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.
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 ;)
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
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!
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.
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...
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...
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.)
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.
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
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,
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
Couldn't you have rotated one image within TG with an animated transform shader?
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.
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.
But I wonder why a series of maps does work then. I've never done this, so it's pure theory.
The texture only offsets when the transform shader gets different values than 0,0,0.
So using an image sequence is no problem, because it stays where it is.
I found the solution.
(at the moment I am hitting my head against the wall)
It seems to be logical to animate the Y-axis in TG to get a vertical rotation. But in 3ds max the vertical axis is the Z-axis. I didn't know that the pivot orientation is imported as well. So what I did is check "position center" in the image map shader, offset the texture in the transform shader (using the X,Y,Z boxes the 3ds max way!) so that it's right in the middle of the disk and animate TG's Z-axis and voila: rotation without image sequence!
Thanks Ulco for setting me thinking. Anyway I'm a bit proud that I found it out by myself. ;D ;D ;D
Although I have a headache now here is the result.
(the clip is a bit rough due to the compression settings I guess)
Yeah, great, Hannes! Good thinking!
Something for the foreground.
Mesh displacer displacement animated and restricted by altitude constraint.
Bloody hell, that's nice! I really like that bufo bufo!
8) ;D
Sweet :)
Haha! That's brilliant.
- Oshyan
It looks like Hannes has a good solution for some things I was trying to get to work.
I don't have any post-work software except Adobe Photoshop. So, this was my solution to animating a ducted fan on an airship.
I made four separate copies of my model. Then I rotated the fan a tad on each model and rendered every fourth frame with each model. Model 1 rendered frame 1,5,9 …; model 2 rendered fram 2, 6, 10…; model 3 renderd in frames 3, 7,11…; and model 4 rendered in frames 4, 8, 12, ….
Much of my movie thing was crap, but the fan looks like it turning to me! :P
Russ
Looks good. Russ.
Here is a test of some more stuff. I decided to not touch the camera animation. I hope that in the end it will be OK.
It's a small resolution but 3MB.
Hilarious and very good!! ;D ;D ;D
Oh No! ;D! Very good!
:o :)
I waited for the explosion... :P
;D ;D ;D
Here's a helicopter test. I reduced the speed a bit, and I think now it's OK. Hopefully.
Like the pine trees lining the winding road
I got a name, I got a name
Like the singing bird and the croaking toad🎶
Apologies to Charles Fox, Norman Gimbel
VERY profi, Hannes!
Oh man. Im going to have a mental break down or something. SEE SEE! You can use TG to render a story! Thank you Hannes.
Do it. Don't let anything stop you.
Thanks guys!!!!!!!So now I put everything together and hit the render button. I guess this will take a few days. Still 800X450px and not the best quality settings, since this is still some kind of a preview.
Added some stuff to make the moment when the bike hits the toad even more yucky. I know it's a bit sick.
Quote from: TheBadger on October 23, 2014, 07:25:15 AM
Don't let anything stop you.
You asked for it!!!
Sick maybe, but a very nice start of the animation! I like sick 8)
Really sick!
Here it is: the almost final animation. I guess this is what I'll (try to) get to Pixel Plow.
I didn't post this at Vimeo, because I don't want to spend so much time to get this crappy quality you can find there. So, I'm sorry, the file has 4.5MB.
AWESOME!
8)
:D
great stuff Hannes!
cheers
Jason
Nice :)
Wow Hannes, that's pretty incredible! Now make it twice as long. ;)
- Oshyan
Cool stuff Hannes! 8)
Terrific!!! Echo Oshyan...
Awesome!
Cool!
Did some tests and realized that one frame in Full HD would take 3 hours and 45 minutes to render on my quite new computer, which isn't the slowest one.
So I had to change some things:
-I disabled motion blur. I'll add it in PW.
-Reduced samples for soft shadows. Tried it without softness. Didn't look good.
-The smallest size of the tarmac's power fractal for the displacement was insanely small. Don't know why I hadn't realized that. Increased it by a factor of 50!
-I deleted each reflective shader and used the specular reflection of the default shader instead. For some reason there's some real reflection of the environment as well, but renders much faster.
-Deleted each glass (water) shader as well since you won't see it anyway. Just made the parts invisible that represent glass.
-Unchecked Detail blending. I know this should be on, but I'll do some tests without and check if it's working.
Rendertime's now 45 minutes per frame! Not bad. Thinking about rendering the whole thing on my machine. I guess the file would be very very large if I'd gather it for sending it over to Pixel Plow especially because of the birds object sequence. Still undecided, but we'll see.
Great render time improvement! Do you have a sense of what changes contributed most to that?
Yes, definitely use 2D motion blur. In your scene it should not be distinguishable from 3D (you can use your own methods, or TG's built-in, although if you use the built-in I would recommend just outputting motion vectors with blur disabled, and then using the Image File Processor to apply it later; more flexible that way).
Try Soft Shadows with no Jitter and lower Samples.
I do recommend using Detail Blending though!
- Oshyan
Im going to find you, and Im going to make love to you >:(
;D
ok no. But you are very good ;)
@TheBadger: ...err...thanks for the offer, but no, thanks! ;)
@Oshyan: I'm not quite sure which was the biggest factor for those high rendertimes. When I removed the glass (water-) shader from the bottles, rendertimes were 30% shorter. Increasing the smallest scale of the displacement PF of the tarmac's surface had a big impact as well. Anyway I'm glad I could reduce rendertimes a lot.
I know that detail blending is highly recommended for animations, but as far as I can see (44 frames at Full HD by now) there is no obvious flickering. Not yet... :-\
"Full HD" great :)
Just to let you know: Frame 144 is rendering right now. Rendertimes are slightly longer now (about 65 minutes per frame) due to the objects appearing in the scene, but I guess the whole thing will be done within a week. Hopefully. No flickering so far. Except a roof texture of the barn at the left side. Hope I can get rid of that at least in post...
wow, good job
by the way. you can add sound.
you can download a bank of sound its free
take look
http://www.universal-soundbank.com/motos.htm
enjoy
and special thanks for your knights (medieval characters)
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,18288.0.html
just for test with low resolution
i don't know if you have the complet characters ready for animation ?
i need it to make some test mouvement in 3ds max
Thanks for the link, Nacer Eddine. I don't know yet if there will be sound. Interesting idea.
Regarding the knights: why not asking your questions in the appropriate thread?
The knights are static, so no animation. Sorry.
Btw, frame 179 at the moment...
tick tock?
Currently frame 286. Rendertimes went up once again due to the pond to the right (90 minutes per frame), but the end is in sight.
Hoooooray!! All the frames are rendered. Now it's time to fine-tune the whole thing and make a movie out of it.
;D
Quote from: Hannes on November 16, 2014, 12:18:30 PM
Hoooooray!! All the frames are rendered. Now it's time to fine-tune the whole thing and make a movie out of it.
Envy :D Still at least 1-2 months to finish mine.
Here it is: the crappy Vimeo-link with the low quality "HD is almost like Full HD" (????) link:
https://vimeo.com/112218911
or the dropbox link with the original file (17MB):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qa7ruc06ogjul0r/FullHDFinalSharp.mp4?dl=0
Postwork:
Motion blur, chromatic aberration, Lens flares, subtle sharpening
Wonderful. So short, so short (I know...). The road is kinda rough, no?
Nice! Shorter than I'd like, but it looks fantastic. Is the motorcycle also rendered in TG?
- Oshyan
Thanks guys. Yes, I know it's short. But it took almost three weeks to render this. I know there's Pixel Plow and other render farms, but it somehow feels good to have rendered the whole thing on my own machine.
Yes, Oshyan, the motorbike is rendered in TG as well. Everything you see except the lens flares, the motion blur and the chromatic aberration is pure TG. One file.
Awesome stuff Hannes, probably the finest all-TG animation I've seen yet. Which is why it needs to be in 1080p and twice as long! :D
- Oshyan
Thanks a lot, Oshyan!! It is actually 1080p (the dropbox file). I'd rather add some more scenes to the existing one than making this one longer (like you said in another thread: several different cuts rather than one very long shot).
Looks really great Hannes.Worth the wait :)
Thanks Kadri. I learned a lot during the process of finding things that increase rendertimes unnecessarily.
Next scene a classic fly from the helicopters viewpoint-high to the UFO? :)
Funny! I had something like this in my mind :D. Let's see.
:D
Ah yes, the download version is indeed 1080p. Why isn't the Vimeo one? Huh.
Multiple shots sounds good indeed.
- Oshyan
I guess you need to create a "Pro"-account or something like this to upload clips in Full HD...
Yes looks like so. But the original is there for upload too.
Have you tried Youtube for full HD Hannes? Might not have such a restriction.
YouTube does not have that restriction, however Vimeo does often seem to have better quality (at equivalent resolution) than YT. Still, since the original clip is in 1080p, would be nice to have that available online...
- Oshyan
Terrific footage, Hannes!!! Too short, but man, what quality! I have to look again and again, as it's going so fast, that you easily miss the toad. Awesome job!
Here is the Youtube link:
http://youtu.be/cl_sSwl_LD0
It seems to be displayed in Full HD (you can select it at least), but the quality is far away from good. :(
However you can get an impression of it before you download it.
Impressive result! 8)
Could easily be real footage of the next
Roland Emmerich movie,given the amount
helicopters. ;)
Well done.
Awesome stuff!! :)
You are a guru Hannes!
Hare hare!! ;D