Hi there. I wouldn't say I'm back. But I think I'm fit enough to spend some time in the forum again - sometimes :) .
Excuse my absence. I had quite interesting and hard trouble with my health including a complete mental breakdown because of stress in every part of my life. The stress is still there but I have nice drugs now to ignore it :)
Nice to see that most buddies are still here and are quite creative. Sorry if I don't comment every of your nice works. But I'll watch them all.
And I'll keep mostly here in the animation sector. You didn't really think I would give up my film-project? ;)
Perhaps I'll add a post in VR too, because in fact I had a long break from my film last year and did something more relaxing (of course TG had to be part but I concentrated on material for my occulus).
But now I told enough and I hope you enjoy some new aspects and experiments of my film project.
I hope the links work that you can download (I don't know how long I'll keep the cloud folder open, so feel free to download.
A big change since some months: I started to learn about rigging and animating in Blender...
These animation tests are just put together all the frames with Microsoft Moviemaker and mixed a bit music to check.
Have fun:
A new Galactica model and a love story on the enterprise:
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgp9y9sQ4eLJ2UuZCHQ (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgp9y9sQ4eLJ2UuZCHQ)
The soldiers are purchased blender animations. Abe, Lara and Spock are manually animated by myself but the models I purchased already as rigged.
Riddicks Poolhouse and his pug puppet:
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgp9zKOX89oH_YCYXlQ (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgp9zKOX89oH_YCYXlQ)
The turtle is purchsed fully rigged and animated but the pug puppy is my first model what is fully self rigged and animated (only the model object itself ist purchased from Turbosquid
Hi there. It`s very nice to see you back here and up and running again! Let this forum be a turmoil free zone in your life.
CHeers, Klaus.
Good to see you posting again, Nils. :)
Nice work and good to see you here again Nils.
Quote from: DocCharly65 on April 20, 2018, 04:00:39 AM
...
Sorry if I don't comment every of your nice works. But I'll watch them all.
...
I don't comment on every thread. I didn't liked that kind of pressure i felt before (to comment on every thread).
I comment now only when i want. That doesn't mean that the others are bad at all.
We certainly are so glad you are back! :)
Awww you certainly got the hang of that rigging. :) Links work great even with my MSOffice apps on the Apple tablet. :) :)
Hey, what a nice surprise. :)
Very nice to see your work here again! I'm sorry to hear of your health troubles, but I'm glad Terragen could be a part of your break too. :)
The animated models are fairly impressive. I'm glad to see you maintained your sense of humor too. ;)
- Oshyan
Good to see you back again! :)
Just saw your posting, and I'm really glad, you're back. I can say, that I know how you felt. I had something similar some time ago, and I know, that it changes your life. Keep on, buddy!!!!!
:)
Thank you all for the warm and kind "welcome back".
Nice to see you all again.
...and hey Oshyan, I had even some VR fun in fighting my "natural" fear of heights with Terragen and my Oculus Rift... I'll show later in the VR board ;)
Meanwhile I think I restarted some animation renders a thousand times. Just for example a short part of the millioin times changed and improved docking scene of the Enterprise.
Last night I AGAIN ;) restarted the animation render of the "inside hangar" scene because I had another ider for improvement of the Enterprise and found a mistake in the traffic light seqence at the end:
There comes a little yellow "cargo-bee" from the right and it would be more plausible if it comes a bit later. Then there could/should be a green-yellow-red sequence on the traffic lights.
But see on on your own:
Docking Enterprise Version 1.665.944 (or something like that :) )
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqAY7t70uCjt-dHinA (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqAY7t70uCjt-dHinA)
...and now first a visit at the VR board - then let's see what you all did in the last 2 years :)
;D ;D ;D ;D Just watched it.
The end is hilarious. But no spoilers now...
Thank you Hannes :)
... one of 1001 new little jokes and side blows ;)
I already checked you latest work(s). Cool stuff. I am still looking for a HQ version of "your home and your castle". am I blind and did I miss it?
Welcome back !
Awesome and very funny anims ;D ;D
Good to see you here again, Doc! Nice updates to your movie!
Matt
Thank you, Matt and Achonforest:)
Time for the next little update...
Meanwhile I restarted the rendering of the view of the Enterprise docking from inside the hangar again.
I wanted a new traffic lights sequence at the end (green - yellow - red) because there comes a vehicle from the right while traffic lights ar still green... Just for traffic safety :)
And I wanted some passersby as film extras when the San Francisco streetcar starts an empty journey (perhaps some people can confirm that my interpretation of the streetcar and the streetsign is after all, acceptable - though the streetcar is a scoda tram from budapest ;) )
The Man with the newspaper is by Julio Garcia for free on archive3D and the sitting woman was for free on turbosquid by FUTURESCAN. I rigged both on my own and tried an unobtrusive animation.
The standing girl is a complete animation for free at the moment at renderpeople. It was somehow a horrible job to transform the original fbx animation into blenderformat and export to obj-format for Terragen, but from far it looks ok I hope.
The complete 600 frames render job is already running and here is only an early cropped test with a positionchange within the sequence.
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqAZf4-KCKpVJNkblA (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqAZf4-KCKpVJNkblA)
Big thumbs up! :)
Great again! These subtle movements are very effective.
Looks great, but the standing girl changes her position abruptly at one moment.
Thanks :)
and yes, thats what I ment with "test with a positionchange within the sequence"
I was just too lazy to rerender the beginning after I had changed her and the cases position. In the final sequence it's fixed :)
Ah alright, I missed that.
...did I mention that I decided that my filmproject would NOT be a children's movie?
have fun :) :
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgp9xc2SFR1JA52tOyA (https://1drv.ms/f/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgp9xc2SFR1JA52tOyA)
Another "fast raw test" just cut with Microsoft MovieMake and some music. With more "conversation" and longer animations this scene should be appr. 10 minutes finally.
The walking soldier I purchased ready animeted as blender aimation from 3DRT (walking animations are at the moment still too difficult for self-making) The rest of the animations I did in Blender and rendered the models in Terragen (the Alien, Ripley, Kirk, Spock)
Looks good :)
So cool again! Keep it up Nils!
Yes!!! Really cool, Nils!
;D Nice details. Especially the dog sign. ;D
Thank you all :)
I should expose and emphasize the materials which Hannes offered some time ago. If the original texture of an object is not good or even not existant, these procedural surfaces from Hannes are my first joice to get a better render.
In this case almost all pipes in the engine room have procedural surfaces. I modified the brass, gold silver, copper, iron and rusty iron a bit.
In the following animation I played with the burningwood.tgc ;)
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEXpGg0FRx2wj9-2A (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEXpGg0FRx2wj9-2A)
Again just a "pre-alpha version" where half of the renders are still running or waiting.
For the sound I used a suggestion of the Microsoft Moviemaker: "Daniel_Birch_-_Rise_Of_The_Phosphor" found on freemusicarchive.org.
some models credits:
Alien Derelict 3D model by Birular on turbosquid
Fat Man Bomb by philipp678 on tubosquid or cgtrader
Free Square Truss Straight Segment 021 by akerStudio aker
Gatling Gun Rigged by DavidAnatolie D13 HMG OBJ
ROBOT-mech-02-walker Blender Anim by 3DRT
Starwars Battle Droids 3by Karl Stocker on Scifi.com (ORIGINAL Terragen animation -- seperated and rotated heads :) )
Terminator T-800 Endoskeleton 3D model by fanboy109 - fully rigged - so I could do the animation in Blender without pre-work
You're a genius!
Nice.
very cool!
Very very good! It seems as if one or two of your procedural textures are animated? Congrats on smoothness and lack of flickering. :)
Thank you very much :)
But don't forget: As I said the procedural textures are based on the materials from Hannes (https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,22695.msg229045.html#msg229045 (https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,22695.msg229045.html#msg229045))
In Fact I did two things (eg the surface of the bomb and canon) with the surface: I chose two basic surfaces I wanted to use like silver and the burning wood. I merged them and animated the "Mix to A slider". Additionally I set some Power fractal shaders (don't remember which one at the moment) to 4D noise and animated the color- and luminosity shader of the orange shader.
The Terminators "bathwater" ;) got an additional 4D noise in another powerfractal.
A quite big challenge and many sucessless tries was the ideal sizing of the displacement feature scale and to find out the best animation speed of the merge shader and the 4D noise.
Some words about flickering:
I still have many problems with flickering in special situations:
Reflections and illumination by luminosity/luminosity images) in object part shaders (usually renamed surface default shaders).
I see some possibilities to reduce them so far:
Reflections flicker a bit less if you reduce the highlight intensity of the reflection shader.
Also it is helpful in reflection shaders and specular settings of default shaders to set the specular roughness higher.
But the costs are reduced "glamour and dynamics" of your render.
Big populations of e.g. grass flicker less if you do the same: Reduce the reflectivity and the reflectivity tint - best to 0.
Illuminations flicker more the higher the luminosity value is set and/or the more far away (smaller) they are - avoid both...
This is one reason why I prefer real light sources instead of masked illumination in objects. But it is not possible if you e.g. have hundreds of little illuminated windows in a space ship :)
For both (illumination and reflections): In tests I saw that flickering was reduced sometimes down to 0 when I increased image resolution and/or increased anti aliasing.
This would avoid that you loose dynamics of your render by e.g. reducing highlights but it increases render times up to unrealistic values ;)
I hope I could help and I didn't tell to much rubbish - it's all just my experiences. Perhaps there are other better solutions.
A completely new experience and parallel running project:
Just watch the Screenshot and guess ;)
After 2 weeks it seems that I have managed a basic rigging of "The Countess" (The witch of the Serentity-episode in my film)
Cross your fingers - this will be a hard job but also an exciting experiment.
[attach=1]
I already prepared the textures and some detailwork for a good look in Terragen.
Just to compare:
Old:
[attach=2]
New:
[attach=3]
Additionally she will get snake eyes instead of the glowing eyes. I'll see in 1-2 hours if that looks good too.
Cool. She's a bit cold, so it seems, though.
Nice. Close up looks cool.
Thanks :)
Now the last post for this weekend.
The last test image of the animation and some testanimations are ready.
May I introduce: "The new Countess"
Old:
[attach=1]
New:
[attach=2]
I think the snake eyes look more natural than the "car lights" ;)
The new one has a slightly different camera angle so I need not render so many clouds - good for the render time.
The animation of Head torso and arm works ok so far:
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEdTQPILf0XpKhUWw (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEdTQPILf0XpKhUWw)
But I have started re-rigging and animating the legs because the walking test looks horrible.
I think I have understood the principle of walking ;) :D but untill it looks as I want, I'll have to do more experiments.
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEehQr2AXAx0RuL1A (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEehQr2AXAx0RuL1A)
Very cool walk, Nils. Very appropriate.
Looks great!!
Looks good.
She's got a cool new look.
Thanks all :)
But I had to try another improved animation from the beginning... And I think this time I've got it now.
Shoulders and hips rotate around two axes now and I had to add some more bone details. So I could improve the swinging back and forth of the skirt hem.
Later I'll care about the dekoltee where the two object parts "skin" and "cloth" pass through each other.
For more exact animating I don't have the patience and the knowlegde so far so I will "hold out" the skinparts with an alpha mask in Terragen. But that will happen in some weeks at the earliest. For the moment I am satisfied.
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEfubNi6QoY0hUfHQ (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEfubNi6QoY0hUfHQ)
Great improvement.
Indeed! It would be easier if the model consisted of one layer.
Let's call it "Pre Alpha"... But anyway it's the first time that I tried to cut the film for the complete story.
Now I am quite sure that it I will give the project at least 2 - perhaps even 3 parts.
Have fun and thanks again to Bobby, who spent 2 of his songs for the "Kansas scene" :)
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqElA67BXDcYzBivcw (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqElA67BXDcYzBivcw)
This first part I post here is still very raw but as close to the final story as possible.
At first I only wanted to see if the story works in general and to find out what is missing, what is too much. But then I had to much fun in testing some sound effects as well. But not all scenes are finished and are only put together with some music.
Many render jobs are still running and some scenes are still missing (the witch in Kansas, the crash between the Starwars TIE fighters and the Enterprise...)
Some scenes I must (want ;) ) re-render like the Borgs ship, where the flickering I spent so much energy on is unnecessary and doesn't look good. Also I am still re-rendering all scenes with the Enterprise. The ship has now over 40 lightsources and the bluish warp-glow is "offline" in the drydock. The earth is completely new, too and needed almost two years until I was satisfied.
One of my actual thoughts is to reduce the babytalk (in this version missing) only to the Klingons (yes you're right - it's me with a turtle on my head ;D )
Most of the rest conversation could work nice with a female and a male narrator as in lord of the rings or some films noir.
You see still very much to do. Even only this part will need more than a year work.
Genius! I've said it before, but this is absolutely fantastic. Something to watch several times, and still small details to discover. Great work, Nils!
Phew!You have done quite a work really. Very nice indeed and fun :)
There are many nice scenes but i liked especially some shoots with the Serenity, Nils.
Yea, verily yea!
Absolutely stunning. 8)
What a compilation! Great! :)
very cool and funny!! 8)
Thank you my friends, nice to know if I can produce some smiles on some faces.
Still much work.
Meanwhile I tested the video with some friends too and the decision is almost done: The baby talk will be left out except the klingons scene.
Most of the subtitles will be exchanged by a real narrator. Unfortunately my english isn't better as a google translater could be. But for these experiments I hope it will work ;)
Anyway sound and music is a seperate working process. A friend told me the "mucical idea" works e.g. very good in the Valkyrie Scene. I only shoud add some background machine hammering sound effects.
At the moment I am rendering many Drydock scenes new because of all the changes I made with the Enterprise and the new Galactica model. If you look close you will see, that many scenes are very short cut to avoid to show the variation between old and new look.
Also in the next months I'll be busy with the missing Kansas witch. This is a bigger job with the parts "appearing, threatening you (or the cameraman), walking while her face get rotted and cows die by the wayside. Last but not least the container of the serenity hitting the witch...
The witch's appear is already in the pipeline.
Here just the comparison:
Old experiment (one year ago)
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgp00rOgtxYYk2KF4hg (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgp00rOgtxYYk2KF4hg)
New experiment (Only Terragen 3D Preview)
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEnZsb9FOxXcUjiUw (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEnZsb9FOxXcUjiUw)
New experiment (cropped and minimum of resolution and AA quality)
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEodYbegUpcNHmqEA (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEodYbegUpcNHmqEA)
Because of the quite thick and foggy atmosphere the rendertimes are high. So it will last some time until I can finish this scene.
.
.
.
...and then there will be part 2 one day with the adventures of the robots
...then part 3 with Silent hill and the big show down.
Holy cow, that's terrific again!
Btw. a google translator could actually work really funny.
The witch appear is pretty cool!!!
Even this "preview" version is a really incredible achievement in my view. You have accomplished what many amateur film-makers aspire to (a 20+ minute short), full of humor, subtle jokes, and some beautiful visuals, great camera moves, and more... And you have done all of it with software that doesn't have built-in character animation tools, and is made primarily for environment rendering. Amazing work!
- Oshyan
Second that! Fantastic!!!
Thanks to all :)
Time for a little update :)
The renderjob of the apearing witch in "Kansas" is finished and I am satisfied so far ... I hae to after so long renders ;)
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEzhk3-Jji6Fz8r9A (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqEzhk3-Jji6Fz8r9A)
In general it's an easy principle: Two atmospheres blended from one to the other via an animated merge shader.
The "Countess" rigged and animated in Blender and exported into a sequence of objects.
Before importing into Terragen sequentially it's important to "clean" all obj and mtl files to avoid errors. That works ok with the batch function of PoseRay.
The rotation and scaling of the witch is done in Terragen. Her textures are mixed with an animated merge shader for each object part.
Also important: If you want to let an object appear in a scene, never scale it to 0.0.0 in the beginning - that causes a division by zero error. Just set the size to 0.00001 or something like that -- makes it invisible enough :)
The next already running project is a kind of "face morphing" of the witch while she passes by dying falling cows...
The change of the face within 100-150 frames is quite a laborious process, because to check the detailled look I must render in high AA and Detail level. I do that in a cropped window but it's still a high effort.
In the Beginning she will look like this:
At the end she will look like this (with a morphing texture surface):
...I hope now nobody will be sad that she will be hit by a container ;)
mhhh... sorry - picture upload seems not to work at the moment... !?
.
Ok then this way :)
The witch before morphing:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqE1qfbptKNdpPjvvg (https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqE1qfbptKNdpPjvvg)
The witch after morphing:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqE22B5IifTFgfGW7A (https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqE22B5IifTFgfGW7A)
Very nice anim.
Nice animation.
Echo others. hope there's more....