I just made this super hero Legos for an upcoming Arnold course that I'm developing for elephant vfx.
Look-dev scene of the characters.
I just made this super hero Legos for an upcoming Arnold course that I'm developing for elephant vfx.
Look-dev scene of the characters.
IBL pack 0001 is available for purchase.
30 different lighting situations ready to use in Maya 2017 and Arnold.
Just import your 3D assets and start look-deving and lighting.
Detailed information here.
Having some fun with these small guys.
I will try to do a couple of these a month.
Quick tip here. Whenever possible use some kind of high frequency detail to capture references for your assets. In this scenario I'm scanning with photos this huge rock, with only 50 images and very bad conditions. Low lighting situation, shot hand-held, no tripod at all, very windy and raining.
Thanks to all the great high frequency detail on the surface of this rock the output is quite good to use as modeling reference, even to extract highly detailed displacement maps.
Notice in the image below that I'm using only 50 pictures. Not much you might say. But thanks to all the tiny detail the photogrammetry software does very well reconstructing the point cloud to generate the 3D model. There is a lot of information to find common points between photos.
The shooting pattern couldn't be more simple. Just one eight all around the subject. The alignment was completely successfully in Photoscan.
As you can see here, even with a small number of photos and not the best lighting conditions, the output is quite good.
I did an automatic retopology in Zbrush. I don't care much about the topology, this asset is not going to be animated at all. I just need a manageable topology to create a nice uv mapping and reproject all the fine detail in Zbrush and use it later as displacement map.
A few render tests.
Mi friend David Munoz Velazquez just pointed me to this great script to flatten geometries based on UV Mapping, pretty useful for re-topology tasks. In this demo I use it to create nice topology for 3D garments in Marvelous Designer. Then I can apply any new simulation changes to the final mesh using morphs. Check it out.
One feature that I really like in Clarisse are the shading layers. With them you can drive shaders based on naming convention or location of assets in the scene. With this method you can assign shaders to a very complex scene structure in no time. In this particular case I'll be showing you how to shade an entire army and create shading/texturing variations in just a few minutes.
I'll be using an alembic cache simulation exported from Maya using Golaem. Usually you will get thousand of objects with different naming convention, which makes the shading assignment task a bit laborious. With shading layer rules in Clarisse we can speed up a lot this tedious process
Texture artists, matte painters and environment artists often have to deal with UDIMs in Nuke. This is a very basic template that hopefully can illustrate how we usually handle this situation.
Cons
Pros
Workflow
The sixth convocation of my "Realistic Texture Painting and Look Development" course at TD-U starts next week. Still a few places available, check it out here.
If you are new to Arnold you are probably looking for RAW lighting and albedo AOVs in the AOV editor. And yes you are right, they are not there. At least when using AiStandard shaders.
The easiest and fastest solution would be to use AlShaders, they include both, RAW lighting and albedo AOVs. But if you need to use AiStandard shaders, you will have to create your own AOVs quite easily).
As every Wed, two new words for our dictionary.
Cutter
(1) The term sometimes used for the editor. (2) A large flag, long and narrow in shape, used for blocking light from the camera or an area of the set.
Mini
A 200 Watt spotlight with a three inches Fresnel lens.
This video was created for elephantvfx.com which means that it's only available in Spanish. But you can mute it and follow what I do visually :)
I basically explain how to render UVs AOVs in a couple of different ways using Maya and Arnold.
Pantheon
The group of directors with the highest level of achievement (Chaplin, Griffith, Hitchcock, Welles, etc.). The term is used in auteur criticism (Andre Sarris).
Safety shot
A second shot of a scene made either as insurance in case the previous shot might be faulty or as an alternative to offer the editor another camera angle or camera distance.
I've been working on this character for a texturing and look-dev course that I'll be presenting pretty soon. Hope you like it.
One of the most common tasks once your colour textures are painted is going to Zbrush or Mudbox to sculpt some heavy details based on what you have painted in your colour textures.
We all use UDIMs of course, but importing UDIMs in Zbrush is not that easy. Let's see how this works.
I've been using Manfrotto Befree tripods for a while now, and I just realize that they are a perfect tool for my on-set work.
I rarely use them as primary tripod, specially when working with big and heavy professional DSLRs and multi zoom lenses. In my opinion these tripods are not stable enough to support such as heavy pieces of gear.
I mean, they are if you are taking "normal" photos, but in VFX we usually do bracketing all the time. Like for texturing references, or HDRI's. The combination of the gear, plus the rotation of the mirror plus the quick pace of the bracketing, will result in slightly different brackets. Which obviously mean that the alignment process will not be perfect. I wouldn't recommend using these tripods for bracketing with big camera bodies and multi zoom lenses. I do use them for bracketing with prime lenses such as 28mm or 50mm. They are not that heavy and the tripods seem to be stable enough with these lenses.
I do strongly recommend these tripods for photogrammetry purposes when you have to move around the subject or set. Mirrorless cameras such a Sony A7 or Sony a6000 plus prime lenses are the best combination when you need to move a lot around the set.
I also use Befree's a lot as support tripods. They just fit perfectly my Akromatic kits, both Mono and Twins. Befree tripods are tiny and light so I can easily move around with two or three and they even fit in my backpacks or hard cases at once.
As you can see below, these tripods offer great flexibility in terms of height and expansion. They are tiny when compact and middle sized when expanded completely. Check the features on Manfrotto's site.
I also use these tripods as support for my photogrammetry turntable.
Moving around with such a small setup has never been so easy.
Obviously I also use them for regular photography. Just attach my camera to the provided ball head and start shooting around the set.
Finally I also use Befree to mount my Nodal Ninja. Again you need to be careful while bracketing and always use a remote trigger, but having the possibility to move around with two or three of these tripods is just great.
They have two different version (both in aluminium and carbon fibre). Both of them come with ball head and quick release plate. But, the ball head in the smallest tripod is fixed, can't be removed. Which means a lot of limitations because you won't be able to attach most of the accessories normally used for VFX.
I shot another HDRI for Akromatic that you can download for free for your look-dev and lighting tests.
Check it out at the Akromatic website.
Yes, I know that Mari 3.x supports OpenSubdiv, but I've had some bad experiences already where Mari creates artefacts on the meshes.
So for now, I will be using the traditional way of exporting subdivided meshes from Maya to Mari. These are the settings that I usually use to avoid distortions, stretching and other common issues.
The real ones :)
Quick and dirty exercises that I do when I have nothing else to do.
We all have to work with displacement maps painted in both Zbrush and Mari.
Sometimes we use 32 bits floating point maps, sometimes 16 bits maps, etc. Combining different displacement depths and scales is a common task for a look-dev artist working in the film industry.
Let's see how to setup different displacement maps exported from Zbrush and Mari in Isotropix Clarisse.