I want to believe! animated

Started by Hannes, October 16, 2014, 12:45:28 PM

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Hannes

http://vimeo.com/109146450
(Oh boy, the Vimeo quality is awful!! >:()

Something I wanted to do for a long time.
I had to rework a lot of things to make it work. For example when I started this animation I found out that the roadsign was actually floating one foot above the ground. I hadn't realized that before when it was only a still image (No, I won't give back my prizes!).

Then I had to animate the helicopters and created image sequences for the rotors. I replaced the glass (water) shader for the bottles by a regular shader with specular highlights because it made the rendertimes 30% longer, and you can hardly see them.
I used the GI cache to reduce GI flickering which worked quite well.
My own crits so far:
-Still some shadows popping near the fake stones. Probably because I didn't yet use the recommended quality settings for animations.
-The reflection of the water surface has some nasty artifacts in several frames at the edges of the blue cloud's reflection.
-The signpost has some disturbing moiree-like pattern when it comes into the FOV. There is no texture, no displacement, just a plain shader with specular highlights.
-The bushes near the road are actually animated (mesh displacer), but you can hardly see it. Maybe I have to increase the displacement value.

I'd like to see this in FullHD. I'll have to contact Ty of Pixel Plow since my Pixel Plowjob ( ;D) Submit agent doesn't seem to work anymore, and I guess that the whole gathered file is quite large with object and image sequences and all the models. We'll see.

Kadri

#1

Looks amazing Hannes.
Nothing much to add you know what you could improve :)
To get get rid of some problems is hard sometimes in Terragen and you have to use much higher settings unfortunately.
But i really want to see this in HD ;)

Oshyan

Oh fantastic, I had no idea you were working on this! Really cool. I think most of the problems you're seeing at this point are down to render settings. The edges of the water, the sign (specular with low detail/AA), etc. So I think once you use "final" settings and at higher resolution it will come together nicely. I'd be happy to help you optimize the render settings too, if you like.

My only other bit of feedback would be I think everything might be moving a bit fast. The helicopters seem to be flying rather quickly, and it makes them look a bit small in my opinion. Likewise the ship, though of course we have no real frame of reference to know how fast a UFO "should" spin, it just makes it look less epic and huge to be spinning at that speed. I think if you slowed everything down by 50% (perhaps including the camera move) it would take on a more dramatic quality. Or perhaps slow down the helicopter's forward motion by 25%, and the UFO by 50%... just my perspective though of course. :D

Whatever you do with it, I can't wait to see it rendered at full resolution and quality.

- Oshyan

TheBadger

Agree with Oshyan.

In post you could edit in some storm (twister) coming out of the ship. That would justify its movement. And be cool if it looks good.  ;D Would need to add wind to the scene though, but should do that to some degree anyway.

On the camera truck from left to right. As it is now I dont see much reason to spend that much time looking at the ground. IF you take away from the time you spend on the road, you can add time to the view of the ship, which is the part that is so interesting.

On the other hand, if you add some ants to the road, then when the camera moves to the ship, the viewer becomes like ants to the ship. Montage and animal motif!   8) Something like this will make a clip into a self contained story in just a few seconds.

Also, wind wind wind!

And by the way, did the mans head turn?! I really thought his head moved, and each time I looked I thought it was just a little. Looks good.




And one more thing
FREAKING AWSOME!
It has been eaten.

Dune

Oh yeah, I want to see this in full glory too. Amazing footage, Hannes! I agree with Oshyan about the movements; slowed down considerably would be much more realistic. Even if too slow, you might see it as a dramatic slowmotion capture of an incredible event.

Hannes

Thanks a lot for your input, guys!
Oshyan, you're definitely right. I slowed down the footage by 50%in After effects only for testing purposes. The helicopters are a bit too slow now, but the UFO seems to have the right speed (see attached test clip - about 2.9MB). So 50% speed for the UFO and 75% for the helicopters should be good.
Of course the first part close to the road is way too long. But I like the idea of something small happening on the road surface until the camera points up and shows the ship. No idea what it could be yet, but I'll find something. This first part has to be shorter of course. So the camera movement has to be completely redone.

Badger, the head is not moving, but I know what you mean. The moment when the head passes the road sign, it looks like he turns his head a bit. Nice side effect. Didn't notice that before :).
Anyway I think the guy should be rotated a bit clockwise, since he seems to be staring at a point left of the ship.

And I hope that I can get some convincing wind movement in the bushes.

Oh boy, lots of work. This will take some time...

Dune

Maybe a crawling something on the road, or a subtle twinkling, or the tarmac melting, or a leaf blown past, or a footstep suddenly appearing, or a toy bear lying there and winking...

Hannes

Thanks for your suggestions, Ulco. Not sure about the toy bear  ;D, but something subtle like a leaf would be nice. Since there is a cigarette butt on the road at the beginning of the clip I thought of some smoke. Or a small animal. Or a tumbleweed tumbling across the road. Has anybody a nice 3d model of a tumbleweed?

Btw rotated the guy by 13° (There is the Planetside logo on his backpack, but since it's in the shadow it's not visible. Unfortunately.)

Hannes

Just had the idea of creating a tumbleweed model with several instances of the ivy generator emitting around a displaced sphere. Just the branches, no leaves and of course without the sphere.

archonforest

Quote from: Dune on October 17, 2014, 10:44:39 AM
Maybe a crawling something on the road, or a subtle twinkling, or the tarmac melting, or a leaf blown past, or a footstep suddenly appearing, or a toy bear lying there and winking...
Dune is on the roll...lol
Dell T5500 with Dual Hexa Xeon CPU 3Ghz, 32Gb ram, GTX 1080
Amiga 1200 8Mb ram, 8Gb ssd

lat 64

Hannes.
8)
Nice.

The birds are wonderful and very natural.
I have been trying to animate turbine blades in TG. Did you "spin" them in a different software render, then composite?

We should all buy Hannes a big new computer and sit back and just watch what happens. It's always something special.

Cheers,
I'm a half century plus ten yrs old. Yikes!

Hannes

Thank you. I guess you're referring to the rotors. I rendered a view of the rotors in 3ds max from above and radial-blurred it in Photoshop. Then I created an image sequence in AE with this image slowly rotating and used this image sequence for the simple disk that represents the rotating rotors.

Quote from: lat 64 on October 17, 2014, 12:25:34 PM
We should all buy Hannes a big new computer and sit back and just watch what happens. It's always something special.

Great idea!!!! What about a "Hannes Janetzko, Bonzvuhl" -Renderfarm? ;D ;D ;D

Dune

Couldn't you have rotated one image within TG with an animated transform shader?

Hannes

I don't know if I did something wrong, but in my tests the image map didn't stick to the object correctly when I was trying to rotate it. But I was a bit in a hurry at the time, so maybe this would work too.

Hannes

Did some new tests. If I apply a transform shader to the image map shader, the image doesn't stick to the disk during the animation. By default the image map shader is set to "Position lower left", so that might be the reason, but checking "Position center" offsets the image. I can of course adjust this and put it into it's correct position, but during the animation the image offsets again.