25 replies to this topic

[plasmax]

Hi friends,

I guess it's about time I showed some of what I've been working on up here. Here are some 3d matte paintings I've been working on. They're all work in progress so I'll be iterating as time allows.

Mountain Flyover:

- An adaptation of the final result of Andrew Kramer's brilliant After Effects "3D Set Extensions" tutorial. I decided to use Nuke instead as I wanted to test out the new particle system in version 6.3.
- Since it's a tutorial adaptation I'm not sure if it'll make it into the reel. Anyone know of any good HD stock footage resources apart from artbeats?

Matte Painting Interior:

- Projected Matte Painting Interior Created with Photoshop, Maya and Nuke. Credits so far include:
- soup-dev's shatter, scatter and attributeTransfer nodes for controlled destruction
- Mario Maruska's exponentialGlow and chromaticAberration Nuke Gizmos
- cgTextures.com and flickr's Creative Commons textures

Chinese Forest:

- A building situated in a peaceful forest vista. Nuke, Photoshop and Maya.
- Credits for the building model go to 3dmodelfree.com. It's meant to be a placeholder.

And lastly, I might as well throw up my ghastly showreel submission in an attempt to explain where my time has been going. I learned a hell of a lot over the last few months but I'm not sure it really shows. Elements of the Procedural Sun (00:40) and Blendshape deformation (00:43) will make it into my 3rd year film.

Edited by plasmax, 02 January 2012 - 06:13 AM.

[AdamOstridge]

Awesome work here, Max, love the interior shot! It's making me seriously consider jumping to VFX, keep it up!

[Aldarion]

First and foremost, AVOID aything Andrew Kramer, unless the only thing used is the technique.
If it looks anything like stuff off videocopilot, showreels do the rubbish run in less than 12 parsecs.

Now, a couple of things about the showreel (all of which you are probably aware of)
Here we go :

0:09 - bad seams on projections, lighting makes no sense, black sky
0:43 - chromatic aberration overload, subtlety is key, mask it with a chromakey or something, check a real lens profile for amounts
0:44 - no parallax on BG - place things on cards or spheres in 3d space
0:50 - motion blur on particles ? Also, do they extend all the way back ? Doesn't feel like either of those.
End title card - Your name is the most important thing, not the other way around.

Other than those obvious things, some nice work in this thread, especially the interior falling apart, love it !

p.s. Hope the gizmos serve well

Edited by Aldarion, 02 January 2012 - 06:44 PM.

[plasmax]

Thanks Adam and Mario, glad to have such talented people commenting on here.

I'm loving the Nuke gizmos, perhaps a little too much hehe, chromatic abberation on all the things is SO tempting. I've taken it down a lot on the interior and probably will more.

The motion blur on the chinese forest matte is a total cheat, 2d motion vector using a forward pass, need to tweak the settings but thinking I'll go for maya particles instead, nuke's have been giving me trouble lately and it's simpler to just knock out a hardware render.

Update on the interior matte - fixed volumeRays pass somewhat and a bit of projection, reversed the DOF for a better focus and switched to bokeh blur using this excellent nukepedia gizmo I will credit later http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmos/gizmo-down...ter/bokeh_blur/ .



Plus a lil' photo that might sneak into the reel:

[plasmax]

Work in progress ident/software toolset using the same gizmos and scripts as the interior projection. Sky plate was shot in Denver International Airport - keen eyes may notice it's the same sky as in the photograph above.

Needs fixing on some uvs and trying to slow down 5 frames into 25 using Oflow wasn't the best solution - rerendering is warranted. Not to mention that first frame flicker. ;D Just keepin' the thread alive

Edited by plasmax, 04 January 2012 - 08:42 AM.

[plasmax]

Having difficulty getting this rain to look the way I want. Perhaps because I'm not sure how it should look in relation to the exposure/shutterspeed of the image.

Two versions:
1 extra directional blur


2 pure multisampling with a shutterspeed of 1.


That's a relatively miniscule update for what felt like a lot more work. :/

So, I'll add a photo or two.

If you don't comment, this dog will cry:


I love lamp


Waxing abstract:



He was barking at me until I let him smell my hand... then he posed

Edited by plasmax, 04 January 2012 - 10:01 PM.

[Aldarion]

Rain usually falls pretty fast, mate

[plasmax]

Thanks Mario, maybe I need to go outside more haha

Update with new rain - I think it's getting there, render times are getting expensive but I might add some wind turbulence to the rain drops when I have time.

[AdamOstridge]

The new rain looks a lot better! I don't know how feasible it would be but some low cloud drifting around the tall structures would look pretty awesome. Really nice work though!

[Miguel]

I think the raindrops still look pretty massive! And could do with speeding up some more. Good stuff mate.

As far as I know, in films the rain is normally controlled artificially, because it's too fast to show up on camera without a high shutter speed. I think it's why most cg rain looks so fake, because it's trying to exist when it almost shouldn't.

Edited by Miguel, 07 January 2012 - 06:01 PM.

[Moid]

Just a thought Max but are you going to put any of your lighting concept paintovers in the reel? They'd be great to have at the end.

[plasmax]

@Adam: Great idea, thanks
@Miguel: I'll try and thin it out a little for the next update, going to update something a little more substantial next time/
@Martin: Thanks, good idea.

Some concepts:

[kull222]

on the above post the bad ones were:
3 and 12.

[plasmax]

Good to know, Jim.

New website up! (Image is link).

Edited by plasmax, 08 January 2012 - 01:40 PM.

[plasmax]

Update. Thinned the rain a little, not sure if it's noticeable - added foreground elements, painted some corrections into the background and regraded.