Another excursion

[Hannes]

After some tests I decided to make this animation without Ulco's cubes. I want to use them at another time, but in this case I had another look in my mind.

[Hannes]

I'm not entirely happy with the dust, but it would be rather complicated to fake dust that reacts correctly to physical bodies.

[WAS]

I'd probably just ramp a simple shape up from 0 to 1 colour as a mask at every step location, but that would be a lot of manual work. 0-1 quickly on a step, and fade back to 0 over time.

This is really cool looking. The animation of the astronauts is done very well.

[Hannes]

Thanks Jordan!

[Dune]

Awesome. I do like the dust. It's indeed hard to get it synchronized with the steps, as you also have dust that stays in the air and whisps out slowly after each step, so it's cumulative, but not entirely. And stones kicked up by the guys may set off other small dust emissions.

[Hannes]

Thanks Ulco. Imagine we'd have a particle system here...

[KlausK]

I am always stunned what you and a few others here are able to do with TG.
And even more so what you seem to be doing only in TG (execpt for the asset modeling part, of course).

Render times must be really long with that kind of cloud and dust effects - at least, when I think
of how long it takes for my machine to render some stuff, let alone animations.

The dust trampled under foot sim would be relatively easy to achieve in a 3D app.
Since you use 3DSMAX also did you ever consider to import particle sims from there into TG?
Or do you think that back and forth would be more even time consuming in the end?
Or is it part of the fun to create as much as possible in TG alone?

Anyway, I`d "buy" your "fotorealism" in stills and animations almost all the time.

CHeers, Klaus

[Hannes]

Thanks a lot, Klaus!
Originally I rendered the animation at 1280X720px. I used a GI cache and rendered with the legacy renderer (PT wouldn't be beneficial very much for that kind of scene). Rendertimes were between ten and fifteen minutes per frame.
I know, creating some sort of particle dust in another app would be not too difficult, but I don't know how to import this sim into TG. I mean, I could of course import particle meshes, but how should I make them look like dust, unless it would be millions?
Or do you mean rendering the dust in another app and comping it together? That's of course the way it's done professionally for movies for example. I might consider that, but usually I try to do things like that in TG first. Just because I want to know, how far I can push it.

I did something similar before:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,23776.0.html
but it's quite tedious, and yet not perfect.

[WAS]

(PT wouldn't be beneficial very much for that kind of scene)

For you, maybe. I can immediately see the lack of accurate shadowing, and too highly lit back-faces of rocks.


SSS steps look pretty realistic to me. You could probably get the lingering effect by enlarging the SSS as it fades, and up the octave warping (so the dust seems like it settles in the air and is influenced by drafts more than the initial impact). Could even play with some of the noise falling on Y during fade like it's settling back down.

[masonspappy]

Wow - that's impressive Hannes!!

[Kadri]

Cool animation Hannes

[pixelpusher636]

Never mind the fact that I've had a few pints but I thought this looked fantastic. Didn't even notice anything being off with the dust. Well done Hannes!

[digitalguru]

Just seen this - very nice Hannes!
I would have simmed the dust elsewhere and comped it in, but this is a great example of what you can do in TG with some invention!
Hopefully, future versions of TG will have some tools to make comps like these easier like Deep output...

Curious about how you did the astronauts - did you use MDD for vertex animation?

[Hannes]

Thanks guys!
Actually I took the mesh into Mixamo and then used object sequences. I once tested the MDD method, but there were some weird flaws. Have to test that again.