OK, here is my try for the contest.
I know maybe it's strange to choose a scene, where in real life nearly everything is moving, which I can't do right now, but I like the scene and maybe I'll do some kind of a "Matrix" freeze frame animation. We'll see.
Right now I am trying to improve the scene: adjusting the border of the grass population and especially getting rid of the weird horizontal patterns in the shore foam at the lower right.
When I'm happy with it, I'll think about the animation path.
Great looking cliffs, just made for swooping around.
good shot !
indeed, well done Hannes! Just updated our facebook blog with your entry: Link (http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/New-World-Digital-Art/127421733934530)
Cheers,
Frank
PS: please feel free to "like" us, and mark your attendance with this contest on this page: Link (http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/event.php?eid=117036438331437&ref=mf)
(named "Your RSVP")
Cheers,
Frank
Thank you Frank, I'm in!
Here's a little update (lower quality and a little bit sharpened to show the details). The horizontal lines in the pattern were caused by the warp amount, that was a bit too high.
For the splashes I used clouds with a very low number of samples. That makes it look like lots of droplets.
I also added some whitecaps. I'm not completely happy with them. Going to try how I can make them look more natural.
again, a great image and I think the white caps are good, but I would be concerned about the splashes, which will not look good in an animation - for two reasons:
1 - they won't animate like splashes
2 - the brightness of the clouds will change as you turn the camera, due to the sun glow amount setting
I think for the animation, it would be much better to make a very calm water that just waves along very softly. You could try and have a look at Nikitas foam and surf pack, but I'm not sure how to animate it.
Regards,
Frank
looking really nice, lots of excellent details!
Well, thank you a lot. This is really a pity! First when I read about the contest I had absolutely no idea what kind of scene I could use. Then I started playing around and came up with an ocean scene with lots of moving elements. :(
I'm not quite sure what to do. Should I try to create an entirely different scene (wouldn't that be against the rules?), because it would really be painful to leave out some of the elements like the splashes?
At the moment I am still trying to improve that caribbean thing. There's still a lot of time, so I hope I'll get some inspiration from above!
Not a probem really, if you ask me. The scene is not going to be inferior just because the water is not wild, and no birds. I would just keep going with the scene, continue to make it beautiful, find a few interesting spots the camera can look at and so on. Maybe you have some clouds rolling in, some strands of fog moving here and there....
Of course you can choose to work on a different scene, there's no problem at all with the contest rules. What counts is your final submssion, nothing else.
best regards,
Frank
Even if you don't use this, it really is a beautiful image. It's a shame it wouldn't animate well. Definitely keep a copy around for a still image though, it would be beautiful.
First off, its an incredible image. One idea for animating it would be to have the scene change in slow motion while the camera pans at a normal speed. If you took out the birds (unless you can make their wings flap), you could have the clouds (spray) and white caps be slightly different in each shot. The downside to this would be that there would not be any effect on the trees from the wind that would create the white caps. The other option would to have gradual, rolling waves causing the spray without wind or birds. I've never animated a scene so all of these ideas could be entirely impractical, but I figured I'd throw them out there.
If you have Deep + Animation you can always try a few frames of animation just to see how it looks. I've been pleasantly surprised by how some things look when animated, so it's worth a try. :)
- Oshyan
Thanks again. Unfortunately I don't have the animation module, so I can't test anything. But I'd love to. I have to think about it... :)
Hannes, why don't you just branch off? Definitely keep this scene and keep working on it for a final image and then create a separate project where you do what Frank suggests to address the limitations of this contest and animation in TG in general.
It's some great work!
Very nice! How will you do the birds?
I love the island! Your lighting, textures and perspectives are always among my favorites.
Thanks a lot!! I just paid for the animation upgrade! YIPPIEEEEEH!!
I'm not sure if I can keep the birds, but I think, I can animate the rest of the scene. I made some improvements of the water surface, especially the foam and I also added a beautiful sailing ship model I recently purchased at Rero.
As soon as I have made some progress regarding animated stuff, I'll post an update.
Here's a smaller crop render that shows the ship and my first attempts for a boat wake. In the meantime I was working on it, so stay tuned!
wow, the crop looks fantastic! :)
are you making the boat move, or hold its position while it tilts a bit with the waves?
Cheers,
Frank
Quote from: FrankB on May 26, 2010, 03:24:32 PM
wow, the crop looks fantastic! :)
are you making the boat move, or hold its position while it tilts a bit with the waves?
Cheers,
Frank
Or a little of both ;) Slowly moving forward while rocking a little.
Both.
First I wanted to make the boat just move with the waves a little bit (because it's easier! ;D), but then I realized that the sails are blown by the wind and I don't think that the boat would stay there resting with hoisted sails (I hope that these were the correct expressions), so I am going to move it from A to B while rocking a little bit.
I already created some ship wake that will be going to move with the boat (that's why I asked if it's possible to move a painted shader in another thread).
BUT NOW I am waiting for the animation module license key I bought this afternoon and then I'll rock the boat! ;D
This looks very good! It would be nice to see this in action , Hannes :)
Here is a veeeery short, low quality animation test of the water surface:
http://vimeo.com/12133484
wow nice preview second ;) looking good
The water looks good :)
But it seems you will have to deal with some flicker problems , Hannes .
Quote from: Hannes on May 29, 2010, 12:57:33 PM
Here is a veeeery short, low quality animation test of the water surface:
http://vimeo.com/12133484
that's looking fantastic!!! Its short length is pure torture. Like showing a starving man a tasty cookie and then swallowing it yourself ;)
@neuspadrin: I didn't see anything like this, but it's OK. We'll all ignore it, don't we?
@kadri: thank you! OH YES, there are indeed some flicker problems. I tried everything I read about avoiding flicker, but using a fill light setup for example looked quite good, but destroyed the translucency on the sails as well as reducing GI relative detail to 1. I'll take care of the flicker problem later.
@FrankB: thank you too. LOL ;D! You'll get your tasty cookie as soon as possible. Render times are really really high. As I said above I have to use GI. Besides there's a thin animated cloud layer directly on top of the water surface on the coastline and around the ship to simulate spray (you'll see it later animated), and I have to switch ray trace shadows on to make the ship cast shadows onto the spray.
At the time I have disabled the plants. I think this will raise render times even more! :(
Another image of the ship with the "spray cloud layer":
I managed to get the sails animated. I thought that it wouldn't look natural if the sails would not move at all in the wind. It's an animated power fractal applied to the displacement channel. I had to uncheck "ray trace objects" to get a real displacement and not only bump. Here's a small test:
http://vimeo.com/12144967
Another cookie crumb for FrankB ;D
To reduce the flicker especially on the sails I had to use some kind of frame blending in a compositing app. That's the reason for this exaggerated kind of motion blur effect (it's just for demonstration).
It shows the ship wake and the animated sails in action. Ignore the terrain. It's way too small and is rescaled in the meantime.
http://vimeo.com/12145114
This project is really coming along. Nice work so far. 8)
the moving ship is awsome man Oo
There's obviously a lot of clever work in this project.
Keep up the good work Hannes ;)
Regards,
Terje
"CAPTAIIIIIIIN HAAAAANNES! WE'RE ABOUT TO HIT THAT ROCK, SIR! 3 SECONDS AND WE'RE ALL DOOMED! ... Oh, it's ok. He's stopped animating us just in time! Not to worry!" :D
Wow, man! This looks absolutely fantastic. Every element, in composition and in animation, is extremely well done. Can't wait for more updates on this, fabulous! 8)
;D ;D ;D!!!
THANK YOUUUUU ALL!!
agree with all...super work Hannes!
Stunning - although I do fear for the ship, being so close to those rocks!
So do I.
I completely reworked the terrain, so the ship is safe. ;)
Wowwww :)... those two short clips are Incredible, well done capt' Hannes :D
how did you get the the foam to go along the side of the ship?
it looks awesome
I hope that I'm able to explain this! ;D
The foam is a thin cloud layer. It's masked with another cloud fractal that's vertically animated through a transform shader to get some kind of turbulence. The same cloud fractal is also used as a breakup shader for a white material to get the foam patterns inside the wake. As I said it's only animated vertically. To make it move with the ship I merged the cloud fractal mask with a painted shader that has the shape of the wake and is animated with the ship. So the cloud fractal stays in place but is made visible where the animated painted shader appears.
For the white caps I used the same masking technique but animated the cloud fractal additionally in the horizontal direction in sync with the wave patterns of the lake object's water material.
Btw here's a lighting test
Hannes can you post this bigger please :D
i guess thats a good enough explanation,
works for me
this new render looks Sweet :)
i agree with kadri, bigger.
OK!
This is the original render. It took 13 hours to render! :(
I already spotted the parallel lines on the left part of the water. I had forgotten to enable microvertex jittering.
(just saw these strange patterns on the sails. Don't know what this is ???)
Another (earlier) 70 frames water test:
http://vimeo.com/12233135
Thanks Hannes :)
This looks very good already !
This is going to be fantastic. Add some matching music and it'll be a delight to see the movie, no doubt. Great accomplishment on the sails. Did not know this was possible.
Wow Hannes that is amazing. :o
I hear a sea shanty!
I see Russel Crowe at the bow!
Any way we can get a tutorial on how you do the animated foam?
Sure. I'll have to take a break because I'll be on vacation for two weeks, but when the scene is finished I will be sharing my secrets ;D
The last image before I'll fly to Greece. This one is rendered with the final quality settings. It took almost 9 hours to render in this resolution!
The whole animation is 900 frames long. That means a total render time of 75 days!!! What have I done? ??? Why didn't I choose a simple desert scene?
Anyway, see you in two weeks!
Awesome look. Have a great time. 8)
Happy holidays. The wake of the ship is awesome. Now all you need are a few dolphins sporting ahead of the ship, a couple of mermaids, some flying fish... ;)
Looks stunning! We'll see if we can't get that 9 hours down to something more reasonable when I get my hands on it. ;D
- Oshyan
Game over, ball's burst! :D
You forgot "ba's on the slates, tea's oot" ;)
(Colloquial Scottishisms for those wondering)
This sure is a potential winner, unless the unknown contributors hold out until the last minute. But if this wins the animation prize, it'll give Oshyan quite something to do! Great work, Hannes!
Holy C**P! This is awesome!
Kalimera alltogether!!
Back again from helping the greek solving their financial problems (by drinking as much greek wine and Mythos beer as I could!).
I had very much inspiration for my sea surface standing on a big ferry boat and watching the white caps and the ship wake. This was really fascinating and frustrating at the same time because it's sooo complex.
Anyway right now I am trying to render a very low quality preview of the whole animation. It's going to take some time, because even at a resolution of 200X112 px with quick render settings each frame takes about 15 min to render.
BUT the deadline is July 15th! So there's a lot of time left.
Btw here is a photo I took from the wake. I love these structures!!
Awesome render Hannes, very realistic. very, very convincing.. ;D
you should sell it on NWDA CS :D :D
(the foam, that is)
Some progress I made regarding translucency. I didn't know why I couldn't get a realistic looking translucency with shadows on the backlit faces. Everything was just equally brighter.
I checked the model in 3ds max and found out that the sails weren't just displaced planes without any thickness, but somehow solid. Like displaced boxes. So I tried to delete the "double faces" and reimported the model into TG.
Example (before/after):
astonishing work here Hannes!
The sails look great. Your whole project is looking marvelous.
Here is a (VERY LOW QUALITY!!!) preview for the whole animation. This was rendered BEFORE I fixed the translucency. I had to use frame blending again to reduce the flickering. Btw, the sun doesn't appear like the well known white cookie in better quality renders.
http://vimeo.com/13033662
cool!!! 8)
it looks blurry, that does'nt really bother me, that much
Yes, that's because the original render is 200X112 pixels, so I had to upscale it and of course the frame blending blurs as well. In this low quality and this size the flickering is terrible without any tweaking.
The ship looks fantastic, but I'd like to see just a*little* more of the shoreline.
Looking good! I just wonder how much trouble the flickering will cause in the end when/if this gets animated ;)
Is the sun look a little wierd when going behind stuff.
Yes, the sun shines a little bit through objects here. I would have to enable ray trace shadows in the athmosphere's quality tab to avoid this, but that would increase the rendertimes even more.
Sometimes when the sun is behind a piece of fabric you can see the sun disc through it (at least a little bit), so I decided to keep rendertimes "short" ( ;D short!!!!! Hahahaha! ;D)
That's it!!! I'm done!!!
I submitted my storyboard.
It's quite different from what I had in mind when I started, but I had a lot of fun learning new things like water animation, foam generation and wind blown sails.
Looking forward to the other submissions. This is really exciting!
Here's the (resized) storyboard:
A fantastic voyage, all the way from page 1! Excellent work. :)
Well done!
Congratulations, Hannes! Even the low quality movie is great. I would really like to see your storyboard animated. When you started out I was afraid the movie would be too fast, as many movies are, when speeding over some countryside, but there's a nice and calm feel to yours. Good luck in the contest!
---Dune
Looks really awesome. It will be wonderful animated.
Thanks a lot, guys!!
Really nice work Hannes. Makes me want to go a-privateering.
arrrghhh...Jim lad!
proper stuff here!
very welldone indeed. I'd love to see how the spray turns out in high resolution.
:)
Richard
awesomeness...
this is spectacular work Captain Hannes!! :D
the foam & displaced sails are great breakthroughs.
OK, since the deadline is set to August 14th, there's plenty of time for nitpicking ;D!
Here is a test animation in final quality to show the displacement of the sails. I left out the water, the terrain and the palmtrees to speed up rendering. The flickering is way better in this quality, but nevertheless I used frameblending which eliminates the flickering almost completely.
http://vimeo.com/13200441
That looks surprisingly realistic. Nice work. I take it you can't use Raytrace Object Rendering with this though?
- Oshyan
Unfortunately not. It destroys the sails displacement and the terrain.
Btw here is a (crop rendered) test animation of the bow wave with high quality settings except RTE is on and AA set to 2. One frame took 12 minutes to render. Without RTE it would have been more than 2 hours! The first part is original, the second part with frame blending.
http://vimeo.com/13227976
Of course the crop render area is resized.
I'll make another test animation with RTE on to see how much the terrain and the sails will be affected.
So this is how it looks with RTE on, AA 2. Rendertime about 32 minutes instead of more than 9 hours. Not too bad!
But look at the ship, especially the sails. Terrible! The rest is OK, so isn't there a way to raytrace everything EXCEPT the ship? HELP!!!
Currently there is no way to selectively raytrace, but I agree it would be a very useful feature. I think there could be some additional tuning here though that would maintain reasonable render times and still increase quality. Generally speaking don't worry about that, it's something I'll have to tackle if your entry ends up winning.
By the way the frame blended version really does look much better, quite good in fact. What app are you doing the blending in?
- Oshyan
It's Combustion. I used a Timewarp operator. Method: Trail, 2 samples each. It's really great to reduce flickering (I found this trick somewhere in the internet. Don't remember where).
Ah, I don't have Combustion. :D I wonder if VirtualDub's Temporal Smoother filter would work though...
- Oshyan
I may have a look. Thank you!
It works. But it doesn't look that good. As you can see in the last part, it looks like jpg artifacts, somehow blurred and dirty. I had to use this effect in VD with 75%, otherwise the flickering was still there.
http://vimeo.com/13242379
Your project is very nice coming :)
You may know these filters for Virtualdub and AviSynth by MSU Video Group !
There are many very good filters . Did you tested the Deflicker filter there , Hannes ?
http://www.compression.ru/video/index.htm
Oh thanks for the tip, Kadri! I immediately tested it. Well, there's some obvious ghosting when using the blend mode, and the flicker is still there. Thanks anyway!!!
Sad :(
Don't worry, it's not my main problem. The biggest one is rendertimes.
At the moment I am still rendering another test animation of the sails with RTE on. Without it I had to use a value of 250 for the displacement of the sails. After some testing I found that I had to use a very much lower value for the displacement (0.5 - unfortunately only bump with RTE on). I'll see how the sails will turn out with just bump mapping.
http://www.thedeemon.com/VirtualDubFilters/
Here are many filters. But not all are for virtualdub ; when you click on them you will see if it will work or not with VD.
These filters are time wasters too sometimes. So i picked some of them . But i haven't used them all.
Begin from these ones if you want to try them . Some of them are in VD i think.
And be carefull if you want to try them . I didn't downloaded from these links!
http://neuron2.net/deflick/flick.html
http://neuron2.net/hiq/smoothhiq.html
http://acobw.narod.ru/ndf.html
http://acobw.narod.ru/nslf_3d.html
http://neuron2.net/smooth.html
http://www.doki.ca/filters/
http://home.earthlink.net/~casaburi/download/
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Other-VIDEO-Tools/Frame-Merger.shtml
http://www.downv.com/Windows/download-Frame-Tweaker-10080140.htm
Sometimes they work on one scene and on the other not unfortunately . And these are free ones .
They are not always better then the commercial ones you know :)
If you can use a frame doubler you can maybe cut the render time and the flicker with one stone(?) !
This is wishfull thinking of course , Hannes :)
Holy cow! Thanks a lot! I'll have a look.
I had high hope for the MSU ones but who knows :)
Seems that this one looks promising:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Other-VIDEO-Tools/Frame-Merger.shtml
... and it works with VD!
Thanks again, Kadri! :)
:)
OK, here is another test rendering (with RTE on). The bump on the sails is set to 0.2 and I have to say, that the bump doesn't look as bad as I expected. Not as good as real displacement, but OK.
http://vimeo.com/13244021
The first part is edited with virtual dub and the plugin frame merger I mentioned above (once more thank you, Kadri. a lot of thank yous today, what?). The second part is edited with Combustion and frame blending. Not that much of a difference. Great idea. Thank you, Kadri!
I'll render a short sequence of the whole animation to see how everything looks like. Of course the quality is not the same like with the other settings, but each frame takes only half an hour to render. Better than 9 hours.
Before I forget it: thank you, Kadri for the great links ;D ;D ;D!!!!
Quote from: Hannes on July 11, 2010, 10:27:21 AM
OK, here is another test rendering (with RTE on). The bump on the sails is set to 0.2 and I have to say, that the bump doesn't look as bad as I expected. Not as good as real displacement, but OK...
I wish you (or Planetside ) could use displacement , but as you said it looks OK , Hannes :)
I think the RTE/bump mapped version looks surprisingly good actually. It may be a very workable solution.
- Oshyan
OK, here is another test image of a test sequence I am rendering at the moment in this size. RTE on, GI detail 1, AA 2. The ropes at the front look horrible, but that's the internal motion blur. For the stills of the storyboard I'll disable it.
Right now I have rendered 27 frames during the last days. I wanted to see how the animation looks in better quality. I am really missing the displacement on the sails because when they are backlit you don't see very much of the bump :'(
OK, that's it. I submitted my storyboard after I made some major improvements. The translucency of the sails is correct now, the foam distribution and the animation of it are reworked and I switched off motion blur to get rid of the grainy blurred parts. I really miss the real displacement on the sails, but with RTE on I will still be alive (hopefully) if this animation will be rendered some time.
(I gave up rendering the higher resolution animation, and keep on rendering a 640X360 test animation).
I really need to do something else now, because I spent a lot of time with this animation, but it was great fun!
Here is a smaller version of my submitted storyboard:
(I forgot to mention, that I sharpened it a little bit. Otherwise there is no postwork)
It looks awfully good!
Very nice. I can taste the salt air.
Great work!
I can not wait to see this animated. Watch out Lucas Film.
;D
Here is a 100 frames animation of frames 700 to 800 with subtle frame blending and a little bit sharpening:
http://vimeo.com/13848951
Just for testing purposes I'm rendering until frame 1000. Afterwards I will render the sails with real displacement without the water and the "spray clouds" to composite it together later.
The ship's wake is totally awesome - really great work Hannes. Unfortunately, in vimeo, the play controls obscure it a bit.
Thanks, domdib. When you move the mouse out of the area the movie is playing, after you hit "play", the controls disappear.
Wow. Very impressive. The wake is totally believable!
damn fine result for sure!!! :)
Hannes, Did you ever finish this animation?