Sid

I've been working on the rendering system for Remembering Omery so I have'nt had a bunch to post. I want to think all productions have the problem of consitant renders and Remembering Omery has been one of those. The test above is me working on getting a consistent render and compositing workflow in place to automate the task for the 34 shots left. The 3 views are the the view we will see Sid throughout the film. I believe the test was successful, and I plan to do the same to the rest of assets in the following days.

Help from a friend

Here's a few things my friend Ben Forman helped me out with. The only thing I did on Bob was shading, and hair. YAY! Last secondary character and last prop (...well almost) finished!!!

Image Dump

Here's a few things that have been happening on the film...

Phyllis in maya

So here's Phyllis in Maya. I may do one more pass on here but despite her cuteness :) she's really only seen briefly and from the side so maybe not... Anyway, there's alot happening right now for the film and I may do a large image dump if I get the time.

Sid Rework

Started Reworking Sid for shot 22 finalization... Oh man what a pain revisiting these characters... if I knew then what I know now - HAHA!

Anyway, no compositing at all on the image, and some shadow flicker but not too bad for a a minute and a half render. I'm having problems with some of the deformations on the hair or lack there of but I'm getting there. Also want to tweak the spec a bit more, but overall I'm pretty stoked about the direction it's heading.

Thanks guys for the emails with words of encouragement, this film has been so draining and that encouragement helps the work go by a lot easier :) - you guys rock!

Shot 22 Peliminary

Here's the preliminary for shot 22. Trying to get the feel for lighting and mood, as well as seeing how everything is meshing together. In PS I cropped left to right, slightly desaturated everything, added some hand painted DOF and some slight vignetting.

Small Earl Update

Small...well the hands are worked on and worked on- I'm not sure they really work at that well but eh- I'm done >< I want to change the brows a bit, his left one, but after that Earl is 100% - with the exception of cloth sim. I didnt get to my goal for this week but I'm going to try to hit it next week so I should have another update soon.

Earl Update

Been pretty busy lately so I have'nt had a chance to work on the film lately. I'm taking this week off depending on a project status to work exclusively on Remembering Omery.

So...Updated Earl... Currently reworking the hands as they do not have a normal map or even a decent texture. It's going to be a little bit of work but I will be able to reuse it on Sid as well. The paper has had me on a bit of stump lately so those of you waiting on a paper update please be patient. My goals this week are to get a complete shot rendered so once that happens everything else will be very quick to complete including the paper.

Please feel free to comment on the blog or shoot me an email. Anyway, for now, hope you guys enjoy the image :)

Just couldn't leave it alone

I was working on some asset management and started just tweaking some stuff with the previous render...I'm kind diggin' this a little more.I am using the rasterzier (rapid fur preset) for mental ray. The hair looks pretty good by default and the render times are really quick but everything else looks very pixelated. I pumped the shading samples really high to get everything to looking ok. There's also no raytracing going on, so that's not going to work either. I'll figure out a render/compositing solution a bit later on, but meanwhile I think this is a closer representation of what I had in mind.

Buck Phase 2

So here's Buck with some of the colors adjusted and some added fur for the beard and eyebrows. The fur is not exactly what I would've liked, but Buck is only going to be in the background a few seconds at a time, with no close ups so I'm gonna call this done...for now. I will need to do the fur again after the face rig is done anyway, so I'll choose at that time where to take it . Anyway hope you guys enjoy...And as always comments, feedback or what ever is always appreciated.

Buck in Maya, phase 1

So here's Buck straight from 3d coat with preliminary adjustments for the sss on the head. I need to make some more color adjustments and adjustments to spec and so forth but I'd thought I'd post this up as a first pass. The wire is slightly more complicated as I wanted to model in more of the wrinkles as I did on Eugene. I didn't want the normal maps to do as much work as what they did before. I may revisit Eugene but as time goes on I may not.

Buck in 3d coat

I've been super busy at work and working on my paper to support the film so I haven't had much time to work on the visuals. Anyway, here's Buck in 3d coat. The colors are coming across a little wonky from 3d coat rendering , but at least its anti aliased. He still has about half a days worth of texturing left and I'm hoping to have him finished and ready to rig by the end of the week. For the hair I plan on using Maya fur for this one just so I can get as much stuff out to the render farm as possible instead of rendering locally. Anyway ... hope you guys enjoy it.

WheelChair WIP 2

Here's another work in progress on Phylis' wheelchair. I plan to put a little yellow flag on the back as well but I'm most likely going to do that entirely in Maya. Comments feedback or whatever would be great!

Shot 22

So here's a shot from Greg. Some nice animation!

Remembering Omery Shot 22 Playblast from Greg Marlow on Vimeo.

WheelChair WIP

So here's a WIP of Phyllis' wheelchair. Still a lot of work left to do but the geo is going to be high res so it won't take too long to finish. Please exuse the high frequency noise on the seat as 3d coat doesnt have auto mip maoping that im aware of. This won't be an issue in the render.

Eugene in Maya

So here's Eugene in Maya.



I think next I'm going to revisit Phyllis to complete her, her scooter should be fun :-)

Oh before I forget here's the wireframe... I'm using poly smooth proxy with creases as in the renders...

Eugene Textureing

So I got Eugene done in 3d coat below is an image



The next image is what I have in Maya so far. I need to bring in Sid/Earl eyes to make that mesh better along with some other stuff. Got to run to diner...look for an update soon!

3d Coat Tips and tricks

So as I've said before I'm testing this new software out called 3d coat. It has texture painting abilities kinda like maxon's bodypaint, resurfacing capabilities and voxel sculpting which is polygon independent sculpting. I've been playing with the software for a couple of weeks now and honestly have been pretty put off by it. The feature look so promising but the performance has been really slow for me. I've blamed the fact that it was in beta for a while and the when it was released I thought maybe it's since I'm running a quadro fx 3500 which doesn't support dx 10, and I blamed xp for not having dx 10. It's taken me forever to get texturing done on Eugene, though a little happy about the results but tweaking has become a real pain.

The display in 3d coat was nice and the link up to photoshop, very cool, but actually painting in there was a real pain, not to mention voxel sculpting. Finally yesterday after suffering from a FPS of 3 all day I checked under preferences and found a nice little mini-gem to turn on, EDIT>PREFERENCES>Slightly lower Shading quality, and also turned the "freeze pattern scroll speed" = 0, since the freezing scroll pattern seemed to be slowing everything down too. I clicked it off and my frame rates went up a bit. Kept painting happily that now I was seeing 8 fps some times. It wasn't until I accidentally switched the program to my other monitor and said "screw it I'll paint over here for awhile" my fps went up to 80 fps. So after some investigation I set my cintiq to be the primary monitor and whalah, it's painting heaven!!!

So I guess for some reason my quadro FX 3500 is putting out more DX or Open GL juice to the primary monitor. If any of guys want to try the software and you running it slowly , I hope this helps. As for the software it's really quite nice and I plan on working it into my thesis paper. I feel kinda like an idiot for not looking into how to speed it up until a couple of weeks later using it, but really the voxel sculpting was ok until I went to close to a million polys and the resurfacing was fine, so I don't feel too bad :-) it was really like 3 days off texturing that made me look…ahh the hindsight. Anyway I higly recomend this software it's located here 3d Coat. Download it. Try it. You may like it. And if it's too slow trying changing stupid monitors lol!

Some texureing

So here's what I have so far on Eugene. I'll post some wires when I'm done. Texturing and most of the resurfacing was done in 3d coat... not quite there but I hope to be done tomorrow. The contrast looks great on my cintiq but not so much on my primary monitor, so if it looks a little bright thats why. Anyway, open to feedback comments and whatever.

Don Design Sculpt

Heres's Don.

So next in the process I will be resurfacing, uving and texturing Eugene in 3dCoat. I had planned to do a video of the resurfacing process and I will on a future post as for now I need to learn some aspects of the software in order to do it proficiently.

Don Alt Head

Not sure which like better.... this one seems to fit more in the RO universe more than the skewed one, but i like the design of the skewed one....comments???

Don WIP

Here's what I have on Don so far.

Eugen Design Sculpt

Eugene is Finished. Next is Don.

Buck Sculpt Finished

This is Buck. Next is to finish Eugene...

Buck Design Sculpt

Here's Buck...


And the process...



I'm going to finish him 1st thing tomorrow, then it's back to Eugene to finish him off. After that I have one last to design. After all 4 are done I'm going to resurface the most generic character in 3dCoat and use that mesh to resurface the rest of the 4. Then I will be texturing these in 3dcoat as well. I look forward to hearing your feed back so as always all comments are welcome.

If some of you are receiving emails with the posts it's because I have you setup to automatically receive the emails. If you'd prefer, just email me and I can remove you so you can check the blog at your own leisure. I've been posting here a lot lately and I don't want to spam your inbox ...unless you want me to :-)

Buck Head

Here's Buck so far. I have some down time at work and I'm researching this new software 3dCoat.

It's pretty sweet but it can be slow at times not to mention sharpening and finishing can be a pain, at least for me. If any of guys have seen any good resources for this software package please hook me up!!! So essentially what I've done is used my base then sculpted out very basic forms. I then took this into 3d coat to play with the voxel tools...I think I may have gotten carried away with the sweet hair you can do in there but what the hell...you only live once eh? From there theres an auto topology tool I tried out. The mesh wasnt super great and but I took that and the voxel export out to zbrush and did a project all to keep my details. I then took the new topo version and refined my forms. The design strayed fromt he concept a bit but that's what desining is for. It'll probabl;y change when I do the body tomorrow.

The process...


Any feedback comments or whatever are welcome. Thanks guys!

Phyllis - an old post

Thought I would post this here to organize a little bit. She was on my other blog a long time ago, and thought I'd put here for consistency.

Eugene Block

Here's a block in I did of Eugene's body tonight... I wanted to play with zspheres a bit so I did. I feel like this sort of block in could have done just as fast if not faster in Maya , but whatchya gonna do? I'll post the final tomorrow, if all things go as planned.

Still a lot left to do, especially on the arms and he slippers, but any feedback would be great! My plans are to sculpt all the characters, texture paint them, and then resurface them for animation in maya.

Momentary Break from busy work days

I've been super slammed with work lately so unfortunately I have taken the time to post for a little bit. I got a second while my computer was chuggin' away at some processes to put together a small explanation of Sid's shirt I posted awhile ago.

For Sid and Earl's shirt I used The MegaTK Shader from Puppet found on my mental ray. A super sweet shader for mental ray. As for the rest I tried to explain it as much as possible and I did it quickly as I gotta get back. I hope this serves as adequate info.

Sid Recomp

Reworked the hair comp a little this morning to get ideas on how to composite this when it moves not so much just photoshop stuff. The changes are slight but if you look closely you might notices some stuff with the hair shadows.

Sid Shirt Nettwork

I did it for earl so I thought I would post it or Sid too. All procedural this time even down to the argyle pattern on the bottom. No explanation for now as most people are like "huh , ok..." but if people show interest I'll be sure and elaborate.

Sid

So I still feel Like he needs some more work but heres what I've been working on after work.The compositing still has some issues as does other areas but anyway...

Earl pajama Update

I'll post some more images later tonight or tomorrow. I keep seeing that network post from earlier and want to give a quick up date + break down. So with this I'm essentially able to get a huge resolution out of my actual texture but use less than a 512 map to get it since it takes 4x 256 maps to make up a 512 and I'm only using 3. Since the maps are tiled 10 times I'm getting a 2048x2048 on the decals alone. I could always use my work file of 2048 however for the three textures for an overall texture size 10 times that. A 20480 x20480 map!!!And since my bump and displacement are completely procedural I never get bump break down regardless of camera render view proximity. YAY!

Hair Test

So this is a hair and face test. This was a single frame composite so theres no raytraced lights in there and the tee shirt and pajama shirt is not skinned or set up with n cloth yet, but I think you get the picture.

1st couple of images... of many

Before PS

After PS

So I know it's been awhile but really that doesn't mean I haven't been working - its strange to look at this stuff from just a few months ago... Getting back into the flow of things has been a difficult challenge so far and I'm still trying to get there but I'll keep trying till I get it right :D So this is the first couple of images of Earl, I'm not sure if I like the overall Photoshop treatment yet but it's somethgin I'm playing with- I have A LOT more to dump soon...

Earl render networks

Im kinda proud of this one so i thought id post it. this is earls clothes.

Earl render

So... Last week I started working on the new call of duty that will be finishing up in three months so guess what... lots of overtime. I already started working 13 -14 hours a day again, reminds me of working on Spiderman 3 all over again. Weekend are still mine as of now so I plan on working on RO then and spend time with Denise. Anyway enough complaining.

Heres Earl. This render features shave and a haircut hair, mental ray dielectric material for the refraction on the glasses, Maya procedural displacement on the clothes (hair just didn't work), and MISSS on the face and arms. I have three lights in the scene one that has a pretty high setting raytrace light. The render size was 1280 x1422 with production preset mental ray settings. Lol the render took 2 hours.

Before throwing displacement on the scene took 1.45, in another scene, with just the shirt + displacement, same lights and render settings took 45 seconds. So one would think that with all that put together with the addition of the pants with displacement would take no more than 3 and a half minutes. My next step is to figure out what the heck went wrong! My thinking - first i gonna give those darn pants the fifth!

Anyway hop you guys dig the render. The things that bother me now are the slippers (i think maybe seen once maybe twice in the film) and the animal print on the clothes are kinda lost, so i need to make some decisions there. ... tell me what you guys think!