Cyan Eyed Biomes | Part 1 - a 3 mintue Terragen shot!

Started by Njen, March 28, 2024, 06:22:49 PM

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Njen

It's been a while since I have posted work here, but I think this is worth the wait! Explore the rich world of Cyan Eyed (award winning animated short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2h1Mtcn9VQ) with the first in a series of breath taking flythroughs of various landscapes that feature the beauty of a world that seemingly goes on forever. Clouds drift and evolve, ley lines brim with energy, water laps at the shores, birds meander about, even the sun changes angle just a little bit. All this happens while Captain Corliss 'The Red Snake' Vail's feared skyship, The Black Cloud sails through the skies, looking for its next prey.

If you can, please watch to the end and even click through the end card as it really helps me with the Youtube algorithm.

This fully 3D environment was created and rendered in Terragen (except for the skyship comped in from 3DS Max), with all three minutes of this single continuous shot taking over 4 months to render on just two computers (I never like my computers doing noting at night).


[Edit: Make sure to watch this in its full glory on Youtube, if you play it through this forum, you may be auto given a low quality 360p version.]


Doug


Njen

Happy you liked it! It is set in a steampunk world that is long after an apocalypse, so society is getting back up and running again. I have more stories planned for this world.

Dune

Awesome. I really like the landscape and the quiet flyover. Very subtly you're getting aware that it's not a 'normal' world. Small details, such as the lapping surf are great too. It also appeals to me as I'm currently finishing a 100,000 word dystopic novel set in world after a apocalyptic drama.

Good luck with your other stories!

Njen

I'm happy that those small details were noticed, I spent a lot of time fine tuning those.

Wow, you are writing a novel? I'd love to know more when you are ready to share, sounds like you are writing stories I'd be very much interested in.

Dune

I'm keen on small details myself (and - real - bird watcher, so small details matter). And I know how long it takes to get them perfect.

Yeah, it's in its last stages. Had a few proofreaders, so I'm rearranging/rewriting some stuff now, and hopefully send it to a publisher in the next weeks. One (big one) has already shown interest, or, I should say, the head editor was pretty positive about the first paragraphs. So I'll start with her, and hopefully get it out.
In short it's (of course) about a walled city with an oppressive regime, young woman finding forbidden info, and figuring out a way to see what's behind that wall (which nobody knows, due to the regime's secrecy - familiar, huh?). She meets an orphan boy, and they have to go together due to circumstances, and hopefully find what she (they) are looking for in life. It's actually about thinking beyond your box, showing interest and having guts to go beyond your boundaries. There are 4 story lines, slowly entwining (the orphan is not really an orphan, he finds out in the very end, and his parents took a terrible decison once, and father is trying to locate his 'sold' son). And of course there's a secret service agent looking for them. Setting is futuristic, but not overly so, and I take the opportunity to weave in some subtle ideas about society, and human behavior in general.
It's in Dutch of course (for the time being ::) )

Tangled-Universe

Cool to see you again here since long time ago :)

Pretty cool animation and quite the effort to make and render by the sound of it!
I may have an odd, or rather unexpected question; how did you animate the water?
Whenever I animate (not that much) I animate the shader through Y, but it doesn't look very good.
Perhaps you did it also through Y but found the right speed? Curious about that.
Else I like the terrain shapes, various colours and all the masking of populations and such. Nice work man.

Njen

Quote from: Dune on March 30, 2024, 02:46:46 AMI'm keen on small details myself (and - real - bird watcher, so small details matter). And I know how long it takes to get them perfect.

Yeah, it's in its last stages. Had a few proofreaders, so I'm rearranging/rewriting some stuff now, and hopefully send it to a publisher in the next weeks. One (big one) has already shown interest, or, I should say, the head editor was pretty positive about the first paragraphs. So I'll start with her, and hopefully get it out....
Thanks for the info! I hope for an English release soon after :D

Njen

It took a lot of trial and error for the water movement, rendering a number of 30 frame tests, it really is just down to experimentation of the timings and other values. I animated X, Y and Z with a Transform Input Shader (Y was larger than X and Z). But even then I wasn't entirely happy with the result, so I used a little denoising and a very tiny amount of blur in comp. Over a period of 4320 frames, here is a screenshot of my animation panel (Z and X are on top of each other, which is why you don't see X):
[See attachement 'CyanEyed_terAnimWater.jpg']

Though if you are referring to the little shore waves, that is actually all a comp trick.

1. First, I isolated the water edge.
[See attachement 'CyanEyed_shoreWavesA.jpg']

2. I then had to manually roto out the trees as the waves just need to interact with the shore only.
[See attachement 'CyanEyed_shoreWavesB.jpg']

3. Then I used an edge detect on the water outline. After, I isolated a thin line that started at a certain distance from the edge, and then animated it towards the shore over a certain number of frames. I then added a fade on and off to get it repeating in a loop. Then I added a time offset and plussed it on top to get two lines. This is all a total hack, because edge detect actually works in screenspace, not worldspace, so the waves always start at a certain number of pixels away from the shore no matter how far or close the point is to the camera, but because the effect is so subtle, it is practically impossible to notice.
[See attachement 'CyanEyed_shoreWavesC.jpg']

4. I then multiplied that through a worldspace noise derived from the world position AOV.
[See attachement 'CyanEyed_shoreWavesD.jpg']

5. And after a little colour grading, plussed it on top of the image.
[See attachement 'CyanEyed_shoreWavesE.jpg']

The Terrain is a number of different heightfields blended together generated using Classic Erosion from Daniil Kamperov.

Dune

Ah, hacks! Thanks for describing your workflow. Indeed a lot of work for subtle (but important) detail!