Speed texturing & look-deving session for this fella.
It will be used for testing my IBLs and light-rigs.
Renders with different lighting conditions and backplates on their way.
These are the texture channels that I painted for this suit. Tried to keep everything simple. Only 6 texture channels, 3 shaders and 10 UDIMs.
Color
Specular
Mask 1
Color 2
Roughness
Fine displacement
This is a very quick guide to set-up Zbrush displacements in Clarisse.
As usually, the most important thing is to extract the displacement map from Zbrush correctly. To do so just check my previous post about this procedure.
Once your displacement maps are exported follow this mini tutorial.
Render with displacement map.
Render without displacement map.
Mari is the standard tool these days for texturing in VFX facilities. There are so many reasons for it but one of the most important reasons is that Mari is probably the only texturing dedicated software that can handles colour spaces. In a film environment this is a very important feature because working without having control over colour profiles is pretty much like working blind.
That's why Mari and Nuke are the standard tools for texturing. We also include Zbrush as standard tool for texture artist but only for displacement maps stuff where color managment doesn't play a key role.
Right now colour management in Mari is not complete, at least is not as good as Nuke's, where you can control colour spaces for input and output sources. But Mari offers a basic colour management tools really useful for film environments. We have Mari Colour Profiles and OpenColorIO (OCIO).
As texture artists we usually work with Float Linear and 8-bit Gamma sources.
I just published another high resolution HDRI panorama for VFX.
This set includes all the original brackets, HDRI panoramas, lighting and color references for look-development and 3D lighting and an IBL setup ready to use.
Check akromatic's site for information and downloads.
A few years ago I worked on Tim Burton's Dark Shadows at MPC. We created a full CG face for Eva Green's character Angelique.
Angelique had a fight with Johnny Depp's character Barnabas Collins, and her face and upper body gets destroyed during the action.
In that case, all the broken parts where painted by hand as texture masks, and then the FX team generated 3D geometry and simulations based on those maps, using them as guides.
Recently I had to do a similar effect, but in this particular case, the work didn't require hand painting textures for the broken pieces, just random cracks here and there.
I did some research about how to create this quickly and easily, and found out that Modo's shatter command was probably the best way to go.
This is how I achieve the effect in no time.
First of all, let's have a look to Angelique, played by Eva Green.
Sunny Boat HDRI equirectangular panorama.
I've been working on a new series of HDRI equirectangular panoramas for VFX.
Check the first one published on akromatic's site.
This is the final trailer for Exodus: Gods and Kings. One of my latest projects at Double Negative.
Enjoy it!
This is a quick introduction to HDRI shooting on set for visual effects projects.
If you want to go deeper on this topic please check my DT course here.
Equipment
This list below is a professional equipment for HDRI shooting. Good results can be achieved using amateur gear, don't necessary need to spend a lot of money for HDRI capturing, but the better equipment you own the easier, faster and better result you'll get. Obviously this gear is based on my taste.
All the equipment packed up. Try to keep everything small and tidy.
All your items should be easy to pick up.
Most important assets are: Camera body, fish-eye lens, multi purpose lens, tripod, nodal head, macbeth chart and lighting checkers.
Shooting checklist
Grey and chrome spheres, extremely important for lighting calibration.
Macbeth chart is necessary for white balance correction.
Before shooting
Methodology
Final HDRI equirectangular panorama.
Exposures starting point
That should be it for now, happy shooting :)
A few months ago, when my workmates from Double Negative were working on Transcendence, I saw them using Houdini to create such a beautiful animations using tiny geometries. They were like millions of small cubes building shapes and forms.
Some time later other people started doing similar stuff with Maya's XGen and other tools. I tried it and it works like a charm.
Frame from Transcendence.
Frame from Transcendence.
I was curious about these images and then decided to recreate something similar, but I wanted to do it in a simpler and quicker way. I found out that combining Cinema 4D and Maya is probably the easiest way to create this effect.
If you have any clue to do the same in Modo or Softimage, please let me know, I'm really curious.
This is my current approach.
In Cinema 4D create a plane with a lot of subdivisions. Each one of those subdivisions will generate a cube. In this case I’m using a 1000cm x 1000cm plane with 500 subdivisions.
Create a new material and assign it to the plane.
Select the plane and go to the menu Simulate -> Hair objects -> Add hair.
If you zoom in you will see that one hair guide is generated by each vertex of the plane.
In the hair options reduce the segments guides to 1 because we just need straight guides we don’t care about hair resolution.
Also change the root to polygon center. Now the guides growth from each polygon center instead of each vertex of the plane.
Remove the option render hair (we are not going to be rendering hairs) from the generate tab. Also switch the type to square.
Right now we can see cubes instead of hair guides, but they are so thin.
We can control the thickness using the hair material. In this case I’m using 1.9 cm
Next thing would be randomising the height. Using a procedural noise would be enough to get nice results. We can also create animations very quickly, just play with the noise values.
Remove the noise for now. We want to control the length using a bitmap.
Also hide the hair, it’s quicker to setup if we don’t see the hair in viewport.
In the Plane material, go to luminance and select a bitmap. Adjust the UV Mapping to place the bitmap in your desired place.
In the hair material, use the same image for the length parameter.
Copy the same uv coordinates from the plane material.
Add a pixel effect to the texture and type the number of pixels based on the resolution of the plane. In this case 500
Do this in both materials, the plane and the hair. Now each cube will be mapped with a small portion of the bitmap.
Display the hair system and voila, that’s it.
Obviously the greater contrast in your image the better. I strongly recommend you to use high dynamic range images, as you know the contrast ratio is huge compared with low dynamic images.
At this point you can render it here in C4D or just export the geometry to another 3D software and render engine.
Select the hair system and make it editable. Now you are ready to export it as .obj
Import the .obj in your favourite 3D software. Then apply your lighting and shaders, and connect the image that you used before to generate the hair system. Of course, you can control the color of the hair system using any other bitmap or procedurals.
In order to keep this work very simple, I’m just rendering a beauty pass and an ambient occlusion pass, but of course you can render as many aov’s as you need.
I also animate very quickly the translation of the hair system and added motion blur and depth of field to the camera to get a more dynamic image, but this is really up to you.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, with this quick and easy technique you can create beautiful images combining it with your expertise.
Just some experiments using cubes, a lot of cubes.
First attempt to create a shader that looks like rough 2D sketches.
I will definitely put more effort on this in the future.
I'm pretty much combining three different pen strokes.
Rough outline.
Quick definition of volume.
Final sharp detail.
Quick exercise using Modo Replicators. Lot of fun.
Scatterers in Clarisse are just great. They are very easy to control, reliable and they render in no time.
I've been using them for matte painting purposes, just feed them with a bunch of different trees to create a forest in 2 minutes. Add some nice lighting and render insane resolution. Then use all the 3D material with all the needed AOV's in Nuke and you'll have full control to create stunning matte paintings.
To make this demo a bit funnier instead of trees I'm using cool Lego pieces :)
Now play with the density. In this case I’m using a value of 0.7
As you can see all the toy_men start to populate the image.
Final render.
We have a new trailer for Exodus: Gods and Kings.
In this one we already can see some cool stuff that we did at Double Negative VFX.
In this post I'm going to explain my methodology to merge different pictures or portions of an environment in order to create a panoramic image to be used for matte painting purposes. I'm not talking about creating equirectangular panoramas for 3D lighting, for that I use ptGui and there is not a better tool for it.
I'm talking about blending different images or footage (video) to create a seamless panoramic image ready to use in any 3D or 2D program. It can be composed using only 2 images or maybe 15, it doesn't matter.
This method is much more complicated and requires more human time than using ptGui or any other stitching software. But the power of this method is that you can use it with HDR footage recorded with a Blackmagic camera, for example.
The pictures that I'm using for this tutorial were taken with a nodal point base, but they are not calibrated or similar. In fact they don't need to be like that. Obviously taking pictures from a nodal point rotation base will help a lot, but the good thing of this technique is that you can use different angles taken from different positions and also using different focal and different film backs from various digital cameras.
Depending on your pipeline and your workflow you may want to use cards or projectors. At some point you will need both of them, so is nice to have quick controls to switch between them
In this tutorial we are going to use the card mode. For now leave it as card and remove the sphere.
That's it if you only need to see the panorama through the shot camera. But let's say you also need to project it in a 3D space.
You can download the sample scene here.
Every single facility or 3D artist around the globe have their own way to work with our Lighting Checkers, based on the render engine they use, shaders, pipeline in general. But just to make your life a bit easier, akromatic wants to provide you with a digital version of our Lighting Checkers to quickly match our physical version.
In this case we are offering you digital akromatic Lighting Checkers for arnold render.
We'll be posting other render engines soon.
Download here.
I will continue writing about my experiences working with Clarisse. This time I'm gonna talk about working with layers and passes, a very common topic in the rendering world no matter what software you are using.
Clarisse allows you to create very complex organization systems using contexts, layers/passes and images. In addition to that we can compose all the information inside Clarisse in order to create different outputs for compositing.
Clarisse has a very clever organization methods for huge scenes.
I've been using Isotropix Clarisse in production for a little while now. Recently the VFX Facility where I work announced the usage of Clarisse as primary Look-Dev and Lighting tool, so I decided to start talking about this powerful raytracer on my blog.
Today I'm writing about how to set-up Image Based Lighting.
A few days ago I did my first tests in Colorway. My idea is to use Colorway as texturing and look-development tool for VFX projects.
I think it can be a really powerful and artist friendly software to work on different type of assets.
It is also a great tool to present individual assets, because you can do quick and simple post-processing tasks like color correction, lens effects, etc. And of course Colorway allows you to create different variations of the same asset in no time.
With this second test I wanted to create an entire asset for VFX, make different variations and put everything together in a dailies template or similar to showcase the work.
At the end of the day I'm quite happy with the result and workflow combining Modo, Mari and Colorway. I found some limitations but I truly believe that Colorway will fit soon my needs as Texture Painter and Look-Dev Artist.
Transferring textures
One of the limitations that I found as Texture Painter is that Colorway doesn't manage UDIMs yet. I textured this character time ago at home using Mari following VFX standards and of course, I'm using UDIMs, actually something around 50 4k UDIMs.
I had to create a new UV Mapping using the 1001 UDIM only. In order to keep enough texture resolution I divided the asset in different parts. Head, both arms, both legs, pelvis and torso.
Then using the great "transfer" tool in Mari, I baked the high resolution textures based on UDIMs on to the low resolution UVs based on one single UV space. I created one 8k resolution texture for each part of the asset. I'm using only 3 texture channels, Color, Specular and Bump.
Layer Transfer tool in Mari.
All the new textures already baked in to the default UV space 1001
My lighting setup in Modo couldn't be more simple. I'm just using an Equirectangular HDRI map of Beverly Hills. This image is actually shipped with Modo.
Image Based Lighting works great in Modo and is also very easy to mix different IBLs in the same scene. Just works great.
Shading wise is also quite simple. Just one shading layer with Color, Specular and Bump maps connected. I'm using one shader for each part of the asset.
The render takes only around 3 minutes on my tiny MacBook Air.
Rendering for Colorway takes more than that but obviously you will save a lot of time later.
Once in Colorway I can easily play with colours and textures. I created a color texture variation in Mari and now in Colorway I can plug it and see the shading changes in no time.
All the different parts exported from Modo are on the left side toolbar.
On the right side all the lights will be available to play with. In this case I only have the IBL.
All the materials are listed on the right side. It is possible to change color, intensity and diffuse textures. This gives you a huge amount of freedom to create different variations of the same asset.
I really like the possibility of using post-precessing effects like Lens distortion or dispersion. You can have a quick visual feedback of very common lens effects used on VFX projects.
Finally I created a couple of color variations for this asset.
Notes
A couple of things that I noticed while working on this asset:
News from akromatic.
"Based on the feedback and requirements of some VFX Facilities, we decided to release a new flavour of our calibrated paint.
Some Look-Development Artists prefer to use grey balls with higher specular components and other Artists are more comfortable using less shiny spheres.
It is matter of personal preference, so let us know which one is your flavour.
Original spheres: Gloss average around 30%
New spheres: Gloss average around 18%
Both of them are calibrated as Neutral Greys and hand painted."
New grey sphere, half hit by the sun, half in shade.
New grey flavour, close up. Soft lighting transition.
The mirror side remains the same. Carefully polished by hand.
Mirror side, close up.
All the information here.
