I've long admired Dinoraul's dinosaur models over at Renderosity, so decided to get a couple and do something with them. This depicts a tenontosaurus being attacked by two deinonychus during the early Cretaceous, somewhere in North America.
It also gave me a chance to test using a greyball and mirrorball rendered in TG2 to light the dinosaurs which were rendered in Softimage/Mental Ray (no keylight, just the IBLs). XFrog prehistoric plants. NWDA ground and stones. Dinosaur textures modified and used for displacement. Clouds are real I'm afraid.
UPDATED
Oops, this is what I get... :'(
Quote from: Hannes on April 06, 2012, 12:33:09 PM
Oops, this is what I get... :'(
Tried a different link. Thanks.http://i331.photobucket.com/albums/l469/jimbowers/ILLUSTRATION/tenontosaurus_deinonychus_JimBowers_2012_a.jpgPhotobucket's gone weird. Attached in first post instead.
Really good :)
Imho the translucency looks to be set a little high. Were you trying to avoid too dark shadows?
Also how big (and what settings, detail etc) were the greyball and mirrorball rendered in?
Cheers
Richard
Quote from: cyphyr on April 06, 2012, 12:57:24 PM
Imho the translucency looks to be set a little high. Were you trying to avoid too dark shadows?
Also how big (and what settings, detail etc) were the greyball and mirrorball rendered in?
Thanks Richard. I take it you mean the leaf translucency? You could well be right. Balls are rendered at just 400x400. Thinking of trying higher rez, but I'm actually quite impressed with the MR shaders.
Looks nice :)
400 x 400 wow, I would have thought they would make more noise (I cant see any!) that small, impressed :)
Richard
This is really nice. Great dinosaur models and plants.
After some seconds of looking at the pictures I couldn't stop laughing because I looked to the ground in the image and thought what are all these potato heads doing there? ;D ;D ;D
Sorry, sorry, no offense ;). The flowers near these brown boulders really look like eyes. Still laughing...
Quote from: Hannes on April 06, 2012, 01:17:20 PM
This is really nice. Great dinosaur models and plants.
After some seconds of looking at the pictures I couldn't stop laughing because I looked to the ground in the image and thought what are all these potato heads doing there? ;D ;D ;D
Sorry, sorry, no offense ;). The flowers near these brown boulders really look like eyes. Still laughing...
;D Me too. For reference, they're Cycadeoidea Gigantea. The boulders are actually part of the plant.
Very nice Jim! What's a grey ball and a mirror ball, and what do you use them for?
Quote from: FrankB on April 06, 2012, 04:14:04 PM
Very nice Jim! What's a grey ball and a mirror ball, and what do you use them for?
Thanks Frank. A grey ball is a neutral grey sphere filmed or photographed on set, using bracketed exposures for HDR assembly later, for matching the real world lighting conditions in CGI. A mirror ball is the same, but with a highly reflective surface. In fact, a nice shiny ball bearing is often used as a cheap alternative to the latter. Often referred to as a light probe.
Below are the raw renders, but I ended up modifying the mirrorball image as TG2 seems to additively "fresnel" the light at the edges of the sphere. Perhaps I need to use a different reflective shader in TG2?
More info:
http://www.cgnotebook.com/wiki/Create_an_HDRi_Light_Probe
http://www.pauldebevec.com/Probes/
http://gl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/tutorial/tutorial5.html
http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff/genibl---ibl-generator (interesting tool for Poser)
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-228465.html
Thanks Jim, I'm getting it now, I think.
Just why haven't you rendered the Dinosaurs directly in TG2 and let TG2 do the lighting and GI?
I wanted to test a light probe setup between TG2 and Softimage, while getting to do something with Dinoraul's work. I think it'll be a very handy part of my pipeline in future, and beats rendering and stitching 360s. I really am impressed with how well Soft uses the light probes to light with. The dinosaurs are actually in the TG2 render, used as shadow casting objects. I've taken Richard's comment on board and am rendering a new background with more contrast in the foliage, plus a little reflection for realism. The dinos are also displaced, and are using a couple of Mental Ray shaders not available in TG2.
Fun image JimB, looks real nice. Interesting software test too.
Thanks Badger.
Update in first comment. Less translucency, more reflectivity on the foliage, some mist added in Photoshop plus a colour regrade.
Really nice Jim,
Vegetation looks much better, and better overall sense of depth.
Are you using fur on the white dinos? if not, its a very good texture.
The only thing I would suggest is maybe rendering out a higher res chrome, to help with the detail in the shadowing, might also help the displacement pop a little more.
Thing I noticed yesterday, though less apparent in the update was the amount of light in the mouth of the dino on screen right, again that might be the resolution of the ball not being able to provide enough sample detail. The eyes look like they could also use a sharper spec as they feel a little soft. But now I'm just getting picky, so I'll stop.
Great work, as always.
Chris
Thanks for that, Chris. No fur, just a modified version of DR's bump map to define translucency and subsurface scattering. The textures are 4k, so that helps. For the Mental Ray Final Gathering/GI there's a diffuse bounce, which I usually have switched on as it adds a bit more realism. The right deinonychus's mouth might be picking up more light because the pink membranes between the mandibles are also translucent and light's passing through them, with added reflectivity inside the mouth. I take your point, though, and may add ambient occlusion to the mouth areas.
One thing that stands out to me is the absence of backlighting coming through the large feathers. That's because the feathers [on the head, arms and tail] are modelled and not textures on flat planes, and even though they're very translucent in the texture map they don't seem to want to play ball. I might look into that. Fantastic models for just over ten quid, though!
The golden rule of vegetation IMHO: leaves are reflective. Tried to get away with it in the first version. Fail.
very nice, glad you fixed that