Now, after some time, the animation is complete.
The comp was put together in After Effects, not too much was involved outside of stacking layers on top of each other and a little bit of color correction. The audio was done in a mix between Audition and Soundbooth, for cutting the music and the city ambience together, respectively. I feel like it'd be nice to see some moving lights against the wall to match against the passing car sounds, but I'm okay with it (for now.)
Even though I did it on the front page, here's the YouTube version again for the sake of posterity. Below that is a link to the full-on high rez QuickTime, which would be the version you can use to harshly and uncompromisingly judge me.
As for the QuickTime, which can be received here:
http://mattburdette.com/studio2/urban_polyptych.mov
Hope you enjoy! I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome, but my opinion means NOTHING. Yours, however, means everything, so write them down and then send them to me by way of carrier pigeon or email.
Click for a larger version.
QuickTime movie of motion coming very soon.
Things are progressing quite nicely. No big technical breakdown post for this one, just a status report. The whole foreground scene is pretty much fully textured and lit, I'm going to start going through motion tests to see if any anomalies stand out when the camera is moving. I don't think final gather flicker will be a big problem, as I'm not really using a whole lot of it and what I am using is really dark. Render times get pretty steep though at 720 HD, especially at ground level where I'm using a displacement map for the street surface. The street was actually supposed to be the first texture I did on the project, but for some reason its wound up being one of the last.
There's still three weeks left in the quarter, and I'm making pretty decent time on this project as long as I keep up the momentum. I'm currently modeling/texturing in the backdrop city street (with low poly cars!) and doing some last adjustments in the main scene area, such as changing some window textures, adding some small details, etc. The whole project is probably somewhere around 80% complete. I'm also gonna add in a dynamics pass for smoke and steam rising from vents and whatnot, but thats a final polish kinda thing.
That said, I decided to do a little exercise in a few things I've been meaning to practice and/or get to know a bit better. Running parallel to my alleyway scene, I've been doing a little project in non-photoreal. Based on a little cartoon doodle myself and my artistically inclined roommate scribbled out one night, I thought this would be a good time to try something different.
Mostly, its an exercise in using Maya Fur, the new mental ray mia_exposure_photographic shader, and eventually when I get to doing the character, it'll be a crash course in setting up a basic rig. I'm having a pretty good time with this one, just getting to experiment with the look as opposed to constantly having to crosscheck it with reality.
That about does it, if all goes accordingly I should be posting some small motion tests by next update. Yeah! Yeah!
I thought when I got into the texturing and lighting of this project, I would start literally at the street level (I wanted to do the street texture first) and work my way upwards. However, something that my professor brought to my attention that I didn't think of right away was that the color of ambient night time bounce light that would cast over the entire scene would be likely provided by the color of the night sky (of course) so it might be in my best interest to start from the top and work my way downwards. So thats what I did.
Currently the backdrop is just a 2.5D matte sliced up into layers for parallax purposes. The midground region, like the smaller buildings and the street, will all be replaced with CG elements. Anyway, behold:
My good comrade Jon Moore opened my eyes to mental ray area lights, which now make nice illumination from the doors and windows a possibility without ridiculous render times. It will be hard not to go on an area light frenzy for all these portal lights, but moderation is key to maintain a good balance.
This is coming right along.
(Click for bigger)
One thing I wanted to establish in this scene is harsh, cold lighting from intense fluorescent sources. Unsurprisingly, a big source of my lighting reference comes from Fight Club.
So lets get into the nitty gritty as to why this works here. One of the first things that hits me right off is even at its warmest tone, the light color still stays cold. The warmest color I think of these five pictures is an almost greenish-yellow, which can be seen in highlights on the Paper St. House, and from street lights outside the bar (which cause a really nice specular on the ground too.) Also, I think its how little fill there is and how much outlining is done by specular highlights. On the Paper St. picture, you can see the chain link fence beside the sidewalk plain as day, but only because of the glare from the street light. Otherwise, given how thin most of the parts of a fence are, you probably wouldn't see it at all. Same goes for the reflections on the pavement, a detail I think really stands out (in a good way.)
So what I've done as sort of a foundation is try to capture the right light tone. I find in most of the night time photography I see, the cooler lights often cast as almost a sea green tone as opposed to bluer, and orange street lights often cast as a super saturated harsh orange, not precisely the look I'm going for.
Fight Club's coldest color is a very saturated blue and its coolest is a desaturated yellow (with a smack of green!), which is more in tune to the mood I want, however for the sake of experimentation I did both color flavor combos for side by side comparison. There's also an important issue of color balance as well as tones and temperature. Original setups had the cold coming from the left, and the warm coming from the right, which met almost right in the middle and lit things well. It looked way too formulaic, not to mention unrealistic since it didn't even take light sources into account. Plus, the street light over the door was going to be on, and its important that the scene doesn't get TOO lit up. In the above image, I reduced the side alley lighting (moved them away) and put more emphasis on the accent lights. I can probably use them to add some fill to the foreground too (thats going on the to-do list.) There's also an issue of something looking off in the composition with the bottom two windows illuminated. I'll figure something out.
Anyway, I'm hugely open to feedback on this project and I wanna hear why you think the light placement sucks and what I should do to fix it, because you're probably right. (I'll be adding a comment feature soon)
Because I promised:
The modeling stage is more or less complete. You'll notice there are some obvious missing pieces, such as plants in the pot, and this is because I want to save that for during or after texturing. Modeling the actual plant in the pot is going to depend heavily on how the textures work with the model, so I plan to do those together later on. I also plan on giving the telephone wires something on the wall to attach to ;)
Also, as you may or may not have noticed, I've used this demonstration of the set geometry to test out the Maya Toon shader, which I think is just a dandy little neat thing and delivers the line art style pretty effectively. Its not the plan I have for the final scene, I just wanted to use something that would show the models well. If there's time at the end, I'd like to go back and try it though.
It may not be orthodox, but my gameplan thus far is:
>>> Texture everything in the scene first with a color map so I can determine how the textures work on their own, looking at things like color balance and detail and the all-important "dirty quality."
>>> After the scene is textured, I'm going to drop in the basic light set up, position everything accordingly so when I start work on the actual shaders...
>>> ... I can see how they will react to the scene's actual lighting as opposed to indirect final gather crap that really just tells me nothing outside of the shaders reflective qualities.
Sound good to you? Good. Here goes.
Hi, hello, how are you. Thanks for coming. This is the current workblog for my Studio 2 project, which has yet to have an apt title but probably will soon enough.
For those unfamiliar with what I've got planned for this project, I want to get down and dirty with a full on high detail CG environment. The focus of my skills are mostly in texturing and lighting, and I really need to get some good practice and produce a nice something which pushes these skills to the utmost of what I can do. I really like doing this kind of work, and I want to see what I can produce with a huge time span, such as ten weeks. I'll probably wind up rendering this all in mental ray, but if I feel ahead of the game by the time I'm done texturing/lighting, I may try to port this to Renderman. I'd like that a lot.
If you're traveling over from the Studio 1 page (or any other page for that matter) you may notice a small cosmetic change in the page in that there is no sidebar. My explanation for this is that since this project is primarily a CG scene, I'm going to want to throw up a lot of screenshots, and I kind of hate the space limitation that the sidebar puts on the news region. Plus, archives aren't going to be an issue since I'm going to have all posts remain on the front page at all times.
Anyway, welcome. Primary modelling on the scene will be done by Tuesday, so on Tuesday I will thrust a handful of screenshots on your face and we'll just go from there.
We ride!
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