Hydrant Rendering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: