarter way done. I added a new pass - z-depth / luminace pass so that I would have more control over the depth of field during compositing, although its just one object.

Moving on, I haven't had time to do much work because of the rendering. But, Greg and I decided to do this mini visual effects sequence. The entire point of doing this short project is to firstly test out all the vfx techniques we both know or want to explore, such as matte paintings, 3D integration, matchmoving, minitature shooting against green screen, etc. Secondly, we want to see how it is like to work on a visual effects sequence in a pair. After all, teamwork is what the industry wants.

So we got started. Using the resources we had, we came up with a simple plan of the vfx sequence. In this case, Greg had this toy Hercules plane which looked pretty realistic from certain angles. So we decided to base the project around it. Greg came up with the storyboards, and we further developed it. During one of the recent meetings, we decided to have a shot of the plane taxing on the runway before take off. Thus we decided to actual create the foreground minitature set shot against a blue screen. But all this would be at a later stage.

Thus for now, I decided to do a moodboard to have a look and feel of the sequence. I took a snap of the plane from my handphone camera and brought it into Fusion. I took out the background by rotoscoping the plane out and cropped the image to a HD 720p look.

Next, using about 8 paint nodes, I painted out unnecessary things that gave the realism away such as the red sticker, some dents and cuts, the guns in the foreground, etc. Below, you can compare the before and after shot of the paint work.

Next, I color corrected the plane. I wanted it to be mid-air at night, so I wanted this bluish hue. Of course from the way the photo was taken, the highlight was pretty big and the shadows pretty harsh, thus nothing much could be done with that. Hence, I used a couple of color correction nodes to get the desired effect.

Now that the foreground element was finished, I had to take care of the background - the sky. I used the clouds 3D plugin from speedSix and created a night sky by positioning the perspective to match to that of my aircraft image.

Next, to add a bit of realism, I added lights to the windows. However, Greg told me that combat planes do not have such bright lights or any lights at all for it would give away its position to the enemy. So in the final shot, we may not have lights after all. But I just created them for the sake of realism.

Finally, I added forground clouds to add that element of depth.

And this is what the final moodboard image looks like:

Of course this is not 100% complete because of a few missing elements such as consistency - if there are lights on the windows, there should be lights in the cockpit as well. The propellors aren't done up properly also.

I could have used Photoshop to create this entire image and get the same results. But I chose not to because eventually for compositing, I would be using Fusion. By doing this moodboard, I realised the technical challenge that I would be facing when doing the real composite. Also, I'm so used to the node-based way of compositing that I'm starting to drift away from layer-based compositing. For example, the paint operation - it's much easier to classify different paint operators as different nodes rather than have them all on a single layer in Photoshop and not being able to edit once out of the paint mode. Or I maybe wrong. But Fusion will still be my choice.

Sky Replacement

2008-09-11T22:30:00.007+08:00

Update on my hydrant render - bad! Very bad! Desktop too slow to handle, and laptop keeps crashing. Have to find a way to fix this soon.

So meanwhile, I decided to do something else. I was walking home from school and I came across this big patch of grass with buildings in the background. It looked pretty interesting to me, so I took out my handphone and took a video of the place. Just a simple plan. I had no idea what I would do with it. This is what it looks like:

When I reached home, I transfered the footage to my laptop and analysed it - the quality was horrible, it looked totally flat and the sky was siply blow out with zero cloud detail. That gave me an idea - why not colour correct the shot, key out the sky and replace it with a better one? I proceeded, and I gave it a very dramatic mood, as if it was about to rain. I also found a sky photograph which I had taken earlier, and colour corrected it to match the footage.

Clouds Image

Color Corrected Clouds

Then, I realised that the camera was constantly moving throughout the shot and thus the sky image had to follow it. I wasn't familiar with Fusion's tracking tool thus I imported the original footage into boujou and tracked it there. This way, I would get accurate 3D camera information. I imported the tracked camera as a Maya camera file and imported that into Fusion. I then placed the clouds in 3D space, duplicated them and positioned and rotated them to form a kind of a panorama.

That was the final step in terms of 3D compositing. I cropped the shot to a widescreen one and rendered it out with motion blur enabled.

A very interesting practice with Fusion's color correction and 3D compositing tools. On that excuse, I got to use boujou as well =)

Cool Compositing Book

2008-09-10T02:31:00.004+08:00

Well, my hydrant is supposed to be rendering at the moment, BUT, my laptop crashed and shut down while still rendering the 11th frame of the ground occlusion pass. And there are a total of 162 frames per pass, with a total of 7 passes to render. And it's not that I did not try to render again - I did 5 times and the same thing happened. Well, frustrating no doubt, but I think I'll have to reformat my laptop and render the frames on my desktop. Oh well, it happens.

So I thought that meanwhile, I would share about a book which I borrowed from the library - The Art and Science of Digital Compositing.

This is one of the best books I've read so far - a must for anyone who's interested in compositing. I am just halfway through my third chapter and I'm already learning so much. Not to forget that there real world examples of how certain shots from certain movies were composited. Very cool.

I was exploring the DVD that came with it and I found out that they had actually included a few source files from certain movies. I took the source files from King Kong and did a small composite in Fusion:

The pass breakdown for Kong and the T-Rex wasn't provided - only the beauty pass for each was provided. So I had to make do with that. Nothing great actually, but I got to practice the Ultra-Keyer tool in Fusion to remove the blue screen. Very cool!

Hydrant Rendering

2008-09-09T20:28:00.004+08:00

This evening I told myself that I should not procrastinate and decided to get the hydrant rendering done.

I started lighting the scene and found this to be really challenging. The lights had to match to that of the actual scene. I added an area light as my main keylight, something which represented the sunlight. I know in most cases, a directional light is usually used for a sunlight. But I guess in this case, an area light suited the best because of the way the shadows were soft during render time. I then added a point light behind the hydrant, somewhere inside the building as my back light and finally another point light as my fill light. This is what the rendered scene looks like:

And this is what the light set-up looks like:

Of course things such as ambient occlusion and things like that will be done during the compositing stage. Right now, I only focused on getting the lighting almost accurate. Next, I went onto creating the render layers. I added two layers for occulusion - one for ground occlusion and another for the hydrant occlusion. I did this so that I could control each occlusion pass separately during compositing instead of masking and rotoscoping. Next, I added the usual diffuse and specular render layers. For the reflection layer, I used a phong shader as a material overide for the hydrant and made it super-reflective so that I could reduce and control it during compositing. For the shadow layer, I used a background shader as a material overide instead of the default shadow preset. This gave me more control over how my shadow looked like.

Once the render layers were set up, I did final touch-ups such as naming each pass, turning on final gather and ensuring that every pass was being rendered as high quality through mental ray. Currently, all the passes are being rendered.

The compositing will be done in Digital Fusion. I know I mentioned in my previous post that I would composite in Combustion as well and try to get similar results from both the packages. Well, I'll try to do that but Fusion would be my first choice.

First Works using RenderMan

2008-09-06T02:58:00.004+08:00

I was just looking through my old works and I came across these two images which I totally forgot about. I used RenderMan to create these images. The first one, I used Slim to generate a glass shader. I decided to go the extreme and increased the refractive index to a very very high level. I rendered the image in Maya through RenderMan of course, and this is what it looks like.

For the second image below, it required more work. That time, I was really into RenderMan and the RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) and I did proper research on it. Well, I didn't exactly copied the RSL code, but I learnt and memorised it and wrote the anistropic shader in my own way for the following container which I modelled in Maya.

One thing about RenderMan - extremely steep learning curve. I guess one requires good mathematics background to master RenderMan, which I currently lack. So I decided to put it aside for the time being, and decided to concentrate on visual effects and compositing instead for the time being. Once I have mastered that, I want to explore advanced CG lighting using mental Ray and RenderMan and really go into its depth and then use that knowledge to create some good VFX.

Nuke

2008-09-06T01:17:00.003+08:00

Okay, nothing new about my works so far. I've done something for my school project. Wish I could post it up here, but I can't as yet. Have to go through some paperwork first.

But anyway, I read a lot about Digital Domain's in-house compositing software, Nuke. There were a lot of debates on whether which one is a better choice when compared to Fusion. Well, I decided to give it a try on my own without consulting any kind of tutorial:

My take on it - the workflow is almost the same as Fusion when it comes to basic CG multipass compositing. Simple mathematical operators and a few merges and there you have your composite. I used the same old files to try this composite and I did a bit of colour correction. Well, this was the tough part. The colour correcting nodes are so complicated, that I couldn't quite understand. For now, I would still stick to Fusion because I'm starting to get very familiar with it. But I would still learn Nuke since it's industry standard.

Well, that's my take on it. Very short post. More later =)

Flickering of Trees - Fixed

2008-09-03T14:47:00.003+08:00

I finally managed to fix the flickering of the trees in Fusion. I had to keyframe a few values to stop the flickering. I re-animated the camera, but I don't quite like the result. Still prefer the previous camera move. Another addition to this animation is the animation of the clouds - its animated using the same technique of grid warp.

This animation was rendered with a hell lot of motion blur, so the rendering time was really expensive - 8 hours! Oh well. Enjoy.

Dramatic Sunset + Rain

2008-09-02T20:23:00.004+08:00

Okay, it's been quite some time since I posted an entry. I'm so busy currently because I have so many projects at hand - both from school and personal. And most of these projects revolves around Fusion =D

So a very brief and quick post for today. One of the projects I'm working on is a dramatic sunset which transforms into a night sky, after which it starts to rain. It's part of a logo animation for Crewsade I'm doing. And a good thing is that the techniques used are all discovered by myself while exploring Fusion. So what I did was I started off with a simple static jpeg photograph of clouds which I took from my handphone camera.

I animated it using two grid warp nodes - one to animate the background clouds and the other to animate the big foreground cloud. Then I went onto color correcting this animation - one to make it into a warm sunset evening and the other into a night scene. I also created the sun, added the light rays and a lens flare.

Sunset Scene

Night scene

And I went onto add the subtle lightning happening behind the clouds using color correction and a mask.

Can't really see a difference here but in the animation, the lightning is very obvious.

Once these three passes were done, I merged them all. I animated the sun setting and the light rays to follow it. The scene changes here gradually into the night time scene, lightning strikes and then it starts to rain almost immediately after that. This has been the most complex work I've done so far:

One thing I learnt from this mini project - be organised when compositing. Keep the nodes nice and organised so that the entire flow is easy to read.

Unfortunately, I haven't rendered the animation yet because it takes a hell of a long time to render with motion blur and the fact that it's in high definition. I'm currently busy with a school project (which I can't talk about right now). Once I'm done, I'll probably render and upload this short animation.

More later! =)

Sunset View

2008-08-28T22:09:00.004+08:00

I know this is a little bit off my workload but I had gone to watch Wall-E with Jake, Greg and Wendy at Downtown East (great movie by the way) and after the movie finished, we accidentally came across this car park on the top level - and the scenery from there was beautiful. Immediately, a lot of CG scenes started coming to my mind and I could almost visualize a visual effects sequence happening. Here let me show you..

You can almost imagine this as a runway although it's just a car park. With a bit of CG set extension in the background, removal of the bump on the road, the lampposts lighted up and a CG plane approaching from the background, it would be a perfect VFX shot.

The sky just happened to be so beautiful that I had to take a few shots for the sake of reference. The interesting part was the sunset. I had Greg standing in the middle of the scene with the sunset happening beside him, and I told him to jump so that I could take a snap of him in midair.

I really feel very proud of this shot - I don't know why. I took another shot of some spikey things in front of the clouds. I wanted it to have a silhouette as light shined from behind. I adjusted the image below in Photoshop to make it more dramatic.

Overall, my take on this entire experience would be that it was very inspiring. A lot of ideas came into my mind and how you can simply transform a car park scene into something else. Very motivating! =)

Snow Scene Composite

2008-08-26T21:40:00.012+08:00

Second post on the same day. I followed a tutorial by CMIVFX (thanks guys, you rock!) on compositing and giving life to a static image in Fusion. What I did was look through the tutorial once, then look through while taking down brief notes and finally made the composite based on the notes I made. So let me explain the process briefly.

To start off, this is the original image, in HD 720p format.

The first thing I did was animate the clouds using the grid warp feature in Fusion. This took me quite a while because I was new to this feature. But it wasn't difficult, it just took a little bit time to get the motion right. Next, I masked out the clouds and color corrected them to make them look as if they are lighted up by lightning behind. Then I created a small mask to create a lightning "patch" on the sky and animated the mask to have the effect of random lightning across the sky. This is what it looks like:

Before moving on to doing more stuff, I decided to color correct the image a little because I felt that I did not quite like the blue that was in the image. Next, I went onto creating the background snow, using the SpeedSix plug-ins. Once I adjusted the parameters to make it look believable, I had to make the snow collide with the ice berg. So I masked out the ice berg:

And color corrected the mask to make it look white so that it would serve as a matte or an alpha channel for the snow to collide on:

Next, I created the foreground snow, which was meant to look a little bigger and falling at little faster rate than the background snow, just to create and fake the effect of depth. Below are two images that compares the scene with and without foreground snow.

Background snow only

Background and foreground snow together

Finally, I made the water animate using the SpeedSix plugin again. This was a tricky part, and I feel that it doesn't look quite right. But if its a shot for a few seconds, then I guess it should be okay:

And this is what the final shot looks like, with animated clouds, snow falling and settling on the berg, water, lightning and color correction.

This is by far the most complex composition I've done so far, because it's very different from the other previous compositions I worked on. The node flow is very different and very complicated too. I had to watch the tutorial a few times before understanding the workflow and then trying it on my own:

But it was a very good and valuable practice on compositing. Anyway, here's the video for the composite. Forgive the low quality though, I don't feel like uploading it on YouTube yet. Enjoy, and more later! =)

Forest Composition Progression

2008-08-26T14:17:00.005+08:00

Well, I don't know why but I still can't seem to fix the flickering effect that's happening with the trees. I did manage to reduce it with a little motion blur and two resize nodes, but it's not completely eliminated. But just for the sake of progress, I'll post up what I have so far.

So let's start with the forest. I took 10 different images with alpha channel from the net as I mentioned earlier and used a particle emitter to replace each particle with each of these 10 trees and randomized the order so that it's more believable. Next, I duplicated and aligned the emitter to form a hilly forest look and created a 3D camera in the 3D space. I took a sky image which I had taken from my balcony, colour corrected it and placed it all the way behind the trees. If I'm not wrong, this technique is called multi-plane compositing or 3D compositing. Either way, it's still compositing :D

I animated the trees's spin variance in the emitter settings so that it would have this look of the trees swaying due to wind. For the foreground forest, I put in a higher value for the spin variance so that it would fake the effect of depth.

I went on to colour correction and adding fog based on the z-depth. I did not add depth-of-field because I felt that it wasn't necessary when it was such a long shot. So here's the before and after.

Before color correction / fog

After color correction / fog

With these, I was basically done, except the flickering effect as I mentioned. Took approximately half an hour to render without motion blur and 5 hours to render with motion blur! Here's the nodal workflow for the composition.

And here's the video. Simple camera move. My aim of this composition is to create depth and have the camera move through the space.

Here's a high resolution frame from the animation. Some would say that it isn't sharp, but that's the kind of effect I wanted it to have.

That's all for the forest composition, as far as my progress is concerned. I'm starting to get the hang of node-based compositing and I realise now why it's so much better than layer based compositing. For compositing, I would definitely use a program like Fusion or Combustion rather than After Effects, but for motion graphics, I would still stick to After Effects.

More later.

Forest

2008-08-23T22:27:00.004+08:00

The idea was to create an entire forest using a few trees. I found about 10 different images of trees on the net which already had the alpha channel attached. I brought these into Fusion and attached them to a particle emitter so that each of these 10 trees would be multiplied and randomized to create a forest-like effect. I animated a 3D camera. Simple track. Here's what the node flow looks like:

My first render went wrong because the particles kept flickering, meaning the trees flickered. I still can't figure out what's the problem. So will do that and post the final animation as soon as I'm done. Meanwhile, here's the basic look.

I'll explain more details of how I made this when I'm done with the final render.

More Compositing in Fusion

2008-08-19T01:37:00.004+08:00

Still in the process of playing around with Fusion. This time, I'm trying to create a matte painting of grass, trees, mountains and sky in Fusion and have the camera track in slightly. Well so far, I've just progressed with the grass part, which doesn't look any realistic at this point in time. Here's the node flow and a preview of what I've done so far:

Compositing is really fun if you come to think about it. All of a sudden, you tend to look things from a different perspective. Even when you step out of the house and you see a beautiful scenery, your mind tends to compose the image in front of you into layers and see the depth in it. Personally I think it's a damn cool thing, just that it's very tedious. Heck of a job. The only key trick to compositing is to get the lighting and colors right to make it look realistic/believable. Other than that, technical knowledge plays a pretty important part to help get things done.

Updated Hydrant

2008-08-18T03:04:00.002+08:00

Thought I'd brush up my hydrant a little and share it here once more. Click on the image to expand.

I'll try to do this kind of thing for every piece of work I produce - the software's used and my initials.

More Fusion

2008-08-17T15:32:00.002+08:00

I'm practically addicted to this program. Can't emphasize how awesome it is. I was practicing my compositing skills with different passes of the fire hydrant I created in Maya previously. For the previous composite, I did not change any color values. But this time, I decided to give it a warm look with a gradient background. So here's the node workflow of it:

And here's the final render of the composite:

Fusion Test

2008-08-17T04:34:00.003+08:00

Hello everyone. I'm back again. I had been experimenting on Fusion for the past 5 hours approximately and I managed to come up with a composite of an earlier project that I had done. This time, I relied completely on the node-based workflow and created an entire composite out of it.

And here's the render of the final composite.

I just have one thing to say - Fusion is simply AWESOME! I had so much fun compositing in this program. Comparing it to a time-line based compositing workflow such as that in After Effects and Combustion, I had so much more flexibility using the node-based compositing workflow in Fusion. No doubt I'm feeling really at the top of the world that I'm starting to get the hang of this awesome program.

Think I'll catch some sleep now. It's 4.45 in the morning (=

Mini Personal Project - Hydrant in Live Action

2008-08-16T13:46:00.000+08:00

Okay, so this blog has been pretty dead recently, so I'd thought I'd update it with a little bit of what exactly I've been doing recently.

Okay, so mostly I've been doing research lately on compositing. A lot of it. I've been exploring Combustion, which I personally find to be much better than After Effects in terms of compositing. However, I'm still not very comfortable with it, so I'm still going on about it. I'm also partly exploring Fusion, which is a hell of a complicated node-based program. Lots of patience required. Other thank compositing, I've been researching on different lighting and rendering techniques using Maya and mental ray. All of this research will be applied on a short mini personal project I'm working on.

This personal project of mine involves the latest fire hydrant that I've modeled. What I'm aiming for this project is seamless compositing of my CG hydrant into the live action background footage. So I went downstairs with my video camera and still camera and did a little bit of shooting.

The above represents a still frame from the live action shot. Basically, the hydrant will be placed at the empty area on the frame. After shooting the hand-held camera shot, I used my still camera and took about 7 photographs of different exposure levels of the surrounding area so that I could create a HDR image.

After the shooting was done, I converted my footage into a sequence of frames and had them tracked using boujou. Awesome program to get accurate 3D tracks. I also created my HDR image using Photoshop. Once that was done, I got into Maya and started creating the geometry to match up the orientation of my hand-held camera with Maya's 3D camera.

Once the geometry had been matched up, I imported my hydrant and placed it in the scene and scaled it accordingly.

This is where I've stopped. Basically the whole point of this personal project is to practice and test out my lighting, rendering and compositing abilities to get as perfect a seamless composition as possible. Once I'm done rendering several passes such as diffuse, occlusion, specular, etc., I would composite these elements in Combustion and Fusion and try to get both the end products to look as similar as possible.

So that's the update so far. More later.

Textured Hydrant

2008-08-02T14:48:00.000+08:00

I laid out the UVs for the hydrant. I still don't know much bout UV, but I decided to apply a simple cylindrical map. Then, I added a fractal map as a bump map and assigned the blinn shader to the hydrant. I rendered in three passes - diffuse, specular and occlusion, and composited everything in photoshop. This is what it looks like:

Fire Hydrant

2008-07-31T01:45:00.000+08:00

It's not that I get side-tracked a lot. This time, it was during class when Greg and I decided to model a fire hydrant as soon as possible. Why a fire hydrant of all things? Because we wanted to model something non-organic. Secondly, my team, Crewsade, is working on this project which revolves heavily around fire fighting and we definitely need fire fighting related assets like fire hydrant. So we decided to model it.

I started out with a reference image below. It's an American fire hydrant. Basically what I loved about this model is the small details that make the hydrant look really interesting.

However, for my own model, I decided to go for a different approach. I modeled using a cylinder for a base shape with very low resolution on it. I sculpted the hydrant to match my desired look. The challenge between Greg and I didn't last that long because class got over, so I just continued at home. I added in the details such as the repetitive dents on the metal and the bolts and nuts.

Once the modeling was complete, I was too lazy to texture it properly. So for the time being, I added a plane for the ground and rendered an ambient occlusion pass with final gather. Here's what it looks like.

One thing I decided while modeling this hydrant - everyone of my work will have my initials somewhere on it. Not like a typical signature, but instead the words "Digimator's Renders" or "DR" on it. It'll be like my own way of marking my work out (= So here are the close-ups of my initials on the hydrant.

I'm pretty excited about this model. I plan to texture it, light it and render it semi-photorealistic pretty soon when I get more time. Can't wait to see what the finished product looks like =D

Oh yes, and I haven't forgotten about my car. I'm still researching on the topic and different methods and workflows for modeling. Stay tuned :)

Ambient Occlusion Animation

2008-07-26T16:58:00.000+08:00

The animation is up on youtube.

Click here to watch it.

No big deal actually. Just a simple camera pan around the text, showing the shadows.

Ambient Occlusion

2008-07-26T00:09:00.000+08:00

I actually wanted to get started on the car, but got sidetracked because I got curious about ambient occlusion all of a sudden. So I decided to research on what exactly ambient occlusion is and played around in Maya by doing a simple logo animation of Digimator's Renders. Yes, it's pretty lame right now, but I guess it can do for a test render.

Render time was pretty expensive. I turned on final gather and global illumination. Approximately 5 minutes per frame. The animation is being rendered at the moment. I'll upload as soon as it's done.

Truthfully, my research on ambient occlusion seemed pretty complex to me. However, I did get one thing right out of it - photorealism. Ambient occlusion can be pretty useful when doing visual effects - CG compositing with live action. It plays a great part in photorealism in that it gives very soft, diffused shadows and very dark shading when corners meet. From what I understand through my experimentation, I think that ambient occlusion is another way of defining soft, diffused, realistic shadows. I may be wrong. I definitely plan to explore in depth on this matter, and how to use it through Pixar's RenderMan.

BMW Update - Rendering & Reflecting

2008-07-25T03:15:00.000+08:00

I was doing a little bit research on texturing cars and I decided to do a few test renders on my BMW Roadster. Here are a few of them, which are compared to the original car.

Basically what I did was very simple. I assigned a mental ray car paint shader to the model and tweaked the shader a little to create a grey car. I turned on image-based lighting. Since I did not have a HDRI image, I used a jpeg instead and adjusted the color gain so that it would emit enough light. I added a directional light for some extra lighting. Finally, I turned on final gather and global illumination and rendered the image through mental ray.

Some close-ups:

I am going to start all over again. Even though a lot of time and effort was spent on this, there are many obvious flaws which are very difficult to correct at this stage. The first mistake I realised is that I jumped into details very quickly into the early stage of modeling. Maybe I was too excited to see the final result like most beginners. I did the edges too quickly and extruded the door sooner than expected to create that little bend. I should have blocked out the main body of the car first before adding too many edge loops to create the detail - which explains why the car looks dented at many points due to meddling around with the vertices. Secondly, I should have kept the car in separate pieces - the front part, the door, rear etc should have been separate pieces on their own so that I could create those panels perfectly without getting too much into extruding the faces to create those small ridges between each panel.

Nonetheless, I'm quite happy with the result here. I did get the edges where I wanted them to be. The only reason why I am starting all over is because I want to avoid these mistakes that I made and follow a proper workflow to create this car. After all, it's my favourite car and every effort should be put in to make it as perfect as possible! (=

Demoreel 2008

2008-07-20T00:41:00.000+08:00

As I had promised, I'm finally done with my demoreel. Actually I was done quite some time back, approximately a week ago, but I had issues compressing it for web streaming. Well anyway, here it is:

Demoreel 2008

Do remember to turn on your speakers (=

It's the compilation of my latest works. Longest one I've done so far. Compiled entirely in After Effects. Do feel free to comment on it.

I'd like to thank Tad Leckman from Lucasfilm Animation Singapore for guiding me on improving my demoreel during the consultation session at NAFA after their talk on how to make a good demoreel.

Enjoy! =)

P.S.

For those who can't access the youtube version video, here's the blog version:

Youtube version would still be a better choice though.

Enjoy once again.

Subsurface Scattering Experiment

2008-07-17T00:32:00.001+08:00

I keep on hearing this term and after Alan explained to me about what it was, I decided to play around with it.

So I built a simple model, inspired by the Hulk, his upper half and rendered it with subsurface scattering through mental ray. This is what it looks like.

The whole point of this subsurface scattering technology is to get realistic looking skin. I don't quite know whether I got there or not. I applied a dielectric material to the ground so that it would give a nice reflection and turned on final gathering. I used two lights in the scene. One spotlight for the backlight and a directional light for the fill light.

I then twitched around with the model to exaggerate the muscles using the sculpt geometry tool. Once I was happy with the model, I rigged it and skinned it very roughly and adjusted the arms to give it a pose and rendered it again.

I was quite happy with this. I've never modeled a human figure before, and although the anatomy is wrong here, I still like the fact that it's over-exaggerated. Perhaps the skin might need to look less plastic like.

Next, I wanted to make it look like a stone sculpture. I carried on playing with the texture.

Was quite happy with this. It's definitely inspiring me to make an exaggerated anatomical human-like creature.

No updates about the car yet. Haven't gotten the time yet. More later.

Back Part Started

2008-07-06T22:27:00.000+08:00

Been very very busy with school work - crafting resume, cover letter, shot breakdown and creating my demo reel (which should be up here and on youtube pretty soon). So couldn't do much on the car. Here are the updates.

As usual, edge flow is always a problem. I messed it up a little, but fixed it back. I'm still thinking whether I should connect the back part to the front. Maybe it would be a lot easier for the entire modeling process.

More later.

Car Door Detailed

2008-06-29T22:23:00.000+08:00

I went over to Jake's house to do my work with him and his team. Apparently, he needed a software from me to do his work and he asked me to stay there and do my work with him.

So while Jake and his team members were discussing their project, I flared up my Maya and started working on the door more. It just keeps getting worse. The edge flow got a little messed up, and there were more dents on the car. I had to think of a way to create the curves and edges of the car door. Thus I extruded a few faces and modified the verts to get them into place.

I have a feeling the headlights need a bit of work too. I plan to achieve a photorealistic car at the end of the day. That's my goal. With proper HDRI studio set up lighting and reflective car paint. I plan to use Mental Ray to render this car and hopefully I can composite it on a live action plate. Anyway, here is the actual reference and my model side by side.

I'm pretty excited to start on the interior modeling of the car. All the tiny details. I think it would really add to the photorealism. Oh well, it's my first major personal project. Really excited over the whole thing =)

Next block starting tomorrow, so won't have much time to do my car. But would try to do as much as I can. Hopefully, I don't give it up and abandon it.

BMW Car Door Almost Complete

2008-06-29T02:04:00.000+08:00

End of block, so it's obviously slack time. Been feeling lazy a lot for the past few days, but I decided to have a bit of discipline and not ignore on the BMW car modeling project that I started on. I have this bad habit. Once I start on something major, I would start feeling lazy and after a while, I tend to ignore it and not complete it. Which explains my previous works in progress, now abandoned.

So anyway, during class, I was bored so I opened up my Maya and started modeling the door. This was an easy process. All I had to do was create a plane with a bit of subdivision and line up the points accordingly. I had to be careful with the edges and thus the edge flow had to match that of the car's - meaning, the edge flow had to follow the contours of the car. One thing I noticed about this car is that the edges are pretty complex, especially at the door.

Notice how the door curves towards the bottom? I realised that minor details like these differentiates this Roadster from other BMW models. So anyway, I continued with my modeling process. Being my first time at modeling a car, I did not know whether to connect it to the front part of the car or to leave it as a separate model. I decided to connect. If need be, I could always separate it from the model later on. Now this was the most tedious part. The edge flow of the front part was very different from the edge flow of the door. So I had to find ways to get the edges together properly.

These are the screenshots of the door. The edge flow looks pretty messed up, and my management of vertices seems really bad because its starting to look like dented metal. I should be fixing that soon. I plan on concentrating on the edges of the door at the bottom and the top and how they would seamlessly connect to the front part of the car.

Will continue to update with more screenshots next time.

School Work - Project Pitching

2008-06-27T19:09:00.000+08:00

I've made no progress with my car so far as I had been really busy with school work.

Basically we were supposed to pitch a story to our lecturers and imagine them to be our clients. So animatics and storyboards had to be done, together with the publicity elements such as moodboards, posters, etc.

So I was incharge of all the technical aspect, a VFX supervisor more likely if I may. I took on the job of creating the moodboards. Basically it's a scene in my school again, just that it's from a different angle. Here is the reference picture I took.

Again, I had to make it look scary and eerie with night lighting. So as usual, I jumped into Maya and began the process of modeling. This wasn't much of a difficult task. Just some placing of models, extruding them and analyzing them through the shot camera. I love architectural modeling and I was getting pretty used to the workflow and techniques. Special thanks to Digital Tutors for that. I finished the model in roughly about an hour or hour and a half. Then I moved onto adding the textures. I knew I was going to use mental ray to render the final image. So I decided to use raytrace reflections, refractions and shadows. Simple blinn materials applied to everything except the floor and the walls. For the walls, I used a lambert and added a little bit of noise so that it doesn't look flat. Nothing is perfect in this world. For the floor, I used fractal as a bump map and added grid lines to it to emphasize the tiling. The entire set is low poly, except for the ceiling lights, which are pretty high res. This is what the set looks like.

And this is what the scene looks like from the shot cam.

Now was the hardest and the most tedious part of the entire process - lighting and rendering. Night lighting is not easy, especially if it had to look a little spooky. I tried a few lighting set-ups and failed horribly. These are some of the renders I took when I was still experimenting with the lighting.

After playing around with the lighting, I finally came to my final render from Maya, using global illumination and final gather. This is what the final render from Maya looks like.

Now was the time for post-processing. I brought this image and the rest of the previous test renders into After Effects and did a set extension by filling in the space. I also color corrected the image to give it more of a night feeling.

Not forgetting that this was a moodboard, we had to add our two characters inside. 3D character modeling and rigging it to pose it is another tedious process. Thus, my team decided to use Photoshop to paint the characters in the scene. My friend, Germaine Phoo Hui Jun did a pretty good job for this. She used a tablet and painted in the two characters.

The image was almost complete. Just the final touch up was left. I brought back this image in After Effects and did a few minor touch ups like adding mist to the scene, glows to the ceiling lights and slight color correction. This is what the final image for the moodboard looks like.

I was quite happy with this final product. This is the first time my modeling scale was at this high a level. I have never built a proper set in 3D before, and this would be my first. A lot of problems along the way, especially in lighting, but when I look back at it at the end of the day, I feel good that I overcame everything and managed to produce the final results.

A few things were still left to do. For example the poster. For this, all the four of us worked on it.

My friend, Wendy Chan Yan Jun, painted the headless ghost in checkered shirt using Photoshop. Another friend of mine, Gary Goh, did the title font. Lastly, Germaine and I created the image below, which is actually the moodboard. I composited all the elements, which were made separately, and made it into this poster.

Also, I had to do the DVD cover as part of the publicity elements for the project pitch. I took roughly two and a half hours to do it. Done in Photoshop.

Credit: Germaine painted the hand pressing the lift button using Photoshop. [Bottom left hand corner of the DVD cover]

Looking back, I realised that I learnt a lot of technical skills and time management. I got more used to Photoshop now, and the Maya modeling techniques and what to expect after the rendering and things like that.

Pretty good learning experience (=

My First Car Model - BMW Z4 Roadster E85 - WIP

2008-06-22T21:22:00.000+08:00

I decided to practice and work on my modeling skills and I had always wanted to model an automobile. Thus I decided to jump right into it. I chose BMW because it's a very personal car to me - it's been my favourite since I watched my first James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies. The design of the car always fascinated me.

I did a lot of research and took as many reference pics as possible of the car. Here is what I plan to create:

BMW Z4 Roadster E85

Personally, I think the design looks pretty cool to me. I also got the blue prints of this car. Once I had my research and reference all ready by my side, I jumped right into Maya, made my own custom workspace, laid out the blueprints and started the modeling process. I worked for approximately five to six hours before I came up with the look below:

The model looks as if the front of the car is dented, probably because I meddled too much with the vertices. I should be fixing it pretty soon, once I get the time from my school work.

More updates when I progress (=

Previous Works - 2D Digital Artworks

2008-06-21T22:08:00.000+08:00

These are few of the stuff that I did previously using Photoshop and Illustrator. I'll try to go in sequence if I can remember the chronology.

This was probably the first 2D digital artwork that I ever worked on. It was part of my school assignment. We were given a simple MTV logo and were told to create it in our own styles. I chose a very cool, windy and icy theme, hence the blue color and fog. Done entirely in Illustrator.

This is the first matte painting that I did using photoshop. It's meant to be a morning scene, probably around 7.30 am or 8. I wanted to give it a dreamy kind of look, thus I added a layer of thin mist and slight wind blowing. Done in Photoshop.

I wouldn't exactly call this one a painting, because it just turned out this way after experimenting. I decided to add the grass and the bush to give it a look of a very polluted and dirty lake scene. Done in Photoshop.

This particular matte painting, I was playing around with color and lighting and how they affected the environment. I did not have any particular mood in mind, but I wanted to create something greenish during sunset. Thus I gave my foreground mountain some detail and left the background mountain a little lain and barren as light was coming from behind the mountain. As usual, I added the fog and light rays and the familiar lens flare to give a dramatic mood to the scene. Done in Photoshop.

The above images are all created for the sake of experimentation. I was exploring Photoshop and wanted to create my very own desktop wallpaper using a set of different themes. The first one is obviously done in a Matrix style. The second is something random, with the focus in the centre. For the third one, I was inspired by the Saw movie poster and wanted to play with grungy and errie textures, thus I tried to create it in that way. The last one, I was playing around with painting fire thus I created that image. Again, I focused on color and light and how they affected the objects in the scene. All done in Photoshop.

That's it for now. More later (=

3D Moodboards - Eerie Lift Scene

2008-06-18T22:03:00.000+08:00

I know I said that I would post up my previous work, but I thought I had to post this up first.

I had to do a moodboard for a panel I did for my storyboarding project. It was a lift scene and it had to be a night, scary and eerie scene. So what I did was I took a few photographs from my handphone camera for the sake of reference. I was going to re-create the entire scene in Maya from scratch, so I needed the details for the model and the textures.

So based on the reference photographs, I began modeling in Maya. The process was pretty simple. I made low poly models and then converted them to high res models. Once the model was done, I set up a camera for my scene and fixed it in place. From the start, I had decided to use mental ray for rendering since there is that reflecive surface of the lift. Thus, I went on to using the dgs material. But I wasn't very familiar with it, thus I stuck with the normal blinn materials. I made the texture maps in Photoshop and mapped them onto the respective objects in Maya.

The real challenge I faced in this mini project was lighting and rendering. I had to give it a scary look at night. Night lighting was a little bit tricky and I had never done it before in a 3D package. For this scene, I used a directional light as my keylight and about 3 point lights for secondary lighting. I used final gathering and global illumination and rendered it.

The images above are my 3D rendered stills. Rendering time was pretty long for each frame - approximately 5 minutes per still. But I was quite happy with the results. However, it still had to look scary and it hadn't achieved that look. I brought the rendered still into After Effects and edited it till I felt happy with the results. Here's the before and after look.

Before

After - Final Image

I added a blurred background in the black space, did some color correction to individual parts of the scene and added foreground ground mist to give a dramatic effect. Finally, for overall correction, I gave a greyish-blue color grade to the entire still. I was done and happy. My friend Jake told me that it's the best work I've done so far. Well, what can I say? I was at the top of the world :D

I'd like to give a big thanks to Jake and Greg for giving me constant motivation to do this short project and for giving me feedback to improve and get it done to this level (=

Previous Works in Progress - Now Abandoned =(

2008-06-11T19:52:00.000+08:00

I've done quite a few works previously, which I abandoned halfway. Mainly because I was just starting out and experimenting. Anyway, here goes...

One thing about me - I just love trains, be it any kind. I have this toy which I used for reference to create a similar locomotive.

Model Reference

When I modeled this loco, I was just starting out new into the modeling process. I was new to the theory of low poly modeling, careful edge flow, surface normals, NURBS versus Sub-D versus Polygon, etc. As you can see, the edge flow is pretty screwed up and thus I could not move on further to texture it.

After studying a bit of the modeling theory, I decided to try out a human face. As you can see below, it's nothing great. Just the front part of the face, and after that, I decided to give up (=

The video below shows my first ever human rig, in fact, my very first proper rig. Though it isn't perfect and a 100% idio-proof, I'm still proud of the fact that it still works in most of the ways. Not quite good with weight painting, so did not bind it =( Enjoy!

I'll try to find more old stuff from my backups to put it up here in the future posts.

First

2008-06-11T19:01:00.000+08:00

Hello everyone,

My name is Neeraj Pattani. I'm going to be 19 this year, and I reside in Singapore. I'm pursuing a diploma in Moving Images (video & animation).

Basically, I'm a CG freak. Anything to do with 3D or CGI, I would get really interested. I love technical stuff especially rigging. My interests in this field would be dynamics animation, visual effects, compositing and of course, rigging.

Software experience is as follows:
- Maya
- 3DS Max
- Bryce 5
- RealFlow
- After Effects
- Combustion
- Photoshop
- Illustrator

Currently experimenting:
RenderMan
Vue
Boujou
Shake

Still images and works in progress will be posted here. As for videos and animations, they are uploaded on my youtube account, www.youtube.com/digimator

That's it for now. More later (=