3D Fruit

August 6, 2008

There is a lighting “challenge” on the forums at CGSociety.  In my effort to show off what messiah’s renderer can do. . . and to make my portfolio of work cooler I decided to have a go.

I’m pretty happy with the results.  There are other entries that have a lot more “feeling” and “atmosphere” but I was going for more technical accuracy.

All the textures were procedurally generated.  I used translucency, radiosity, fur. . . a few camera gradients and lots of tweaking.

Filed under: 3D | Comments (1)

imaginaishion Productions logo animation

July 30, 2008

Just finished a logo animation for Imaginaishion Productions.

You can download the HD MP4 version.  <– “Best version” Plays great with VLC.

Or an HD MPEG version.  <– “Good version but a bigger download”

Or an SD MPEG version. <– “Ok version”

If Quicktime is whats opening these then I’d highly suggest you pick another player.  Windows Media Player, VLC, real etc.   Quicktime on Windows is really not so great as of late.

I’m going to do a write up on it now while its all fresh in my head.  Hope you enjoy my ramblings. 

Yariv Newman, the art director on their end sketched up what they wanted but then gave me free reign to make it “cool”.

So after gathering up some great reference from around the net:

I picked Wings3D to model the match.  Not exactly a challenge but always fun. . .

So then I started texturing.  I’m a huge fan of the shading power built inside of messiah:studio.  So I went ahead and started with a “realistic” shader.

Then from there I added in the burning elements to that material and made it controllable by effectors.

The feedback I got from Yariv was that they wanted something “cooler” than a real match head.  Something exotic like a metallic car paint.  So that evolved into:

Got the ok for that so then I moved on to refining the flames and sparks.  At first I was using the built in ParticleShader but was frustrated by the slow render times so after a few conversations with Fori (The lead programmer at pmG Worldwide) he/we decided that using the ParticleCloud shader would be much better for something like this and that we just had to add the ability to “stretch” the particle along its path.  After that conversation, I went to bed and by the next morning I had a new shader in my in-box that worked perfectly.  Fori. . . time after time has won me over by doing these things for me.  I doubt I will ever be able to use any other software for this kind of thing.

SO!  Anyway with that I was able to get the sparks to really look slick.

See how they stretch according to their direction and speed?  Pretty cool huh!?!

The next thing to figure out was the fire.  At first I tried to get particles to do what I wanted.

I think I could have made it work if I had kept going with it but then Yariv sent me another concept sketch,

and I realized I had to re-think how I was going to pull off these flames.

What I ended up doing was creating a flame “model”.

That allowed me to control exactly where these big stylistic flames would be at any given time.  I then created a material that used a gradient that was bright when facing the camera but quickly faded off its intensity and opacity as the angle changed to facing away from the camera.

It ended up looking pretty slick.

The next big challenge was the tunnel of fire.  This is the part I struggled with the most.  You would only see it for about 1 second so I couldn’t make anything “epic”.  It just had to “feel” right.  The direction I got was that it had to be a tunnel of liquid fire.  Not lava though.  Something very fluid.

So here is how I ended up doing it.

I created a morph for the match head that pulled everything up and around so that it made a tunnel for the camera to move into.

The first “base” layer is just a pure Messiah render.  Then I used Taron’s ZbornToy to create the “liquid” caustic effect.  I used a depth buffer layer out of messiah to help darken the tunnel as it gets deeper.  Then I twisted the image in AfterEffects and then applied a big spoonful of Trapcode’s “Shine” plugin.  Chicks dig Shine.

The animation of the placement and motion of the material was done using a very complex shader flow.

The “sparkles” at the end of the animation on the match head were done as another pass out of Messiah and then masked with an animated noise in After Effects.  Lots of glow was then applied to make the effect “cooler”.

The final “Burn” of the aish part of the logo (aish means fire in Hebrew BTW) was done all in After Effects.  It was created by using an animated noise displacing a gradient being masked by the “aish”.

And thats it!  Thank you Fori and Taron for making such awesome software and Yariv for paying my bills while I play with such awesome toys.

If you have any questions, praise or critiques, please leave them below in the comments section.  Otherwise, thanks for reading and have a nice day. 

Sphere: Related Content

Filed under: 3D | Comments (4)

Amazing Helicopter

July 28, 2008

Jen, our Foster Daughter and two of our neices went up to Park City this last Saturday and on the way up we noticed that there was a fire up on the top of the canyon walls.  Pretty cool stuff.  We could see flames and lots of intense smoke etc.

Well at one point we saw a great big helicopter fly away from the fire. . . go up the canyon. . . then make a real sharp turn and start to fly right towards us!  It just kept getting bigger and bigger and then it slowed down and hovered over the Provo River.  Real weird looking thing.  Like something you’d see a mad scientist invent.  It had a great big hose hanging down from the bottom, big side landing gears and a great big tank as its belly.

I whipped out the camera. 

This is where it was still going down.

We realized that the hose thing was sucking up water from the river to put on the fire at the top of the canyon walls.  Its such a tiny little river!  I would have thought it would fly over to the Dear Creek reservoir about 10 miles up the canyon but I guess that’s the beauty of a Helicopter. . . it can go wherever it wants.  It “drank” from the river for about 3-4 minutes and then slowly lifted off.

Very exciting stuff.  Don’t see that every day.  :-)  I hope we do an episode that features fire fighting in Andy’s Airplanes if we ever get to start making them again.  I’d love the challenge of rigging and texturing a big complex helicopter like that. . . and then all the particle effects we’d need to figure out for the fire!  Man that’d be cool. . .

Filed under: Life | Comments (1)

Catching Up With Photos

July 22, 2008

Filed under: Private | Comments (0)

Tutorial on Raytraced Soft Shadows in messiah

July 22, 2008

A friend of mine asked some questions on CGTalk about shadows and I could see that he was a little lost and not really taking advantage of all the cool things messiah can do.  So I created a quick video tutorial that should walk him and anyone else who is interested through the relationship between raytraced soft shadows and anti-aliasing in messiah 3.0.

To view this tutorial I highly recommend you install VLC. Quicktime, Windows Media Player and even Real player do work but none as smoothly and stutter free as VLC.

I hope people start using Messiah’s renderer more.  Fori has really put a lot of time into making it very powerful.  Its a real shame people tend to be a little scared of it.  Hopefully this little video will belay a few of those fears.

Filed under: 3D | Comments (0)

HUGE news! We are going to be . . .

July 17, 2008

Filed under: Private | Comments (5)

SPONZA Atrium in messiah 3

July 16, 2008

In my continuing effort to demonstrate messiah’s awesome rendering capabilities, I rendered the Sponza Atrium.  This is a scene that has been around for quite a while and I even remember seeing it done in messiah years ago with pure montecarlo so this is just a minor update to show what the new noise reduction can do.

Looks pretty clean and rendered fairly fast.  I just now noticed a light “blob” in the back area that shouldn’t be there.  Don’t quite know what that could be.  Other than that I think its looking very clean for there only being 1 light and the “sky” to provide illumination.

Filed under: 3D | Comments (0)

Foster Daughter’s 3rd Birthday

July 16, 2008

We had a great day with our Foster Daughter today. She turns three today so we invited all the neighborhood girls over for a “Hello Kitty” birthday party in our back yard. The little buggers were so cute.

First we had a treasure hunt where they all ran around and looked for little coins I had hidden. Took them a while to find most of them and after the party I found a few more that were in plain sight but they sure had fun.

Then we did an egg and spoon “race”. The first one was just them going around a little tree and back which they all managed fairly well. . . but then the next one I got a little fancy and set up an obstacle course for them. Over the little logs, around the bin, over the green blow up water wiggle worm thing and back. Not many of them managed to get through that one without dropping their eggs. After the race was over I let them throw the eggs on our back wall to watch them splat. Didn’t realize they would be so hard to clean up after “cooking” on the brick for a few hours.

So then we did a water balloon game that quickly deteriorated into “throw the balloons at Billy!”. That was fun.

Then Cake, presents, party favors and . . . that was about it.

Jen took lots of photos so I’ll make sure to upload them when I get a chance.

Update:  I can’t upload the photos, but if you send me an e-mail I can let you see them.

Filed under: Life | Comments (1)

messiah’s renderer is my baby

July 10, 2008

I tend to get very defensive when people dismiss the rendering capabilities of pmG’s messiah:studio.  Blanket statements are often made that dismiss its power and efficiency based on the fact that they haven’t ever seen anything done in it before that has impressed them.  I guess Andy’s doesn’t look so great in their minds?  V-Ray is currently the “darling” rendering package of choice at the moment.  Grr.

I was a little frustrated yesterday and decided to challenge anyone out there to beat the rendering performance in Messiah.  There were a few takers using Lightwave but that was about it.  So then I went bonkers and decided to make a “scorched earth” image.  If anyone can best it. . . I’d be VERY surprised.

The image created would have to include:

Global Illumination, translucency, camera lense distortion, fresnell, a large “area” light casting raytraced shadows, anisotropic, displacement, light emitting surfaces, particle effects, a robust “eye” shader, a shader that can use the underlying geometry placement to drive bump and displacement, soft reflections and hair. . . and demonstrate that it is all “integrated” and done in one “pass” by using ample amounts of reflection.

This is what I came up with.

And the crazy thing is. . . I didn’t even scratch the surface of what messiah’s renderer can do.  Cuastics, refractions, volume shaders, instancing etc etc.  When you buy messiah:studio you get a BIG tool chest.  I need to start figuring out ways to make its value more apparent to potential users and clients. . .

Filed under: 3D | Comments (0)

AMD Opteron Quad Core 2347 (vroom)

July 8, 2008

I got some new CPUs!

Yay!

I have been limping along with these older Dual Cores. . . and then one of them up and died for no apparent reason.  Haven’t really needed the horse power so I haven’t bothered upgrading.  Glad I waited.  I just snagged a pair of 1.9ghz quad core Opterons on e-bay for $200!  $100 each!  Woo hoo!  I now have 8 cores on my system and its soooo so much faster.

I love AMD.  You buy a motherboard and usually for years afterwards you can keep buying CPUs when you need the extra power.  No need to buy a whole new machine and re-install the OS or anything.  Just pop out the older ones and plop in the newer ones and your off!  Yay!

Filed under: 3D, Life | Comments (0)