electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

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maze
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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 12 Sep 2012, 00:32

Hi thanks for the advice Maximus, well I actually had some time off yesterday and could do some improvements to geometry.
using the polyreduct all around I reduced the total polycount from 16mil to 10mil polys, yes, there's still a lot, but it still does feel a lot lighter.

Something really cool about the polygon reduction tool is that you can reduce polygons selectively, meaning in different percentages along the same mesh... thats awesome so I can keep density only where is needed. Also noticed that even a 50% total base reduction to start of, did not affect the mesh quality (detail sharpness) to any noticeable degree. So thats Cool!

Doing a test render I am now at 45+ mins per frame on a single Lambert and the basic glass shader, thats a couple hours less...!

-------

I hear you about 3Delight, Actually Ive had a couple months gig around 6 months ago where I could play a little with 3delight... (I was mostly texture painting and modeling...but still could play a little) I remember being able to use the default arch shader, so thats good, as I kinda know it well. I remember I did a house mostly in zb and it was rendering displacements like butter at imax res... was pretty cool to see actually! ...still though I am very very new to renderman engines as my experience its being mostly raytracers ....mental ray and lately a bit of arnold at my last gig... (but yeah I can't get to play with it at home unfortunately). I did some test with 3delight 2 core version last night... using only environment light (meaning an actual .hdr plugged to the envshader) I ve went quickly through the documentation... looks like you dont need, a blurred img for lighting... thats nice.

/note:I ll give myself some days to do some tests and decide if its worth the learning curve and render time or either I ll keep optimizing the scene with MR. As it was before. Again this is a breeze in xsi using passes for each renderer.... :)

I'll attach a couple of tests I just did, and post some questions hopefully someone can give some advice. Test is done with no lights and only an hdr connected to the env shader.
Image So here I have some questions :)


1) From that first test I ll notice a difference in reflections when not using raytracing, and it does look better to me. Can someone care to explain me why? (primary rays reyes, ibl on, point based color bleed.)

2) I already had setup .ies profiles for the wom shader in Mr. Obviously wom shader wont work with 3delight and not even sure about .ies profiles. So any advice on photometric area lighting using 3delight? Is there any light shader for 3delight?

3) I am not sure why happens that the camera renders a different view. I saw the render output and it does render something different although the correct camera is assign to the pass. Is there somewhere I need to declare the camera to 3delight for it to use it? I notice the FOV is wrong.

4) How does 3delight deals with reflective objects, metals like. I saw that turning "raytracing off" does gives a nice result at least in the example I posted on a single ball. What is your approach to reflective metals from a shading perspective?

5) How good does 3delight manages geo count in comparison to displacements. Currently the scene is at 10mil polys.... Although if there was to be a significant improve on render time coming from displacement usage, I could reproject the detail on simpler meshes in zb and output .32 bit displacements..

Thanks again for your time guys!

Regards.

-Manu

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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by gustavoeb » 12 Sep 2012, 01:43

great project maze! looking forward for the final result...
I see you are playing with 3delight, cant help you much with that...

your MR setup seems pretty good though, but your ray depth is ridicously high... I understand you have glasses and all that, but do you need that much reflections? specially with glossy materials that can become a problem. also, have you given unified sampling a try? I recomend you do if you are on 2013 (it was slower on 2012), seems to work pretty good for me... (must have local samples down to very low values for best results).
Gustavo Eggert Boehs
Blog: http://www.gustavoeb.com.br/

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maze
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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 14 Sep 2012, 01:09

hey gustavo, Nice to meet a fellow south american using xsi as well!

I ve been a bit busy this couple days, but from the tests I could do using 3delight, I am getting the impression that there's a ton of power behind this
render engine, as I ve said, I used it before but very briefly on a gig, so its nice to get to play with the 2 cores version.

Although from my tests, I am at 30 mins render only with the .hdr and no lights. I think that I shoud've started by using displacements all around instead of actual geo
if I wanted to go 3delight route. Also as I am new to this engine I am having a bit of a hassle matching the lighting 100%. Mostly in regards to light falloff and distribution .ies).
Although I am pretty sure with some time it ll work. But I ve decided for this project to stick with mental ray.

I ll take a look at standins as was suggested by you guys.

@gustavo, I haven't used unified sampling, although I ve heard some nice comments about it. I am currently using 2012 at home, I have a student license in this computer so I might be able to do the upgrade if its worth, as I still have the access to updates.

hopefully that wont crash the wom archlight shader :) ?(...we never know)

I ll try to give some news soon, keep bringing ideas. I do appreciate your time guys.

à plus

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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 14 Sep 2012, 22:02

...did a quick test:

Image

I modeled by hand beveling the edges, result is much better and I am not getting that weird rounded look..
its actually not as long as I thought modeling using a grid and shelling/beveling all the pieces at the same time.
I ll go ahead through all the pieces.

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Mathaeus
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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by Mathaeus » 14 Sep 2012, 22:38

maze wrote: So here I have some questions :)


1) From that first test I ll notice a difference in reflections when not using raytracing, and it does look better to me. Can someone care to explain me why? (primary rays reyes, ibl on, point based color bleed.)

2) I already had setup .ies profiles for the wom shader in Mr. Obviously wom shader wont work with 3delight and not even sure about .ies profiles. So any advice on photometric area lighting using 3delight? Is there any light shader for 3delight?

3) I am not sure why happens that the camera renders a different view. I saw the render output and it does render something different although the correct camera is assign to the pass. Is there somewhere I need to declare the camera to 3delight for it to use it? I notice the FOV is wrong.

4) How does 3delight deals with reflective objects, metals like. I saw that turning "raytracing off" does gives a nice result at least in the example I posted on a single ball. What is your approach to reflective metals from a shading perspective?

5) How good does 3delight manages geo count in comparison to displacements. Currently the scene is at 10mil polys.... Although if there was to be a significant improve on render time coming from displacement usage, I could reproject the detail on simpler meshes in zb and output .32 bit displacements..

Thanks again for your time guys!

Regards.

-Manu
Just a few ( very personal) answers about 3delight for SI
1 and 4: if you disable ray-tracing, it's just a 'reflection' from environment map, that's all. Probably you don't want this in closed scene, doesn't make sense, imho.
2: photometric lights, as well as physical sun, are not supported in plugin for SI. Physical sky *is* supported. About additional shaders, hardly you'll find something like photometric lights. But, you can find stuff like 'area shadow map' or like.
3. I don't know
5. Renderman compliant renderers, like a 3Delight, works differently than MR or V-Ray. All geometry is already tessellated according to screen resolution ( or something else). By 'shading rate' you control the level of detail - smaller is sharper and slower. However, contours are (almost) always tessellated properly. In short, you can have as many displaced objects as you wish at very low cost. As well as any other tiny stuff, hair for example.

MR Shaders are just emulation, maybe for having a smoother first experience. Under the hood, this is a very different engine, again. MIA material is just (almost) the same mix of components - diffuse, reflection and highlight and so. More an introduction, instead something where you'll expect the same experience.

Point-based GI and AO are (again) different methods than MR final gather or ray-traced AO. Let's say, they likes curved surfaces more than flat ones, they likes a lot of small details, like hair.

Ray-tracing is generally slower than in MR or V-Ray.

IMHO the best introduction could be to read the docs of standalone 3delight (they coming with plugin). It's not all technical lecture.

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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 18 Sep 2012, 17:38

Hi Mathaeus,

Sorry for the delay posting. Thanks for taking the time on those questions! That surely helps for future endeavors,
for now I ll stick with mental ray mostly for time reasons (haha yeah it does sound ironic...!). Although I don't have a deadline I ll like to start shading/texturing soon,
And probably it ll take me a bit to figure out 3delight as I want. It ll probably help to start a project from scratch using that engine.

Yeah, I hear you about the 3delight manual, thats actually where I went at first ;) really well explained. Although its not until you test stuff that you can be certain...
There s really good points on 3delight side and does look awesome, knowing you can get displacements, MB and DOF almost at no cost...
also hair as you point which I didn t know.

On the other side, theres the raytracing part that bugs me a bit for highly reflective surfaces, also light falloff and distribution. I ll try to take a look at the shader link you ve sent!

---

I ve been doing some tests with the broken glass geometry (very time consuming!), and although it might look simple I`ve encountered some issues I didn't thought of at the beginning but now that I am refining stuff it does looks off... and even if in the concept is working, I felt that it wasnt looking good in the 3d scene so I've changed the glass a bit. So I ll try to finish some more tests and post what I mean by that..

Cheers.

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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 18 Sep 2012, 20:49

*quick question, does someone know if there is any compound to cap complex (messy) geo in ice?

ref: Image

thanks!

Edit: *bridge does a great job, a lot better than in max, because you can select multiple edges at once, although there are some holes left that bridge could not fill and was wondering if there was something else..

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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 27 Oct 2013, 20:33

Hi there!

well well... its been quite a while since I posted something... !!

I ve been very busy on a project and didnt have too much time for personal stuff... but
well some weeks ago I decided to give up excuses and to put some time to finish this project...
and I will like to show you what I came up with, hopefully you like it !

Got to say that this project its been a great learning experience overall, and it showed me that
planning stuff in advance can save you tons of time later... (unfortunately
that wasn't the case here... thats why I know now... haha but well thats how we learn I guess..)

Lately I ven been picking up nuke and arnold more and more at work (doing lookdev / lighting in arnold and softimage)
So I though it would be a good idea to do it in arnold/nuke as I also had access to it at work and could advance a bit on my free time.

I can say that one of my biggest problems its being.... reducing rendering times while keeping low noise... I learned that Arnold is a beast
for outdoor shots with complex geo but that interiors can get tricky do pull out with many area lights and a closed environment...
sure there was a lot of room for proper optimization... and again that goes with planning in advance, but I was also learning it so it wasn't that
straight forward to start of, but ok here it goes..

I wanted to create a very grungy environment, from looking at the concept it looked like an abandoned place with lots of debris
here and there... I wanted to keep it low saturated with some added atmospheric / lighting effects and subtle fog added using cards in nuke.

Image
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Last edited by maze on 27 Oct 2013, 22:55, edited 1 time in total.

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maze
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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 27 Oct 2013, 20:44

For the broken glass textures, I decided to go a different way instead of doing it textured in 3D I tried doing it in nuke
as I wasn't really sure what I liked and it was quicker to do iterations... still not quite convinced, but still it was cool
to learn a new way of adding textures in post.

I basically combined 2 tile nodes (one for the front of the glass and one for the side) in nuke using overlay and / screen as merge modes.
each tile node had a broken image clip like this one:

Image

over the broken glass tiles I've added a dust/dirt texture using the same method, here is the nuke script:

Image

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maze
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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 27 Oct 2013, 20:49

this is a quick image about the light rig used (mostly spotlights with a gobo image for light decay and point lights for light bulbs):

Image

and here is one in Mari for the texture part, I tried doing most of the concrete using a combination or mari procedurals and hand paint:

Image

Image

Image

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Superpositivo
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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by Superpositivo » 28 Oct 2013, 12:15

Only one word : AWESOME!...

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McNistor
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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by McNistor » 28 Oct 2013, 18:28

Looks very good, although I can't say I'm a big fan of teh over-saturated game-ish look.
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
-Thucydides

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maze
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Re: electric chair chamber - xsi, nuke. Personal project

Post by maze » 29 Oct 2013, 04:19

hey,

@superpositivo, thanks man glad you like it!

@McNistor, Thanks for the comment, I do appreciate your feedback and in fact I do agree with the saturation point, to be honest I've been doing the comp / grading part at home
and my monitor is really bad (hues / saturation... which reminds me I really need to get a decent one and calibrate it as well...) not an excuse but its being a bit hard because everytime
I was looking at those images back at work colors didn't quite match exactly...but well.. you get my point. I did lowered saturation a bit on all images now, hope its easier on the eyes.
I did though wanted to get a very raw / grunge / vintage feeling... thats why I thought I might be cool to make some pure black and white versions... still I am learning comp on my own so I am hoping to get a better attempt doing stuff properly next time ;)

cheers

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