Seraph3D

Cisco "Human Network"

2012-01-24T17:25:00.000-08:00

For this project I came on about halfway through to set up the master light rig for the environment and robots as well as help setup up render passes and settings for the lighting team. This project was a quick one with only 4 weeks total to complete. This show ran very smoothly with only a couple minor and simple to fix issues along the way. Most importantly (for me) was that on this show I learned a new method for keeping the entire team organized as well as greatly simplifying all of the usually complex setups for creating all of the different render passes we would need. As usual its all Maya/Vray/Nuke.

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron

2011-12-31T09:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnazs2t5Brg&feature=player_embedded

Just before the holiday break I was pulled off of a very cool project (temporarily) to supervise a commercial for "Call of Duty." At the time I was pulled off I was knee deep in modeling and texturing Optimus Prime for the latest trailer for Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. I was bummed to get pulled off of Transformers, but I knew I'd be coming back to it later. The Call of Duty spot was really cool though so it worked out that I got to be on both projects. :)

When Call of Duty ended I went immediately back onto Transformers right as lighting was about to begin. Some lighting had be started by the show's CG sup but I was asked to help develop the look of all the shots on the "lower level" where Megatron first appears through to the end of the trailer. I started with the first shot of Megatron as he stands above an autobot he has just destroyed. This was an important shot and it would help to set the look of the following shots on the lower level of the environment. These characters were particularly difficult to light. For the most part the models themselves did not have small bevels on their sharp edges (although some of the hero characters did). Because of that it was hard to get highlights and shapes to read. It was also a bit difficult in that everything in the scene was reflective metal with a lot of flat surfaces. It took some experimentation and I also went back into the original published textures for Megatron and reworked them to bring a little more diffuse back into his metal shaders so that we would see a little more direction to the lighting. We ended up with a nice balance between lighting with diffuse light and also with reflections.

The hardest shot I worked on was the 360 degree spin around Bruticus as all his parts come together and transform into the complete character. The environment used in other shots was not designed for this shot. Which meant this shot needed to have a completely custom environment built for it. Originally, I started off by taking a bunch of the existing environments parts and duplicating and positioning them around a central platform that Bruticus is on. The shot was over 1000 frames long and done in super slo motion because we were applying a bunch of speed ramps in the edit. So i was rendering every 50th frame at first just to get some feedback for how the environment was coming together. My first attempt was ok, but the environment was just too vast and open. So I went back in and started moving all the buildings and pieces closer to the center so that everything was much more closed in and we were seeing up to these large building tops instead of to just the sky. The environment was fairly easy to light, but felt like I was lighting 4 shots in one because it had to look good from every angle. When it came to lighting Bruticus though, things got really complicated. Unfortunately, Bruticus's model really needed more work done to it, but there just wasn't time. So his character was missing all the micro bevels that would help catch highlights. To start we picked some key moments of his animation and decided we wanted to use the lighting to help show off these key poses. So as the camera spins around I placed buildings that were going to be exploding as well as lights that would rim light Bruticus when then went off. This was good for interactive lighting, but he also needed a base light rig that would look good from all angles as well. So to keep him rim lit I started by creating a light rig that would spin exactly opposite to the cameras motion so that he was always rim lit. This worked ok, but because it was constant it felt like a cheat. It just never changed at all. So I came up with a different trick that felt more natural and interesting (even though it was also a cheat). What I did was place some large area lights in roughly the places where the environment was brightest. Then I put a sphere around Bruticus that had him completely enclosed inside, but the area lights were outside of it. I then linked this spheres rotation to exactly match the camera's rotation. Then I deleted the faces of the sphere that the camera could see. What this ended up doing was hiding all the area lights from being able to light the front faces of Bruticus, but as we spun around it would reveal those lights only when they would be rim lighting him. This trick worked nicely because the large area lights were slowly revealed and would appear to get brighter and dimmer as the sphere rotated revealing and then concealing them.

I have to give much respect to our compositors who really knocked it out of the park on this project in a very short amount of time. They did a fantastic job of integrating all of our cg lighting with real smoke and fire elements, adding lens effects and overall just balancing out all the lighting and FX to make the shots look as real as they do.

Call of Duty

2011-12-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

I was approached not long ago about the possibility of working on "a cool live action project" which would involve some set extensions, smoke and other FX. I didn't know at the time it was going to be Call of Duty, nor that it would be as cool as it ended up being. I was beginning look development on a new game cinematic for "Transformers: Fall of Cybertron" and really wasn't expecting to get pulled off it. However, that is what happened. I was asked CG sup the latest Call of Duty commercial. It was a very fast project. Only 3 weeks from the day I started till delivery. The first week the live action hadn't even been filmed. My team put in some long hours and worked weekends, but in the end we worked on roughly 20 shots in one way or another creating everything from set extensions, helicopters, jets, missiles, mines, explosions and rocket launchers. Nothing was particularly difficult about this project with the exception of the time frame we had to do it in.

So here is the spot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rSI4CJaZBs

Not long after this was released Jay Leno did a spoof of it which was quite fun to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZT4kcvi-HA

After this commercial was finished I did get to go back onto the Transformers cinematic which I'll post about in the near future.

Tim J

Project Challenge: BMW Refuel

2011-05-25T17:36:00.000-07:00

BMW Refuel Commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uppx0K4ikpw

I recently had the privilege to supervise a very fun commercial for BMW. It also marked the second time I got to work with Eric Barba (VFX sup) and Joeseph Kosinski (Director).

This project wasn't all that challenging as projects go, but it was a lot of fun. In the early stages of the project I was asked to head out to Riverside CA to an aircraft museum and shoot reference pictures and textures of a KC135 stratotanker. At the time we were planning on having one fully CG shot that would be from inside the boom operators station. So we asked for permission to actually go inside the plane and take pictures. Fortunately, our contact at the museum not only allowed it, but used to be a boom operator himself. My co-worker and I spent a good 3-4 hours documenting every inch of that aircraft while our guide told us about his experiences as a boom operator and showed us how things worked on the plane. It was really cool to get to crawl into the underbelly of the plane and into the boom operators seat (if you can call it that since you lay on your chest) and get a lesson on how to operate the fuel boom. I'd never seen the inside of boom operators station before and let me just say...It is really small and tight. You basically lay down on the floor of the aircraft and then slide sideways onto this very narrow seat. You lay on your stomach on what I can only describe as being similar to a very narrow masseuses table. You place your chin on a chin rest and your arms dangle down on either side of this thing to operate the controls. It was very claustrophobic in there. Right next to the museum is an airforce base where KC135's were taking off and doing touch and go's right next to us. So we were able to get some great pictures of the latest models of the plane in action.

As far as the visual effects went we pretty much were just dealing with a CG plane and car. For most shots all we needed to do was animate the plane and cast shadows on the ground. These were very straight forward shots but it did become a bit of a challenge to get the plane to look like it was flying at a slow enough speed to both match the car and still stay in the air. Ultimately though it is sometimes more important to make the plane just look great instead of be 100% accurate. The plane model itself was very detailed. The tail section of the plane and boom operators station were the most detailed because we got the best look at those areas. The boom operators station was modeled down to individual bolts and screw heads. The flaps and ailerons on the wings even had the mechanisms inside that drive them modeled and rigged up so that they moved and hinged correctly so we could see glimpses of the pistons and mechanics inside as they moved. Because of the amount of detail this plane model needed and a very short schedule I teamed up with our lead modeler and we both tackled different parts of the model and combined the different parts in the end. He handled the fuselage, wings and tail, while I modeled the boom operators station, boom and retractable boom nozzle.

We were never planning to actually render the car itself. We only intended to use it for getting shadows from the plane to cast properly over the live action car. We did end up rendering a CG car for one shot in which the plane flies over the car and we needed to see the car in shadow. In that shot the live action car was lit by bright sunlight and we couldn't just grade the car down because the sun was clearly visible in the reflection. So for that one shot we rendered the CG car with the shadow of the plane creeping over it. Then in the comp we used a shadow pass to blend between the live action car and the CG car in shadow. Major cudos to our compositor who seamlessly blended the live action with the CG in that shot.

This project really was a blast to work on. Even though the schedule was short we had a great team of artists who had a lot of experience and just made everything go very smoothly. The lighters got to wear many hats on this show which was great. The three of us did all of the animation, modeling, texturing, lighting and FX. :)

Recent work

2010-04-13T15:34:00.000-07:00

Recently two projects I had the pleasure to work on were released. A commercial for Nicorette, and the debut trailer for Gears of War 3. My first cinematic done completely in-engine.

Nicorette

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOgJnFQFeFE&feature=PlayList&p=2327414B998AE9A6&playnext_from=PL&index=2

Gears of War 3

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/ashes-to-gears-of-war/64419

VES Award for DD's commercial work

2010-03-02T16:26:00.001-08:00

Digital Domains commercials department won the VES award for "Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial" this year for the Audi "Intelligently Combined" spot we created. Congrats to the whole team!! It was a beautiful spot and a real pleasure to be a part of.

VES awards!

2010-01-22T09:58:00.000-08:00

The Audi Rubix commercial we worked on here at Digital Domain was nominated for a VES award for "Oustanding Visual Effects in a Commercial."

AUDI - Intelligently Combined
Jay Barton, Visual Effects Supervisor
Rafael F. Colon, Sr. Compositor
Chris Fieldhouse, Visual Effects Producer
Ronald Herbst, CG Supervisor

Here is a "Making of" video filmed by the folks at Audi.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUEwol3-W4Y

and here is the commercial itself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVQKrxSOx7Q

Promotion

2010-01-07T17:26:00.000-08:00

I was officially promoted to CG Supervisor yesterday. I start my first project Monday. :)

Project Challenge: Disney Jungle

2010-01-07T14:45:00.000-08:00

I had the pleasure of working on a very cool spot for Disney recently. The project was called "Jungle" and it was our job to take many of the animals from the world famous Disney jungle boat ride and do photo real CG head replacements for them so that they could be made to talk in the commercial. On this project I was the lead lighting artist and assistant CG supervisor. Near the end of the show I had to step in as CG sup when my good friend Richard's (senior CG sup on the project) wife went into labor.

Right off the bat I knew this project was going to test me. It was entirely character work which I've done very little of over the years. My first task was to model the face of the baby gorilla who at the time had the most dialog in the entire spot. So I put my character modeling skills to the test and modeled up the little guys face. My second task was to model the zebra's heads which also had a lot of dialog and we would see some close up shots of them. After the models were approved I moved onto morph targets. All the while we had two other artists modeling the other characters. In total we created 3 gorillas, 1 zebra, 1 lion, 1 lioness, 1 elephant, 1 tucan, 1 giraffe and 1 wildebeest. The models and lookdev was moving along very smoothly. There was just one problem at this point. We were never budgeted to do fur. All of these animals were actually rubber animatronics so they didn't have fur on their faces. The only exception to that was the zebra's manes and some whiskers on the lions. So I set out to find a way to create the fur. At first I went with a simple approach of using a bunch of cards with hair strands mapped on them. This was ok...but it really didn't look too realistic. We didn't have a fur solution that we could render in Maya/Vray so we needed to come up with some way of creating geometry that we could style and use. That's when I remembered my good friend 3dsmax. I took the zebra model into Max and used Max's hair and fur tool to create the zebra's mane. The bummer was that in Max the hair and fur tool does not create uv's...I just uses the color of the texture the hair is grown from to give the hair its color. Since I needed this to get rendered in Maya, I needed UV's so that I could have the black and white zebra stripes. I exported the geometry back to Maya and in a side view I planar projected UV's...Then I went in by hand and selected all the hairs that grew out of the black stripes on the head and moved their UV's to one side of the UV layout and all the white hairs to the other side of the UV layout. Then a simple texture map that was black on one side and white on the other was used to created the diffuse color of the hairs. This approach looked a million times better than the cards, but it was a longer render. It also allowed us to get backscattering on the hair and make them translucent.

Our pipeline had recently been given a major overhaul and we now had tools in place that made bringing in characters and animation into our lighting scenes a snap. It was literally a 3 click process for each character in the scene and you were ready to go. The lighting was all done using HDRI probes that were taken on set in Disneyland. A few extra area lights were used in some shots, but for the most part it was just a vray dome light with the HDR mapped to it.

midway through the project we got an updated cut of the commercial and realized large portions of the spot now had new dialog, characters that were not originally talking now had tons of lines and the characters that were talking the most before no longer were. This required us to go back in and create lots more morph targets and also look at what turned out to be the biggest challenge on the spot...The wildebeest.

The wildebeest was only ever intended to have one line...He was to say "huh?" We planned to do a 2d warp of his mouth in Flame, but now this character was saying all kinds of stuff. So we now faced a huge problem...This characters head is totally covered with scraggly hair. His lips barely were visible through his mustache. This now put a huge burden on our Flame artist and several of us 3d guys set out to create a mouth with morph targets that we could use to replace the lower half of the wildebeests head. We though maybe we could get away with only replacing the lower jaw. This worked ok, but it didn't look right that the upper jaw and nose did not deform at all (because we were just seeing the original plate photography). So we decided to try camera mapping the plate onto a larger model that included the upper jaw and nose as well as the lower jaw. This turned out to be really tricky to make look right. It even required us at one point to scrap the model and morph targets we had and start over. We needed our CG model to match as closely as we possibly could to the actual wildebeest in the plate. We eventually got it and started cranking out elements to pass to Flame. In Flame we still had a lot of 2d warping to do to marry the CG and the plate properly. In the end I think it turned out pretty well for having such a short amount of time to do it in, and never having planned or budgeted for this character to talk.

With our new pipeline tools in place the project went very smoothly. We were able to build shots and update them in no time. Even rebuilding a shot from scratch only took a couple minutes. At the end of this project the senior CG sup had to hand the project over to me when his baby was born. So the last weekend of the project and final delivery was in my hands. By that point everything was pretty much done and it was just down to the wildebeest shots. We delivered the project on time and I'm very proud of the team and the work that we did. Its one of my favorite projects that I've worked on during my time here at DD.

Tim

Project Challenge: Audi "Rubix"

2009-07-31T14:11:00.000-07:00

In this project challenge I'm going to cover my experience working on a commercial for Audi. At the time of writing this the commercial was not released and I do not have a link to it. Hopefully I'll get a link sometime soon after its release. You have to see it to appreciate it I think.

In this commercial we were asked to do every raytracers worst nightmare. Create a photo-real 9x9x9 glass rubix cube full of car parts in a photo-real CG environment. Then animate the cube rotating around and assembling the car as it spins until the car is completely built. For anyone keeping score...A 9x9x9 grid of boxes means that we had 729 cubes, each with at least one object inside it and most of them having several objects. Each individual cube had realistically modeled sides made of glass, which means we were seeing through a minimum of 36 panes and even more if viewing from an angle. So...729 cubes, made of 6 objects each. At least 3 times as many part objects. That put us at 26,244 nodes, just for the geometry of the cube and parts. Once you throw in the nodes for the environment and cube rig I can't even come up with that number...but these were some HUGE files to work in. Probably the most complex I've ever worked with.

When the project began I was one of the first modelers/lighters to start on it. There was a lot of uncertainty about what the environment should be like. It needed to not distract from the cubes, but also look good in its own right. Myself and two other lighters modeled up rough environments with temp glass cubes in it every day for a week or two. All similar but also quite different. As things progressed the environments that kept getting the most response were the very simple plain white rooms. In the beginning these all had white artificial lighting and no natural light sources. We went this direction for a long time, but when you put a glass cube in an evenly lit white room it disappears. We needed to have contrast in the scene in order for the glass to look like glass. I was pulled off of the environment for a week or so while the client, director and supervisors all worked out what they thought the environment should be. I was put on the task of creating the cubes and their glass shaders. At first I went with a totally realistic approach. I modeled all the sides of the glass cubes and stuck them up against each other. I put a realistic glass shader on them and hit render. Now I've never seen an actual 9x9x9 glass rubix cube before so I was a little suprised at first to find that the center of the cube was very dark. It was like the light just couldn't penetrate into the glass. I made the glass totally transparent and fresnel reflection at 100%, but it still had the same problem. The only way to make the center of the glass not get dark was to reduce the IOR for reflections and refractions. So I started breaking reality and it was starting to look better. After I had something kinda working I started adding a slight bump map near the edges of the cubes because I noticed in my glass reference on my desk that towards the corners the glass was warped a bit when the pieces were fused together. As soon as I did this it became aparent that with as many refractions as we needed you couldn't see through the cube again. Parts just became invisible inside all the crazy refractions. Not only that, but the rendertime suffered an almost 200% increase.

Eventually the environment was sorted out again and because I have architecture experience I was taken off the cube glass set up and put back on environments. Another artist took over the glass set up and came up with some nice looking results that totally broke reality, but that didn't matter because it looked good. I worked on variation after variation on the environment nearly right up until it delivered. At one point we finally decided that there wasn't going to be a good way to make the artificial lighting look good. We ripped open some holes in the ceiling and I was told to light the thing naturally. I think that was the best decision we made on the job, it really changed the look of the project and finally it was working.

In the meantime the other lighter who took over the cubes was getting creative with ways to reduce the rendertimes and still get great results. He came up with a great solution, but unfortunatly it was very complex. It was still faster than just waiting for frames though. His solution was to render the parts all by themselves without any glass in the scene. We did this three times. Once with an HDR generated from the actual 3d environment I built. A second time with an HDR of a studio lighting setup, and finally a third that only had a big area light above the parts. Our compositors would blend these three passes together over the environment background render until the parts looked cool. Then they would render an un-premultiplied pass of the parts back out for the lighters. The lighters took that pass into our cubes scenes and projection mapped it from the shot camera back onto the parts. Then we deleted all lighting from the scene. Only the glass cubes and projection mapped parts. This was rendered with the HDR of the CG environment for reflections and refractions. We still needed the ability to render mattes for the compositors, so we had to make scenes that had everything black except the parts which were 100% illuminated white. We also did an extra pass which was just the connecting edges of the glass cubes. This pass was used to tint only the fused faces of the glass cubes to have a greenish hue.

Project Challenge: Fight Club

2009-07-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

I recently had the pleasure...wait...was it a pleasure? After I fully recover and get some sleep I'll look back on this and consider it to have been a pleasure to work on ;)

At any rate. DD recently finished a very cool project for the Blu-Ray released of the movie "Fight Club." We were hired to create some graphics for the dvd menu screen. This project was FULL of challenges. Our goal was to re-create the scene from the film where Ed Nortons character is walking through his empty apartment while one by one pieces of furniture fade into the scene while text pops up over some of the items making it look like items from a catalog. However, in our version we planned to extend that shot into a full 360 degree panorama with half of the room being his apartment from the film and the other half being the gross dirty kitchen from the house on paper street. This also had to be a totally seamless 360 that would loop repeatedly. So as we came back around to the end of the shot we needed to make the rooms blend back together and start empty again. Did I mention that this all needed to be done from start to finish in less than two weeks?

To make this project harder. I wasn't supposed to be on it. However, the CG supervisor on the show was going on vacation and was not going to be here for the last half of the project. DD decided that they needed to have a CG supervisor on the show and they asked me to drop what I was doing on a different commercial and take the reigns as CG supervisor on this fight club project to help finish it. So I got to put on my supervisor cap again for the first time since leaving Blur. I was asked if I would do this about 15 minutes before the original CG sup left for his trip. I got a 15 minute crash course on what was currently done and what still needed to be done and what the expectations were.

We had a small team. Two lighters, two modelers, one compositor (although we did get some help from a few other artists here and there) and myself. The first plan was to get the modeling started. Half of the modeling was done before I came onto the project. The other half continued up until the last minute.

The plan was to render a 900 frame nodal pan around the entire empty living room and kitchen. Then we would create HDR's of the room and map it back onto the walls and render separate passes for all the different items in the room. After spending a little time thinking about this it became clear that we would run into a problem with this approach. First of all we would need multiple reflection and shadow passes for every object in the room, but more than that we were rendering with GI and as lights turn on and bounce off of objects in the room it should change the lighting on the rest of the objects in the room. Unfortunately, there was no way for us to render a pass that was ONLY the bounced light from the addition of a single prop into the room. So we needed to find a new approach.

The next idea was to actually just keep adding one more prop to each pass and then disolve between them in the comp. This was a good approach because we could elimiate all the shadow and reflection passes completely, and we only needed to render about 30 frames of each pass because we would be frequently disolving to other passes. So this was a good plan because we greatly reduced the number of passes and complexity in the comp and made life a bit easier for everyone. Then we discovered the next problem...GI flickering and glossy reflection noise.

We tried raising settings which was helping, but in order to get renders nice and flicker free we would need to bake out the GI. Since this would require over 100 separate GI calcs and would need updated everytime a prop was moved or changed this became a major problem to manage. We didn't have time or tools in place to help us do that. So it was time again to come up with a new plan.

The key to the solution ended up being that the camera was just a nodal pan AND that nothing in the room moves. Items just fade on. Late at night on my first day on the project I started thinking about this problem. The solution to our GI and reflection problem would be to only render single frames and stitch together a panorama. That would greatly reduce the number of frames we had to render. In fact that would mean we only needed one single frame for each prop that fades on. Then it occured to me. Vray has a cylindrical camera. We could render one single high res frame of the entire 360 degree room and map it onto a 3d cylinder in Nuke. We could also bake out our cameras motion and feed that into Nuke also. Then the compositor would just disolve between our single frames and have complete control over when things blended on. The only problem with this plan was that Vrays cylindrical camera didn't work the way I thought it did. So that idea wasn't going to work. However, Vray's spherical camera could do something close enough. Instead of a cylinder we could use a sphere. I rendered out a few lower res spherical panoramas to give to the compositor to try the idea out with. It worked. We scraped all our other methods and moved forward with the spherical pano idea.

In order for the final resolution pano's to hold up we needed to render 6000x3000 pixels. This took a while, but it was a safer way to go. Renders took a maximum of about 10 hours. Things were kind of interesting in the comp. The tree itself was pretty simple...just a huge line up of read nodes and disolves. But because we were rendering panoramic images and only still frames it made some tasks easier, and others harder. For example it was very easy to roto. You didn't have to animate any beziars because the images didn't move. The camera just pans across them. What wasn't easy was rendering mattes. We rendered a few, but we knew going into it that things would be disolving on and screwing up the matte, so we would either have to render a new matte for every time an object blends on, or the compositor would have to work their magic a bit with mattes. Ultimately, roto would be faster.

While lighting was going on we had two and sometimes 3 prop modelers creating props to fill up the rooms with. We were referencing all of these models into the lighting scene so the lighter could keep working while the modelers were updating things. It sounds great in theory, but in all my years I've never seen this work well. The biggest reason this was a problem this time around was that we discovered some bugs in our model publishing tool that was screwing up shaders and geometry in the lighting scene. We also had a lot of trouble with Maya's render layers which have proven to be a total mess. The biggest issue with them was they would lose texture assignments. This has happened on several shows now and I'm not thrilled about it. On top of that we just started using a tool called "Atomic" that greatly simplifies setting up render layers. Its a lot like Blur's "Render Elements" tool, but in some ways much stronger, and others much weaker. Atomic is still going through stages of being integrated with Vray, so we ran into a few issues there as well. The modelers did a great job. Two of them had never used Vray before and the third had used it only once before. They are a talented bunch and quick learners so they picked it up pretty fast.

Project Challenge: LG Transformers 2

2009-06-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

I'm back with another project challenge post about our latest LG commercial. This time around we had a tie in with the upcoming film Transformers 2. Here is a link to the commercial on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLUnwCJV0IA&feature=PlayList&p=14973D66D576B5B8&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=29

Our main workflow these days is to use Maya/Vray on our commercials. This project, however, came at a period of time where it would be more beneficial to us (for internal scheduling reasons) to dust off our old Max/Vray pipeline again and do another commercial with it.

This time around we had a very small team. There was only 3 of us doing any 3d work. We were able to get a model to start from of the phone from the client. I took the model and reworked some areas of it and cleaned it up so that we would get proper meshsmoothing on it. I also did the same for the laptop model. Another artist modeled the camcorder from scratch while our supervisor modeled the GPS unit using the phone as a base model to start from. After all of the modeling was done, all of the models were given to me to create materials for. Since the phone was supposed to appear to be transforming into all of these other objects, everything basically needed to have the same materials applied to them. After we got the materials all set up, the three of us began animating. Since we were a very small team we had to handle all the animation ourselves which was a little daunting at first. I handled two of the transformation shots and ended up taking over and finishing a third one. While this was going on I also set up the light rig that we ended up using for all the shots. The rig was entirely set up using an HDR panorama that was shot on location durring the shoot. I plugged that HDR into a Vray dome light and used Light Cache and Brute force for GI.

Animating was probably the biggest challenge on this project. Although once you got your head wrapped around it, it really wasn't that difficult to do. We first focused on the big moves. We didn't care if it was physically possible for something to move a certain way or if it was floating out in space. We just focused on making some interesting movements with the bigger and more noticable pieces. After that we went back in and starting the real work which was to connect up all the big pieces so they weren't just floating around and give them connectors and gizmos that would support their motion. Finally, we did a pass on the animation where we added parts inside the objects to make them appear to have circuit boards and components that would actually be inside these objects and we used those to help hide any bits behind as the transformation happened. So a piece of the phone may slide behind a circuit board while another piece of the camcorder swung out from behind something else. You do this enough times with enough pieces and eventually you have a transforming phone.

The next challenge we had to overcome was that the actor was holding the real phone in his had in all of our plates. So when we did our animations on top of it you could see the real phone in his hand underneath our CG. We already had an artist do some camera and geometry tracking for us so we had a rough hand model that we were using for shadow catching. I took that model as well as a still image we had of the actors empty hand that they shot on set and mapped the hand photo onto our 3d geometry. I had to do a lot of pulling and pushing of the UV's to get them to line up ok since the angle of our camera and the hand photo were fairly different. I rendered out an empty hand pass that the compositor used to help paint out the original phone from the plate. He would just use little bits and pieces from my render as needed to fill in some gaps. We ended up do this for several shots.

Rendering was simple. These weren't complex scenes really so they rendered pretty fast. I think we were around 1 hour a frame for the worst case close up shots. Everything else was between 10 and 30 minutes. It was a lot of fun to work on this project. Not only did it turn out looking pretty cool, but I got to push myself a bit with the animation, and nobody had to work any long hours.

Project Challenge: LG Advanced Learning

2009-06-15T14:30:00.000-07:00

Its been a long time since I've done a Project Challenge post. I haven't done a single one since moving to Digital Domain either. So lets go over a spot that I really enjoyed working on...LG Advanced Learning. Here is a link to the commercial. This is the 30 second cut. We did a 60, but I can't find it anywhere online that you don't have to subscribe to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KLDzz_GNYY

*edit* The 60 second version is now online at Digital Domains website...Here is a link to the quicktime.

http://ne.edgecastcdn.net/800155/www.digitaldomain.com/video_142_commercials_17194588432.mov

This project was a lot of fun to work on. It was a pretty good challenge and in the end it went very smooth and I'm quite pleased with how it all turned out. This was the third project I worked on at DD.

The great thing for me was that another co-worker of mine and I convinced our supervisors to use Max/Vray for this job. Vray is exceptional when it comes to photo real metalic surfaces. The only problem with this idea was that DD didn't currently have a Max TD around to write tools, and DD's older tools for max hadn't been updated in a while. There were a few tools that we HAD to have in order for this to work, so right off the start I set to work creating the ones we didn't have, and my co-worker, Chris(who had used the older DD max pipeline), started testing the existing tools to make sure they were working and stable. Fortunately, they were all in good condition, so it was up to me to script a few needed tools. I ended up writing a tool that would allow us to automatically import animation data in the form of MDD files onto objects in max from Maya. We had hundreds of objects and there was no way this was going to be done by hand. I was very happy to see it get used the first time in production without breaking. In fact, I think we only broke it once durring the project. I also re-wrote a tool that I originally came up with at Blur, but needed re-written to plug into DD's pipeline with Vray. It was a quick test render tool which allowed you to override render settings at the push of a button to do very quick test renders while not actually changing any of your final render settings.

When the project first got rolling we learned that the director had already had another company model the characters. So we were given meshes to start working with. For the most part the models were well done. However, we really wanted these characters to be hyper detailed, so we went back into the models and re-worked them A LOT. We added tons of tiny details that you will only see if your lucky enough to catch the commercial in HD, and maybe not even then unless its a close up shot. We went so far as to model little weld points for all the circuitry. Every inch of these characters had some fine detail on them. We spent a lot of time in this part of the production. Perfecting textures and models. This was the hardest part of the project actually. As soon as the characters started getting signed off on it was pretty smooth sailing to the finish.

When it came time to start rendering shots it was a breeze. The time we spent up front getting the tools ready really paid off. Shots came together quickly and we had very little issues on the render farm. The one thing that did present a problem for us though was grainy noise. We were throwing everything at Vray on this spot. We had GI calc'd per frame, glossy reflections, glossy refractions, translucency, depth of field rendered in camera and motion blur. We also had nuclear hot lights which didn't help the grain at all. Then the challenges started. It really wasn't all that bad to solve the grain issues, but it was the most challenging thing about this project. I love working with Chris though. He and I come from two different schools of thought about rendering with Vray. He is very much in favor of using Light Cache and Irradiance mapping for GI, where I'm in favor of Light Cache and brute force, or in some cases completely brute force GI. What we learned was that about 50% of the time his method worked the best. We got fast render times and clean GI. However, the other 50% when things got more complicated we found that my approach worked out better. It ultimately came down to what was happening in each shot. With so many variables it was a little tricky at first to figure out what needed to be tweeked in order to get rid of the grain. The best way to figure it out was to look at all the buffers we were saving out. We could do test renders looking only at the GI pass to see if our settings were causing grain there and we could tweak the GI settings apart from everything else. We did the same for reflection and refraction passes to make sure our samples were high enough there. Then finally we'd turn on motion blur and DOF and check again to make sure everything was clean before submitting to the farm again. Naturally the render times went up, but all in all none were very long for what we were doing. Most frames averaged around 30-40 minutes at 1024x576. A few of the close up shots were rendered at 1920x1080 and those were about 3 1/2 hours per frame for finals.

This was a rare project. Things went so smoothly on the back end that the lighters pretty much finished a week early and were just there to help the comp artists with additional matte passes and misc fixes. We pulled a few late nights in the beginning durring the modeling phase, but once we were into lighting it was regular work hours til delivery.

The FX were very cool on this spot. DD hired an artist to come in and code real time particle FX and render them in open GL. I sat next to this guy and it was very interesting to listen to him click away for hours writing code, then there would be a flash from his monitor and I'd look over and he'd be testing his particle system...It would just swirl endlessly without looping until he stopped it and went back to coding. In order to get those FX into our scenes with the correct camera motion he rendered out cards of his particles and another 3d artist took them into Lightwave and positioned them and rendered out passes for the compositors. In some cases the compositors took care of the FX placement themselves. The lighters didn't have to do any of this, but we did have to render interactive lighting passes and a few reflection passes.

That's about it.

Lost your dialog box off screen?

2009-04-03T10:06:00.000-07:00

Ever tried to open a program or dialog box to discover that somewhere it has opened, but is off the edge of your monitor and you can't grab it and bring it back? I'm not sure exactly how this happens half the time, but most commonly I've seen this happen when you have two monitors and then one of them is taken away, or your screen resolution changes enough that the program opens off screen.

No worries. There is a simple trick to getting it back, and it works with any program under windows (as far as I'm aware of).

Lets say your working in 3ds max and you've opened the render dialog box. You know its opened, but its off screen. Here is what to do....

1. Click the render dialog button again. You want to make sure that the dialog IS for sure open and is the currently active window.
2. Don't touch your mouse...Press Alt+Spacebar.
3. At this point you may see a drop down window open up....If not its still open, its just off screen too. I've seen this happen both ways.
4. If you can see the drop down use your keyboard arrow keys and highlight "move" and press enter. If you can't see the drop down...Hit the down arrow once. "Move" is usually the second item from the top of the list.
5. Now you need to lock the window to your mouse. You can do this by hitting the "left" arrow key on your keyboard (at this point you still have not touched your mouse again).
6. Now you should be able to move your mouse and the window will be locked to it. So you can move the window back on screen.

A friend and co-worker of mine back at Blur showed me this trick years ago. Thanks Dave!

Large Scene Management

2009-03-03T21:01:00.000-08:00

I received a request recently to have a post about how to manage large scenes. I thought that was a great idea for a topic so here goes.

Poly Count

Once you force yourself to follow good modeling habits then poly count almost stops being an issue except on rare occasions. The most important thing you can do on a high poly count scene is to instance objects whenever possible. This just makes sense. If you can use the exact same object in other areas in your scene then you should instance it. Not only will it be easy to update one model and have all the instances update as well, but it saves a huge amount of memory when rendering and also makes your file size a lot smaller. There is a downside to instances though. When you start to have a lot of them. Like around 5000 objects and up. Its great for getting your shot to render and saving the file, but working in the file becomes really slow. You have to make a trade off. If you have some RAM to spare with all your instances then often it will help to grab a bunch of the more simple objects (for example a bunch of grass blades) and break their instances and attach them into one single mesh. You now have one much larger poly count object which will take up more memory at render time, but you have sped up how interactive max is while your working considerably. Always do this with simpler geometry though. You have to make sure that what your attaching won't be so huge that you run out of memory again.

Another great way to deal with huge scenes is to have separate scene files for the background, midground and foreground. Then composite renders together to create the final seamless shot. I worked on a project once (which unfortunately I still can't talk about about and probably won't ever be able to), but it involved a huge jungle campsite. This cinematic went for about 3 minutes straight without a single (visible) cut and all took place in first person. The scene for this was so expansive and huge because the main character (you) run from one end of the camp to the other so it became nearly impossible to cheat things unless they were really far away. We ended up needing 5 separate environments that all fit together like a puzzle that were rendered separately and composited back together. If you gotta do it then you gotta do it.

Textures

Textures have always been the trickiest to balance. I always want the highest possible res textures I can get up close to camera and as things go back I'll make them smaller and smaller. But even with a lot of planning this can be difficult. Especially when you have a lot of different types of surfaces and maps that are close to camera. Once the texture is loaded into memory then max is going to treat them all the same, so you want to feed the highest quality image you can with the smallest file size. Most of the time for me this is just a simple jpg. As long as you don't have visible artifacting in the compression then your fine in most cases. I have also been known to use png textures with indexed colors. This keeps the file sizes lower and if you do it carefully you get almost no visual drop in quality. I stick with 8 bit textures for almost everything, except for objects that need displaced. For those maps I use 16 bit. Just so were all clear about this...You can NOT take an 8 bit texture, convert it to 16 bit in Photoshop and use that. displacement maps need to be generated in 16 bit or higher. In the end the best thing to do is to just be very picky about which textures are important to be high res and which won't be.

Displacement

I have used displacement in Vray, Mental Ray and scanline. Scanline was always predictable, but you aren't able to render millions of polygons since the renderer isn't designed to deal with that. That said I still use max's own displacement for some things. The displacment world space modifier is great. You can create very detailed and still fairly optimized meshes with it. Its not usable for deforming meshes though. I have a long history with Vray, and will admit that I was very let down by Mental rays displacement. Its better than using max's modifiers, but at least back in max2008 there was a lot of memory flushing problems. I found that I couldn't get more than a couple heavily displaced objects in my scene before I was out of RAM. This was a big problem for me since I was creating a big rocky landscape at the time. In the end we had to customize every single shots displacement settings just to get it to render. I was never happy with the level of displacement we had to settle for. I haven't used MR again for a while so I'm not sure if its any better in max 2009 or 2010. Vray on the other hand has never let me down when it comes to displacement. You can load it up all over your scene and it will render. Maybe not fast, but it will finish. Vray handles dynamic memory flushing very well. Vray also has a couple options for how to calculate displacement. So if one way isn't working for you, you can easily switch to another method. I like to use 2d style displacement in Vray because its very fast and predictable, but it does reach a point where it requires to much memory. So in those cases I switch over to 3d displacement which will still take a texture map to drive it, but the calculations are handled differently and you can use a lot more displacement in your scene at the expense of render time.

Lighting

Its been a while since I've had problems with optimizing lighting. So much of what I do now is all HDR lit and doesn't have more than a few extra lights....If any. I'm currently rendering an interior 3d scene for a commercial lit with only an HDR outside the room. No lights at all. But there are still many projects that will require lots of lights. Memory wise its better to raytrace your shadows, but that is also slower. Shadow maps are great, but you have to be careful balancing them. You can run out of RAM really quick. Never use an omni light unless you have to. Omni's project six shadow maps where a spot light only projects one. So you can save yourself lots of ram by choosing the right light for the job. With shadow maps there are three parameters that are important to optimize. First is the bias. This one is kinda worthless most of the time. It doesn't really affect memory or rendertime but it will affect the look of the shadow. Lower values are best. I usually go with .01 for everything unless an issue comes up. More important are the Size and Sample Range. Size is going to determine the detail of the shadow. The higher the value the sharper the shadow. The sample rangle will blur the shadow and soften out any jagged edges. I've seen people balance these two numbers wrong a lot. The size is what is going to use up the most RAM, but the samples are going to cause the bigger render hit. If you want a soft shadow, don't turn your map size way up and then crank the sample range up to blur it out and make it looks soft. Instead keep your samples at the default 4 and adjust your map size until its as close as you can get it to the final result you want. Then slowly turn up the sample range. I have never needed to go above 16 for the sample range. I've never gone above 4096 for a shadow map size either. Just like with modeling. Instance your lights as often as you can.

Rendering

Know your renderer inside out. Setup a simple scene that has a little of everything in it and then start spinning values and really get a feel for what they do. It can be as dramatic as knowing one value that needs to change to take a render from a couple hours to a couple minutes, IF you know the right thing to adjust. So get to know what everything is really doing and how it works. With large scenes your probably going to have longer render times just because theres more in them. Be really smart about your test renders. Find VERY low quality settings that will render extremely fast. Even if the render quality is very poor. This is where I start, and remain until almost the end of a project. Every once in a while I'll crank settings up just to make sure something isn't messed up, but keep everything low for as long as possible. Most of the time you really just need to be able to see what is happening in the shot and all the noise and mess can be dealt with later once you know everything is working. Use region renders as much as possible. Once things are coming together and working I'll usually select one shot that best represents the sequence and push that one through to make it final. This shot will become the master shot. This way only one shot on the render farm is going to take any time and everyone else can keep working with fast renders until the look, and which passes will be needed, are all figured out. This way you also learn what settings are likely going to be for final shots and how long they will take to render. This will help you predict how much time your going to need to render all the final shots.

I think that just about does it. :)

Catching up

2009-01-08T10:04:00.000-08:00

Time is flying by. We finished up that previous photo real project I was mentioning in my last post. It was a commercial for LG brand televisions. The commercial featured a bunch of robots made up of parts from inside the television. They come to life late at night in the living room of a modern looking home and have themselves a little rave party. Then the owners of the house come home and they all scurry back into the television and hide. The designs for the robots were pretty cool and were VERY highly detailed. The commercial featured live action background plates with CG robots. This project was animated in Maya, with all the lighting and rendering done in Max/Vray. It was refreshing to be back in software that I knew very well. The project went very smoothly once all the characters were approved. All the characters were highly reflective and had a large range of material types on them. Everything from chrome and etched metals to glass, plastics, translucent bits and glowing LED lights. I learned a fair amount about eliminating grain in Vray on this project. Rendertimes were fantastic considering the complexity. We were using full 360 HDR light rigs with GI, glossy reflections, glossy refractions, translucency, 3d motion blur and DOF all rendered in camera. The longest frame times were just under 4 hours for shots where the character completely filled the frame. Most shots were 45 minutes or less for final renders. The commercial is being shown over seas, unfortunately. I'm not sure when or if it will be shown here in the US.

I'm currently working on a commercial for Sobe which will be shown durring the super bowl. This project is pretty intense. We're nearing the end though. I can't give any details about it yet, but it is being animated in Maya and rendered out of Lightwave. I was a little worried jumping back into Lightwave after being out of it on the LG spot for a couple months. Suprisingly, it all came back to me pretty quickly. We're about a week away from delivery and unless there are some last minute "gotcha's" we should deliver right on time. Now that I said that I'm sure to get a big list of notes ;) .

There is a pretty good chance on the next project I'm on I'll be modeling the main character. Should be interesting considering I'm more of an environment/lighting guy. I'm learning that Blur's artists are a lot more specialized than here at DD (at least in commercials). A generalist here really does do some of everything.

Good example

2008-11-19T21:20:00.000-08:00

I recently came across a great example of a situation that can happen when compositing that I thought I'd point out.

http://mymentalray.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1491

Basically, the example shows a limitation when working with RawLighting passes. The compositing math for this example is being done correctly, but because of the anti-aliasing you cannot composite these passes back together again and get the same image that you would get out of your 3d package in one pass. In some cases you can get away with having this problem in your comp and not see it. This thread shows a great example of the problem really showing its ugly head.

There is a work around that would allow you to create a raw lighting pass (if you wanted one) that would multiply over the diffuse pass and create the indentical output from your 3d package. To do this you need to render a lighting pass (textures and lighting together) and a diffuse pass. You could then divide the lighting pass by the diffuse pass which will give you a RawLighting pass. The difference between this RawLighting pass and if you rendered it from your 3d package is that this method will take the anti-aliased color differences into account. If you then color correct this and multiply it back over your diffuse pass you will get the exact same output as your 3d package would do.

Why would you want to do this? It is less efficient. Your basically rendering extra passes and using extra nodes in order to create the pass you just rendered anyways. You might consider doing this if you wanted to tweak the diffuse pass and have it automatically update down the chain reguardless of lighting changes. You might also want to work this way just cause its easier to actually see your lighting seperate from your textures. For lighting passes this workflow is probably more trouble than it is worth. But it does work.

Anyways, I thought the example was interesting and good to know about.

Long time

2008-10-31T17:26:00.000-07:00

I had a feeling this might happen. No updates in a long time. Things have eased up a bit today and I found some time to give a little udpate.

Gnomon has released my latest training DVD on Multi-pass Compositing. My first project at Digital Domain is on TV and before pretty much every movie now at the theaters. My first project was actually 3 commercials of which I worked on two. The first one is called "Mecha Mesquito" and is a commercial for the Honda Fit model car. The commercial features a bunch of cars modified to look like mosquitos complete with wings and legs made of car parts. They watch the Honda Fit drive by and begin chasing after it in the hopes of sucking the gas tank empty. At the end they become entranced by a building in the shape of a bug zapper and fly into it. The project was done mainly in Lightwave, with just some minor stuff in other packages. There were two other commercials in this campaign. The other I worked on is called "Defense Mechanism" and features the Honda Fit again but in a city with an underwater feel. All the other cars are fish like. The last I did not work on but had lots of bats flying out of the cars trunk.

After finishing that project I went on "overhead" which was a totally new experience for me. Basically you come to work and wait for someone to find work for you. I started to learn Maya in that time, but two days in they found a new task for me. The VFX supervisor on the film "Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons" came to me and asked if I could render the opening shot of the movie in 3ds Max using Vray. I can't give any details about the shot, but this was an experimental pipeline involving converting animation from another package into max on a VERY grand scale. Unfortunately, after two weeks of trying to make it work we ran into memory problems that just could not be overcome. So the shot remained in the orginal software package it was created in and I was put back on overhead. I was pretty bummed cause the shot is very cool and I really loved working on it. I got to see the final shot (rendered in another package) and it turned out fantastic. A part of me still wants to know what it would have turned out looking like using Max/Vray though. It had been looking really good before the memory cap.

After a couple more days on overhead I was put on another commercial project which again I can't talk about. This project is very cool though. I'm really enjoying it. I came to DD wanting to push myself to create completely photo realistic work and this project is turning out to be the closest I've ever come to that goal. Again on this project I'm involved with creating a pipeline for it which has been quite interesting. I've done quite a bit of scripting over the years in Max, but mainly creating tools that only I needed to depend on. I had a very nerve racking but also exciting experience on this project where we were going to be in serious trouble if we didn't have a particular tool created and I was the one to do it. It was a bit challenging to write this tool and the moment that another artists tried it for the first time on a shot......it worked. The few quite seconds before the tool was run for the first time in production was quite an intense moment. Seeing it work flawlessly that first time made my day and since it was the major stubbling point on the project and we had gotten past it made me feel like this project was well on its way to success. At the moment I'm wrapping up the last of the character modeling. Thats right....for those of you reading this who know me...I'm not a character modeler, but that is in fact what I did on this project. I modeled and textured 3 characters actually. They weren't all that difficult though. Mostly hard surface modeling. But it was something different for me. I've modeled only environments for the past 5 years.

Next week we begin rendering shots. I can't wait to see the shots start coming together.

Tim J

Gnomon release

2008-08-15T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Gnomon Workshop has posted in their "coming soon" section news about the release of my next training DVD. It is called "Multi-pass compositing" and deals with rendering passes out of 3ds max using several different renderers and compositing in Digital Fusion. The DVD mainly focuses on the compositing side of things. I really tried to include as much information as I could. I started off with some basics, but then I got into the "meat and potatoes," if you will, about how to work with passes. I feel that over the years I've come across many compositing work flows and issues in production and I made sure to include examples and explanations on how to deal with as many of them as I could on this DVD. I feel really good about how this DVD turned out. Hopefully if anyone reading this checks it out they'll enjoy it too. :)

www.thegnomonworkshop.com

One week and counting

2008-08-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

I've just completed my first week at Digital Domain. So far its been exciting, frustrating and overwhelming at times. I've been bombarded with a ton of new software to learn, both proprietary and off the shelf. The amount of new software to learn has been the overwhelming part. Each day its gotten easier, but its still a lot to try to soak in all at once. At times its been frustrating because for the past 5 years at Blur I've known the pipeline and tools inside out. Even helped to create some of them. But now I find myself the struggling new guy all over again. So far that has been both exciting and frustrating as I mentioned before. Knowing one pipeline inside out and then being dropped into a new pipeline and software that is completely foreign has been the hard part. Your faced with wanting to produce work at the same level and speed that your used to doing, but you know no matter what that there has to be a period of time in which to learn and your going to be slower until you gain experience with the new tools and pipeline. I'm excited about learning new software and work flows. I'm also excited to get to work on different types of projects and make new friends.

Project Challenge: Hawx

2008-07-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

So as I mentioned in my previous post. Hawx is finished. So its time to give a little breakdown on it. :)

Hawx is a 30 second television spot for the game. The final output resolution was 1920x1080 HD at 30 fps. We had a total of 17 shots. We had 1 animatic artist, 2 vehicle modelers, 2 riggers, 2 animators, 2 scene assemblers and 2 FX artists on the project. The project was for the most part rendered in Mental Ray. I ended up needing to render a few passes in Vray though. More on that later.

The biggest problem as usual ended up being memory management. The city street shots were pretty heavy on the poly count and textures, but nothing above and beyond the normal range. What made it difficult to render was that we needed to have the characters render in the scene in order to get proper reflections and light interaction on the environment as them move through it. Since the final output res was 1080p we had some very high res texture maps. It only takes a few of those before your in memory troubles (This project was in 32bit so we had the 3 gig RAM limit). It came down to carefully optimizing each shot so that it would be as high quality as possible but still render.

Another issue we came across was one that we originally thought would save us time. In this spot we were re-using some characters and vehicles from a previous project we did. The only difference was that the materials needed to be changed over to Mental Ray from Brazil. So we didn't need to worry about new character models or rigs. Unfortunately, in the end it came out as a wash. The models were over a year old and weren't up to date with our current pipeline needs as far as our tools are concerned. So the animators and riggers fought against that enough that it probably didn't save us any time at all in the long run and caused headaches for them. Sorry guys :(

Scene assembly was pretty straight forward. Most of the shots took place in the air so there was no interaction with the environment to worry about. Renders were pretty fast even at final quality. I think the longest render times I had were about 1.5 hours per frame at final quality. That was for some closeup shots of the pilot in the cockpit.

The aerial shots turned out to be simpler than I was originally anticipating. For the most part we got away with some satellite photos mapped onto a rough landscape model. Then we sprinkled in some models of the taller buildings, but left the shorter ones as just part of the aerial photo texture. This map ended up being HUGE. I broke it into two maps cause it was just too big. Each of the two texture maps was 19,000 pixels square. I could just barely get these two maps to render by themselves on the landscape model. So I spent some time looking into ways of dealing with extremely large texture maps. Which lead me to tiled .map and .exr files. In the end I ended up not needed to use them and just rendered as normal, but what you can do with them is really impressive so I plan to start making use of them more often in my work.

The beauty of a tiled .map or .exr is that Mental Ray can look at these texture maps and know if they are tiled or not. When I say "tiled" I don't mean you take a texture map and repeat it a number of times. Tiled in this case means that within the texture map are smaller defined areas or "tiles." When these types of texture maps are used in your scene and Mental Ray finds them it does not load the whole texture map into memory...Instead it only loads the tile it needs in order to render the current bucket. Then when its finished rendering that bucket it dumps the memory and loads the next tile it needs. So you have almost no Ram overhead, and it seemed in my case to actually initialize and render the scene faster. It is also possible to have these .map or .exr files store multiple resolution texture maps inside them. This way if Mental Ray knows that an object is far away it can load a lower resolution version instead of the full res one. The downside to this is that it requires a lot of hard drive space. These texture maps get huge. Mine were around 400 megs each. Another downside is that it takes some manual setup to create the tiled texture maps. For that I found some dos based executables on the OpenEXR website which allow you to convert texture maps to tiled texture maps. But its not a simple "save as" menu, you have to actually type out some basic code in a certain format. Totally worth the trouble though if you have a lot of highres maps you need to render. I found that .map files worked just fine in Max 2008, however, exr's did not work properly. The memory was not being handled right in mental ray. In max 2009 the exrs worked beautifully. FYI

In the end the project went very smoothly. The clients were great, the project delivered on time and on budget. There were hardly any long work days and nobody pulled any all nighters.

Nearly 5 years

2008-07-25T17:48:00.001-07:00

Well...Hawx is now finished and out the door.... And so am I. After nearly 5 years at Blur I've decided to move on. I'll be heading over to Digital Domain to work in their commercials department. Its been an amazing ride at Blur. I've made lots of great friends and grown tremendously as an artist and team leader. Blur is a fantastic place to work and I'm very sad to say goodbye. I've always wanted to produce photo real renderings, and since that is a type of work that Blur rarely does, I've decided to move on. I will miss you Blur! Thanks for everything.

On a side note. Digital Domain is pretty much walking distance from Blur, and Sze (my wife) will still be working at Blur. So I'm not really leaving, just sitting further down the street. :)

1st Pass of Hawx

2008-06-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

Hawx is in full swing now. Animation is about 98% done with just minor fixes being done as we find them. Scene assembly is just past half way done and the FX artists started this week. As projects go this one is simpler than most. Half of the spot takes place in the air so we don't have to worry about shadows on the environment or in some shots not even an environment at all. Only 3 of the aerial shots ended up needing a modeled environment in the background. The rest of the aerial shots worked just fine with photographed cloud backgrounds and afterburn particles mixed together. The FX will consist of two large explosions (seen in 4 total shots) and some simpler things like vapor trails and flares. We'll have our first review of the scene assembly this Friday with the client. That's when we'll find out if we're really on the right track or not ;) .

HAWX begins

2008-05-07T16:47:00.001-07:00

Section 8 is finally completely approved and out the door. So work on HAWX has officially begun. HAWX is a game all about modern air combat. This project will be a 30 second television commercial for the game. Part of the spot will take place on the ground in some war torn streets of Rio de Janiero. The rest will take place in the air over the city. I'm looking forward to this project. I have never done a project that requires me to create a CG version of a recognizable city and its landmarks. Let alone do that from the air. Should be fun and very action packed. The in-game footage we were given for reference is pretty impressive.

Project Challenge

2008-04-08T14:21:00.000-07:00

With every project I work on there is always some unique challenge that has to be overcome while working on it. I thought I would start a re-occurring topic where as I finish a project I'd share what the main challenges were with it and how we over came them.

For the first post in this series I'll talk about the game trailer for "Section 8."

This project was pretty typical in most respects. It was rendered in HD at 1280x720 at 30fps. The total running time was 2 minutes 10 seconds and there were 30 shots. We had 2 character modelers, 1 rigger, 5 animators (never all at once), 3 Scene assemblers, 2 FX artists and 1 matte painter. The cinematic mainly takes place on the surface of an alien desert environment approaching sunset. Some shots at the beginning take place inside a space ship. The characters are futuristic soldiers wearing highly reflective body armor.

For this project we rendered with Mental Ray in 3ds Max 2008. This was the first project to be rendered at Blur using this combination. Understandably, many of our issues in the beginning were just learning the ins and outs of Mental Ray. Memory turned out to be our biggest challenge on this project. Memory is always an issue on every project, however, this time it really came to the forefront.

I was responsible for modeling the environment (among other things) which is full of large rock formations and was wanting to use mental ray's displacement for them. The rocks were modeled in Z-brush and displacement and normal maps were exported for them. After only putting my second rock into the scene my render crashed. I checked the RAM and was shocked to see it was well up above 3 gigs. After some experimentation it turned out that Mental Ray was not flushing the RAM it was using for the displacement after the bucket being rendered finished. Vray users (like myself) will know this as dynamic memory. Its memory that is only loaded when the bucket starts to render, and is flushed when the bucket completes allowing you to render very memory intensive scenes. I started lowering displacement quality to see how low I had to push things before I could get it to render. After a short while it was obvious that displacement was not going to work for me. I couldn't get anyways near the quality level I was hoping for. So instead I started outputting level 4 subdivided meshes from Z-brush for all my rock formations and normal maps to use for the finer details. The normal maps looked great. Almost as good as the displacement did, and because the meshes were pretty dense I was able to get a pretty decent silhouette for the rocks also. The silhouette detail is the most important part of getting the rocks to look realistic. A good shader helps too ;). So I stripped all the displacement out of my scene and was getting lighting fast renders. From that point on it was business as usual with RAM. I could just watch my RAM usage in the task manager just like I always do. Towards the end of the project though we started running into memory problems again. In order to get the level of detail we needed in the rocks we had to have millions of polys in the scene. Every shot needed its own custom optimizations just to get it to render at all. The poly count of every shot varied, but the larger shots ended up around 6 million polys.

The second challenge was the highly reflective body armor the soldiers have. We have shots of the characters running through the scene as well as crouching behind rocks as they take fire from the opposing side. The original plan was to render and HDR of the environment and use that for lighting and reflections when we did the character passes. We've done that plenty of times in the past and it works great. However, this time, because the characters were so reflective it was really obvious they weren't moving through the environment. The reflections remained very static. We thought about maybe rendering HDR sequences that tracked the motion of the characters, but then every character would need its own HDR sequence and it just would be too complicated to do it that way. So we ultimately ended up making the environment invisible to camera, but having the characters rendered with the environment in the scene. This really helped add to the realism, but was very difficult to get it to render because of the RAM usage required having the environment and characters in the scene rendering together. In the end though this was the best solution and is how it ultimately got rendered.

As projects go, this one was fairly easy. It was a small crew and most of us are veterans. The new guys on the team did a great job on this project as well.

Simple scripting

2008-03-29T15:31:00.000-07:00

Scripting in 3ds Max is maybe not for everyone, but I couldn't even begin to count the hours/weeks/months of my time that was saved by learning at least the basics. You don't have to be a scripting genius to automate some simple repetitive tasks. The "For loop" is very basic, and is also probably the most common bit of coding you'll need. Save yourself hours of work and try this.

Lets say you've modeled a bunch of vines using renderable splines (based on a true story), but after placing about 300 of them you realize you forgot to give them enough segments to look rounded. The "for loop" is here to save you. It goes like this.

---------------

for i in selection do
(
i.render_sides = 12
)
-------------------

Its that simple. But let me explain what its doing. "i" could be anything. It could be "n", "blah", "Myfirstofficialblogpost"....etc. It doesn't matter. Its a variable that you make up that will represent each object in your selection. So basically....for (every object) that is selected do...the following bit thats in parenthesis.

In this case inside the parenthesis is a line of code that will change the segments a spline to 12. Because "i" will represent every object in my selection. This script will go through each object in my selection one at a time and change the segments to 12.

Now lets take this one step further. Another really helpful bit of code to know is how to generate random values. With a slight modification you can have the above script assign a random number of segments to each spline.

-----------------------------

for i in selection do
(
X = random 3 16
i.render_sides = X
)

-----------------------------

So in the above situation all we've done is create a variable called "X" which for every object in the scene will generate a random number between 3 and 16. Then the script assigns that value to the segments parameter of one of your splines and repeats the process until it has done this to every object in your selection.

You can use the Maxscript help file to look up what a certain parameter is called, or you can open the maxscript listener and adjust the parameter you want to later script and watch what code appears in the listener. Its an easy way to get the line of code you need without having to open the help file and search for it.

Its pretty simple stuff, but its saved me countless amounts of time. Enjoy.

First Post!!

2008-03-27T20:02:00.001-07:00

I've been wanting to start a blog for a while, but hadn't gotten around to it. I guess the stars aligned and it finally happened. Anyways, the idea was to have a place to just ramble out ideas and tests related to CG, compositing and photography. Maybe some experiments, tips and tricks I've come across, tutorials. Whatever seems interesting.