Young queen

[TheBadger]

Those Dogs are such great animals. Ill never understand the need to make them look so... ... ... um...alien.

[DocCharly65]

Still developing some creepy horror-like scenes in the corridors of my Enterprise  ...
Alien experts and enthusiasts know what kind of scene I try to develop here:

Only 720x405 and lowest render quality for some POV and DoF tests - "The rising queen"

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[bobbystahr]

Very scary/effective...well done young ridley, hee hee hee

[DocCharly65]

Thanks bobby 

I am soooo curious, what will be Ridleys next step after Prometheus! 
I hope he does not mess it up!

[Kadri]

...
I am soooo curious, what will be Ridleys next step after Prometheus! 
I hope he does not mess it up!

Like Prometheus? 

[DocCharly65]

I hope not to bore you all with only twiggeling with my actual stuff... Still rendering the helicopter in the jungle and some additional scenes for my film.

But something new for my alien sequence: The alien queen needs an opponent... Let's mess up all cinema history: After the Alien appears in the Enterprise, captain Adama lurks in the ventilation shafts 

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Just a test of my "facegenerator" and illuminating a face behind a helmet visor...

And 3D anaglyphic (red/blue):

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One of coming tests will be to see the alien rise as a mirroring picture in the helmet visor... but many other things to do 

[yossam]

Doc,


You are going to have TOS people up in arms over your video.................can't wait. 

[Dune]

Really cool!

[DocCharly65]

Many experiments until I found the slightly slimy look I wanted.

Also I would prefer the scene with TG-rendered fog and not greenscreen postworked like in my teaser.

But good looking fog needs high rendertimes.
Here comes the best compromise I could find:
Atmosphere with NO shadows (otherwise astronomically exploding rendertimes)
Clouds are imported from the older TG3 versions, quality 12 and low density to avoid semolina pudding instead of fog.
Then I found that renders with only objects in the view need less render detail than rendered terrain:
Detail 0.3 and AA 5
A little bloom
And there we are:
About 1h55 rendertime per frame
3 animations with each 300 frames + 1 animation with 130 frames = 1947 h = 82 days for this scene... 

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Here an example with cloud quality at only 4 and render settings Detail 0.4 / AA 3  --  welcome to the semolina pudding 

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[Kadri]

Nice.
Aliens is one of the few movies i can watch all the time.

Render time...ouch!
"quality 12" no typo?

Edit: Yes no typo i see now.

[Dune]

Almost 2hrs per frame, that's horrible. Can't you just omit the clouds? When no micropoly terrain maybe detail 0.1 will also do.

[Kadri]

I am still learning postwork too you know.
But with that kind of render time you could use the render layers(there are surface depth etc. kinda options) objects
to comp them later in Fusion, After effects whatever.
I would render the objects in normal size and render the clouds in a much smaller size.
With clouds you can get away with much smaller render sizes.

Other then that are you sure that there isn't a better way Nils (as Ulco said above for example)? Curious?

[DocCharly65]

You are both right Ulco and Kadri.

I am still undecided a bit.
On one side it's already a chosen "feature" of the film: 99% or more Terragen-rendered.
On the other side the render times...

Anyway the film will not be finished faster with more postwork and faster rendering because in intensivated postwork I would start at almost zero knowledge and with no professional software (only a bit hobby stuff like magix...). To bring the project to the actual state of knowledge and quality I can work with in TG now, I'd need about the same time. I guess it would need about 2 or more years to learn postworking. In that time I have rendered the scene 10 times in TG 

In my alien teaser and the smoking doctor in the shuttle you can see that postwork-fog or smoke is possible in general. But especially the spaceship corridors are not convincing in my eyes. Somehow in the full TG render I can see that the fog (or the clouds´) are really there.

I will see, what the future brings. 
I'm still working on my small knowledge about blender, wings3d, poseray and others as well...   
At the moment waiting for renders is quite relaxing... Otherwise I would forget to eat and that there is a real sky with a sun and clouds outside 
TG-workaholic-syndrom, you know? 

[Agura Nata]

looks great!

[Kadri]

...
I guess it would need about 2 or more years to learn postworking. In that time I have rendered the scene 10 times in TG 
...

LOL! Actually i think you could do it in 1-2 weeks and in 1-2 months (I think you might do it much faster actually) you might be able to do things you haven't done before. Really
I haven't done "Depth passes". But sometimes even basic things like rendering in layers(so to speak) is enough.
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18917.msg187180.html#msg187180
This one had clouds from Hitfilm (that isn't a pro program at all too).
Just a ground render sequence. Then a Building render sequence.
And all other elements were from Hitfilm. Rendered super fast.

We could see the finished animation before 2020 for certain in that way 

...
TG-workaholic-syndrom, you know?