I've been working on some alpine type plates for a few shot we've been working on, which you can see here...
http://www.mediastation.tv/examples/virgin/
The hero mountain in the moving shots is a Geocontrol HF blended into some ridged noise mountains. The A330 has been rendered in Max, and camera's exported into TG. There are a couple of still composites in there which weren't generated in TG, before anyone points that out. ;D
This was a good exercise in getting as little noise and shadow pops from TG as possible. Whilst being able to place both the camera import and HF to where ever the shot looked best. Loving the .chan offset options.
Rendered at Q 6, AA 3, GI 2/4 at 720p. @15-40 mins a frame.
Cheers
Jon
Very impressive!
I think the lowish detail settings in contrast to the high detail of the A330 work well to give a greater sence of depth to the image (and as a bonus speed up the render time.
:)
Richard
Very nice :)
I wonder how the A330 would look directly rendered in TG2 !
very, very nice, agree with kadri, be nice to see a comparison frame maybe?
Very good work. Its certainly very believable!
Hey Jon, it's great to see that you and your company are using TG2 in your workflows quite often!
But what's up with the render details in the TG2 scenes of this particular clip? There was one scene where a ridge of an alpine fractal was quite near the camera where I was surprised this scene passed the "Hetzen QC" ;)
Secondly, I think all scenes needed a much higher contrast (where TG2 was used), dont you think?
Again, not downplaying what was obviously a lot of work. I just think it can be improved in these two aspects.
Cheers,
Frank
Thanks guys.
Hey Frank. These plates were rendered out as .exr for a colleage to composite, and he was basing his colour judgement on some actual air to air footage, where the background didn't actualy have that much contrast. The objective here was to make the plane model pop and look quite natural in scene. That being said, yes there could have been a lot more work done on the BG.
The other thing to note, was that I was being told things like, could you move that mountain over to the left a bit, and down a bit, and could you move the snow caps down in altitude etc, so the scene had to have flexibility in being reactionary to the director. Also, there had to be a quick turnaround in production, and this had to be rendered a few times to deal with off camera shadows poping, so there had to be 0.3 or sometimes more padding in the ray and GI calculation. One part of the mountain looked as if it was a neon light bulb starting up, which I couldn't seem to fix, so had to paint it out in the end. It seems there has to be a balance in your displacements, or you have to apply a lot of time in investigating settings, to stop certain textures turning themselves on and off as the camers moves.
I've had trees in a population disapeer in the same frame rendered twice on the same machine, so something tells me that theres some 'jittering' going on in rounding off PFs. Not sure. I'd be interested in your thoughts on that.
Absolutely great! Really enjoyed watching this!
Stunning, you might even be able to sell something like this to an airliner...?
Nice work Jon :)
At some stages of the animation I strongly had the idea the plane was not moving at all while at certain moments the sensation of a fast flying plane was very strong and convincing.
Though the terrain at some points isn't as nice as it could/should, it still looks good. The "flat" less contrasty look is very good to me.
Frank is a huge fan of contrasty images of course :)
Maybe less interesting from a photograpic point of view, but realistic because this is how one would see it with his own eyes.
Also nice to see you had some practice with a scene like this, so we can start finishing our little project :P
Cheers,
Martin
Thanks Martin.
It's funny, we did actually work out in metres the distance the camera and model had to move for it's cruising speed. I guess the higher up something is, to reference against, the less the paralax.
Yeah it was good to get to polish off the workflow a little with this. There's some really good features in the alpha which really help.
So how are you getting on with your canyon, I thought you were re-working it?