Planetside Software Forums

It's been a long time since I posted something (lot of other things to do).
Here's something that was initially meant for testing surface layers. During some early tests I realized that GI lighting looked great for the clouds but the terrain looked way better with a fill light setup. So I decided to use some kind of a hybrid lighting. Fortunately it's possible to choose which light illuminates what.
The birds are made in 3ds max by using a bird model I got from somewhere. It's preanimated. Not flying around but flapping for about 300 frames. I created a particle system with this bird as source for 200 instances. I made the system emitting the birds for about 30 frames so that the birds started their animation at different frames and let them fly around. So at about frame 100 I had a nice flock of birds each in different states of movement. I then made a single mesh out of these particle birds and imported it into TG. I used four of these flock objects (so it's only 800 birds, but 1000 sounds better! ;))
The rock including the plants in the foreground on the left side is an imported mesh too. Initially it was a distorted sphere which was displaced with a rock texture map I also used for the diffuse colour and for bump mapping. I grew some ivy on it and added some bushes.
The tree on the right is a Monterey cypress by XFrog.

There is a lot of stuff in this scene and it's a pleasure to see how TG handles this. My computer is a little bit outdated but anyway this scene took only about 11 hours to render in a 2400 X 1022px resolution. I remember when I worked only with the foreground rock in 3ds max. Even adjusting some parameters took ages...

Edit: Check out the final 1080p render here: http://youtu.be/3_T6zhiI2aM

---

Très belle réalisation, bravo!

Technically it looks very good and can be used as a real landscape probably Hannes :)
Not sure why but maybe that it lacks a more defined focus as an image-for me-,
i see this more as a frame from an video -where the camera is panning alongside the birds for example-.
Do you have a video Hannes?

Superb, Hannes, very realistic. I agree with Kadri, it looks like just a moment in time, a random snapshot. Reminds me, actually, of a still from something like Planet Earth. I can hear Attenborough now: "And as dusk descends, a flock of Ki'pu'i fly out for their evening meal, a rich harvest of insects drawn out by the growing dark and cooling temperatures. The flock will circle for hours, gorging themselves - in some cases up to their own body weight - before finally returning to their cave dwellings." ;)

- Oshyan

wow ! really really nice one, Hannes !
very realistic and nice work on the colours too

Its great Hannes!

I really wish you could animate those birds in TG!! Maybe you can do an image sequence animation thing, or whatever its called. Still have not seen one, that I know of.

Thank you, guys! It's not a frame of a video, but now that you mention it, it really looks like one to me too.
@Oshyan:  ;D ;D ;D
@Badger: I also wish I could animate those birds. Now that it looks like a still image of a sequence, I'd love to create an animation including wind blown trees. Maybe I'll give it a try.

Superb image, Hannes. I really like the birds (I'm a bird fanatic), but the terrain is fabulous too. I like the explanation given, the story behind this scene. Thanks.

Great work Hannes, I really like it!
IMHO, the clouds are the weakest point of this image, else is just really good if you'd ask me.
Looking forward to your next one :)

Quote from: Oshyan on January 16, 2013, 08:11:45 PM
Superb, Hannes, very realistic. I agree with Kadri, it looks like just a moment in time, a random snapshot. Reminds me, actually, of a still from something like Planet Earth. I can hear Attenborough now: "And as dusk descends, a flock of Ki'pu'i fly out for their evening meal, a rich harvest of insects drawn out by the growing dark and cooling temperatures. The flock will circle for hours, gorging themselves - in some cases up to their own body weight - before finally returning to their cave dwellings." ;)

- Oshyan

Ghehe, that's an awesome comment Osyhan :) I can really imagine hearing him telling that story :)

Cheers,
Martin

Funny, I like the clouds. :D

- Oshyan

Hi Hannes, welcome back!
What a seriously beautiful scene!
Great setup info too, and Oshyan; great impersonation!
What a great flock of birds... any chance of sharing the mesh?
I would love to download these somewhere!!
cheers
Jason
:)

This is seriously cool. Great work!

Thanks again!!
@inky: I'd love to share this one, but I don't really remember where I got this from. It was a Max-Script that created flapping birds flying along a spline. I took this model and used it as described. So I hope the creator won't mind if I'm sharing it.
The file has more than 17 MB (compressed). So I can't upload it here, but I'll see where I can upload it.

thanks Hannes!
Look forward to checking out the possibilities!
J
:)

So impressive; the light and contrasts make this image pop. BTW, you might try 'MediaFire' to upload the birds.

if you can post a cycle of the bird animation (obj seq) and a VERY low poly representation of the cliff I'll make you a nice flock of birds...

Thank you, goldfarb! But I already managed to create my own object sequence of the birds. I'll post an example movie asap.
First I'll try choronr's suggestion (Thank you)!

OK, the birds are ready to download in the file sharing section.

Very kind, thank you Hannes

Thanks Hannes!

Thanks Hannes, just downed it. But I really am more interested in this:

QuoteBut I already managed to create my own object sequence of the birds. I'll post an example movie asap.

If you are talking about animating the birds by that mystery method, than please start a thread on the subject! The only things I have read on it in all the time I have been a member here, are quick conversations in posts and theory discussions. I have not seen any break down of the process, and do not believe I have seen any animations using the method.

Martin (T-U) did happen to discuss it in the lecture last week, and he made it sound that like the process was simple in terms of whats involved; amount of steps. But I think I would like to see someone do it first before I could try it. And if I am asking about the right thing here, it would be great to learn from you what the strengths and limitations are in this method, how useful you find it, and what (perhaps unorthodox) ways it might be used other than the obvious. Since everything in TG2 seems to be good for more than just what it was intended for.

By the way, you won an award in the "toscars". Did you know that?  :)

Badger, this is an object sequence rendered, a demo for our 2.3 release: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNf6E0GMJ1g
It really is quite easy, the method shown in the web conference is literally all there is to it. The hard part is really getting ahold of (or creating) an OBJ sequence.

- Oshyan

Thanks Oshyan! That is an interesting view of it. I did a quick search on "OBJ sequence" And found that most of the major softwares have OBJ sequence plug-ins.
C4d has one built in, and I found a free script for maya http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/utility-external/export/c/obj-sequence-exporter

Oshyan, please indulge me a little more on this.
Suppose some stubborn person wanted to do a complex (really complex) sequence, the kind of thing most people would just render in another software and then comp; lots of complex natural movement or physics.
And also suppose that this hypothetical sequence can be loaded correctly. Can I then assume that the OBJ sequence will render in TG2 in a way that is consistent with the sequence in the other software? Or do you know of a point where you become limited by what you can do in this process?

In the video the example did not have textures on the objects. I am curious to know if there will be additional issues with UVs and texture stretching on top of any issues in the export software, or if what you see when you output a sequence is only and exactly what you get when rendered in TG2.

Personally I think having objects lit and placed in the same render as the terrain is created is best. As apposed to comping, matching and then correcting 2 or more separate videos. Ideally I mean, it should create the most real results. Yes?

I won an award?? Where can I see this?
@Badger: I don't know if this is really a mystery method. I had a particle system in 3ds max. After the particles behaved the way I wanted them to, I used the preanimated bird as instance.
Then I used the 3ds max-mesher object to create one mesh per frame. Afterwards I had to find a script that helped me to transform these meshes into .objs and to create the sequence.
TG can read this, when you put "%04d" as prefix in "filename" for a four digit sequence.
Here are the birds in motion rendered in TG. So, I don't see any differences to the original in 3ds max.

Hannes pretty much answers your question. ;) To the best of my knowledge the sequence loading functionality works exactly like the normal image or object loading system, the only difference is it knows to use a different object file for each frame, and it gets the info on which file to use from the file name wild card specified, as in Hannes' example above. So basically, you start rendering with frame 1, it loads birds0001.obj and renders the scene, frame 1 finishes and saves to disk, frame 2 is about to be rendered and now the OBJ loader sees it's on frame 2, it loads birds0002.obj and renders, and so on. So as long as a single instance of your model loads and renders fine in TG, the sequence *should* load and render correctly. After all it's literally just a series of separate OBJ files, no different to if you manually loaded a different OBJ and pressed Render a bunch of times.

The only issue I can think of is if the program that is outputting the OBJ doesn't output multiple corresponding MTL files and only puts out 1, but hopefully that's not something any of them do.

What you need to keep in mind is that fully animating complex models is going to create a lot of very large object data. If you have a 10MB object and you want to animate it over 1000 frames, you suddenly have 10GB of object data. It could easily get into 100s of GBs very quickly.

- Oshyan

QuoteHere are the birds in motion rendered in TG

THATS REALLY GREAT! Are you kidding me? Why don't more people do this?! It really works :o

QuoteI don't know if this is really a mystery method

Most things in life are a mystery to me. I don't hold you guys so low.

QuoteI won an award?? Where can I see this?

Yes, and were nominated for several more. People had some nice things to say about you. It was cool.

If you sign up for a gold pass for the lectures this weekend you get the video for all of the sessions. But as a winner I would hope that someone would get you a video from friday regardless of whether or not you can come to the sessions Sat and Sunday.
Like I said it was nice. And I am glad that they recognised the images you make, I like the work you do too.
They picked a lot of nice work to show. But not a lot of people voted, and not a lot of people voted in every category. I my self waited until the last moment to vote, without enough time to vote in every category. But it was a good idea, we should do it every year, for the work of each year. But with more than a week to do the voting, I think.

Thank you Oshyan, that is the sort of boundaries I was looking for. In terms of resources, It is very good to have that information before I start. 100GB is doable, but if your not expecting that before you start it would be a nasty surprise. Had I known how much trouble the ivy on my maze was going to be I would not have started, but I dont know how to quit ;) But this though, looks like any difficulties could really be worth it, if the project is good to begin with.

The birds in Hannes' test make that plain old terrain come alive

Keep in mind also that populating animated objects would likely be problematic because of the way instancing works. Either you have a whole bunch of copies of objects moving exactly the same way (unrealistic), or you have the objects with varying rotation, so they have the same motion, but different rotations, looking slightly different, but still wrong, and certainly not achieving any kind of good "wind" effect for example (because there's no cohesion across instances for the motion).

- Oshyan

Argg^^ Then its a question of timing and distance. The eyes would have to be given lots of information, but not enough time to fully transmit everything they are seeing. So the viewer is tricked into believing what they think they see. For example, using Hannes' birds, several shots while the camera is in slight motion, all from different positions, and no edit longer than 3 seconds.
Its very complex then, in terms of effective execution.

It can be done.

Or you could just composite the output from TG and the output from 3DS Max/Maya/whatever, like the pros do. They seem to get pretty good results. ;) Either way has its challenges, but the compositing workflow is probably more well documented, and better facilitated by the recently-added FBX support.

- Oshyan

Both methods have their pros and cons. If you have the objects inside your scene, you don't have to worry about camera matching or matching the lighting conditions. BUT: there's no object motion blur (yet), you have large file sizes for obj. sequences and you can't change anything except PW when the rendering is done.
Compositing gives you a lot of freedom to change things later, but you need a composition software and the knowledge how to do that.

Btw (I love to say "by the way", it seems), I created an animation of a wind blown tree the same way like I did my birds animation. I'll show it as soon as possible.

I discovered something weird. When I am importing an .obj sequence everything is fine, but the parts shader is empty. So I have to copy the shaders out of a previously created TGO and put it into the empty parts shader. Then it works. Probably there is some issue with the .mtl file 3ds max creates. As long as I find a solution it's OK.

Nebenbei bemerkt (I won't say btw any more): how can I see this Toscars event thing. Seems there is no way to get access at the moment. Has anybody the video of friday?

I know, this seems to become a monologue, but here is a test animation of my imported wind blown tree.

That's ridiculously cool Hannes!

Tree looks good Hannes, nice to see that.

The "Toscars" event was part of the paid Terralive Conference that's going on this weekend. But it does make sense to me that it should be available (at least after the fact) for free viewing by the community. An event ceremony isn't really worth much without publicity for the winners. ;) I'll talk to Paul Bussey, the organizer, and see what can be done.

- Oshyan

Thank you, TU and Oshyan! Unfortunately I had to take a break from my Planetside forum activities, so I saw the Toscars thing one day before the voting ended. I'd love to see something of that. Thank you in advance, Oshyan for your efforts!

Quote from: Oshyan on January 19, 2013, 04:44:28 AM
Or you could just composite the output from TG and the output from 3DS Max/Maya/whatever, like the pros do. They seem to get pretty good results. ;) Either way has its challenges, but the compositing workflow is probably more well documented, and better facilitated by the recently-added FBX support.

- Oshyan

On this I cant agree with you Oshyan. For Hannes' bird test, yes you are right. But imagine fireflies or butterflies in a prairie, with camera parallel to the tips of the wiled grasses. The creatures flutter in float up and down, in and out... The amount of masking and rotoscoping alone would make me puke. Add to that everything else, and forget it.

Even just take the OP image that started all of this. The usual way means that Hannes has to mask all of that foreground stuff out, and then set up multiple blend layers over edges. Or he would have to do a bunch of different passes in each software. Do we have z-pass yet?

Without development in this area, TG2 is background or foreground (in part) but not both at the same time, unless its pure landscape.

Remember chris_x422's post on his work in snowWhite. THat works just like you say, but only because nothing in the foreground is obstructing the view of the background. And I think even big productions don't like spending time on masking and roto, if they don't have to.

This is a bridge! If it can be made to work well up close in complex ways, it will mean one render sequence, not two. And a ton of other work cut out also. See? Or am I forgetting something important?

I think you can present *common* scenarios that are more advantageous to either approach. The fireflies one is perhaps a bit contrived, I'm not even sure I'd recommend Terragen as the best tool for that in any case. But depth pass and other render element outputs basically address all those issues anyway, and we'll have that in the future. Of course if you are doing something right now with current Terragen capabilities then the decision is perhaps more weighted toward having everything rendered in TG, if possible.

- Oshyan

lol, yes you are right ;D
I am making fireflies models to share with the community, also wanted to make butterflies. I had wanted to make a stock video with alphas for easy compositing for community members in their summer scene renders. Do you remember Wallies "non TG render thread" in open-D. He had a view of a house near a pond in the twilight hours... And thats what made me want to make lightning bugs to share.... It would be easy just to use glowing spheres, but not for close ups.

But I also wanted to have a camera follow a butterfly through a terrain in my "mushroom forest" project. The butterfly eventually descends to a plant in the front yard of the mushroom house render I posted. I wanted it to be the opening shot, and use the idea repeatedly as a way to transition from one edit sequence to another.

I am building both the mazeworld thing and the mushroom thing, simultaneously in Tg2 and Maya. So Hannes' work here means a lot to me. Because obviously, I am not an expert, and do not have the resources of a production house :-[

Yeah, I understand. So it sounds like your particular scenario would benefit a lot from doing as much as possible in Terragen. I don't think that's the "wrong" approach, but I do think you just need to strike a balance and make sensible decisions about how much difficulty you will put up with in some areas to avoid difficulty in others. It's all trade-offs here and there, a balancing act. Fortunately you have a story to tell, and a great artistic sense, so I'm sure you'll get there over time, and the results will be great. :)

- Oshyan

Yes. In truth, the way I am going about this is terribly unprofessional. But its a great way to learn; the hard way. Thanks for your vote of confidence Oshyan.

Sorry for hijacking (again) Hannes. Apologies.

No problem. This is quite interesting.
Here is a low quality 140 frame animation of my scene with the birds and the foreground tree animated. I had to use heavy postwork to reduce noise and flicker, since this was rendered with the quick render settings (Valley 51 is a working title).

Very promising Hannes!

- Oshyan

That is one hell of an animation

I really love it :)
Hannes depends on you what you want to achieve but the birds could fly roughly 2-3 times faster maybe ?

sorry I'm late...

@Hannes - glad to see you've sorted this out - looks great!

Thanks again and again!
@Kadri: yes, I think too the birds are a little bit slow  ;D
Right now I am rendering an animation with better quality settings. I don't know if I can manage to create a new Flock of birds .obj animation for this project, because it takes quite a while to do so, but I'll do that as soon as possible.

Hannes, I think this one has the potential to be the best animation that you have showed. And one of the best TG2 animations across the internets.
If you can get everything working just right, its going to be really great. The tests are already very inspiring.

I am not sure, but I think it is already close to having the most moving parts of any TG2 animation I have seen.

Astonishing result, Hannes. I envy you (not really, but still...)

Thank you, guys! I just realized that my object sequences used for this scene have a filesize of 25 GB! That's quite a reason to implement some advanced object animation features into TG, isn't it? ;)

25GB is a little problematic...esp if its obj - not the best format out there...supporting more geometry formats would help here...
ideally you'd want to import one bird anim seq and instance it onto a particle system - this is how a standard 3D application would do it...but Terragen doesn't have this capability - and I'd hesitate to want a full particle system in Terragen, developing such would take away resources from other, more important areas, better would be the ability to import a particle seq made in a 3D app and then use that as a population source - populations would have to be updated with the ability to use geo seq and have offsets etc...but this is easier to implement than a particle system.

Amazing Hannes!  The whole scene just looks great, and the animation adds even more!

Whoa, what a stunning preview!

Great preview animation, I also love the wind effect on the tree! Great job all over!  :)

Realistic as ususal Hannes!

Really like the rock surface, groundcover and the pines.

Cheers

This is all excellent Hannes.

James

Hey Hannes, I read a post by you about object motion blur. I just learned, what you probably already know, that OBJ sequences do not support motion blur at all. So its not just an issue with using .obj sequences in TG2, or so I am lead to believe.

Anyway, I cam upon a post in another forum for a plug-in that claims to take care of the issue. It was recommended by Andrew Cramer of VCP. It may or may not be of use to you.

http://www.revisionfx.com/products/rsmb/

Let me know if you think this can do the job.

Thank you, Badger! Yes, I know this plugin. I tend to uncheck MB in TG most of the time, since MB takes a lot longer to render. Creating MB in PW saves you a lot of time, and the plugin you recommended is really good! Additionally it blurs the objects as well, that, as you already said, can't be motionblurred in TG.

Ok thanks Hannes. Cramer and your word on this is enough for me. I will pick up this software when my taxes are back. It comes ready to use for a ton of different softwares including AE cs6 and all of autodesk's stuff. I just need to find out if it works on all the softwares at once, or if you need a different version of the plug-in for each package you want to use it with.
Hope it works on all at once, that would be nice.

Andrew Kramer's tutorials are imho essential for all AE users. And they are quite entertaining! As one of the users commented: it's great fun to watch them, even if you never touched AE!
For Reelsmart MB: here is the compatibility list:
http://www.revisionfx.com/products/rsmb/compatibility/

Here it is folks, the final 1080p animation: http://youtu.be/3_T6zhiI2aM
Be sure to watch in HD (1080p). It's only 8 seconds, but it's a lovely 8 seconds!

And don't worry, it didn't take a month and a half just to render. ;) In fact it was less than 2 hours on the Ranch render farm.

Turns out that object sequences can be pretty big to deal with. We're talking some 25GB of object data! So there was a bit of struggle in transferring some big files. But it worked out great in the end, as you can see.

Big thanks to Hannes for working with us on this! Glad to be able to bring his scene to life in full HD.

- Oshyan

Holy mother damn...how awesome!

Oshyan, how cool of you guys to render it on Ranch!

25GB of data  ::)

That is awesome looking, killer stuff man ^^

Really pretty! Excellent work.

Triple WOW!!!!

Just want to play it again, and again ...outstanding Hannes.

WOW!  That's truly inspiring.  So beautiful.  How long did each frame take to render?

Since it was rendered on a farm, it was quite fast - total render time for ~200 frames of an hour and 50 minutes or so. On my workstation here, an i7 2600k (4 cores) at 4.6Ghz, test frames were about an hour and 10 minutes each.

- Oshyan

Seriously. Awsome.

Thank you all! I'd like to mention that the lens flare is of course postwork. So is the subtle contrast enhancement and a little bit of chromatic abberation. There is also some added motion blur especially for the birds.
Thank you so much Oshyan for doing this! If I would plan to render the animation in this resolution on my machine, we would see a lot of popes coming and going until it's going to be finished...

Just a small in-between question; speaking of chromatic abberation... how do you put it in? Couldn't find it in Photoshop CS3.

Wow, nice animation!

Quote from: Dune on March 18, 2013, 03:41:56 AM
Just a small in-between question; speaking of chromatic abberation... how do you put it in? Couldn't find it in Photoshop CS3.

If you want to add it in PS, it's part of the lens correction bit. Probably in distort or somewhere. I'm on CS6 but have been using CS3 for years. ;)
Essentially use the fringing corrections to add fringing rather than take it away.

I used this plugin:
http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/

Thanks, guys.

I haven't read through this thread. I have no idea how this was done but it's very impressive.

Quote from: Hannes on March 18, 2013, 06:29:23 PM
I used this plugin:
http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/

Thanks Hannes...I have a project in PhotoShop that might just pay for a full version of this. A bunch of photos all screwy from a friend who doesn't hesitiate to offer money for my time...a rarity in BobbyWorld.