Showing posts with label xsi. Show all posts

Back to Boujou

No Comments »

Long time no post. I've been finishing the Lighting and Rendering in Mental Ray course. It's been really good and I've learned a lot of techniques and tips for not only making my lighting/rendering better but also more efficient. One of the most important things I've done to improve is to no longer just 'guess' lighting work. It may take a little longer at first to take time to set up your key lights etc but taking time on small changes instead of adding new lights to overwrite errors in the scene is worthwhile in the long run.

Since finishing the course I've been planning on how to use it, as well as starting a redesign for my website. I updated my current CV/Resume (which can be found to the right of this page). My new website will be easy to use and just have simple links to gallery, videos, CV and then the news can be updated from here.

Finally I've been dusting off Boujou and doing some motionmatching. As most starting 3d jobs within VFX/film require motionmatching skills I thought I'd pick it back up and start to test footage/ scenes to bring me up to scratch again (I last used it last year while at university).





I have a friend at work who has a good camera and did a favor and shot the above footage for me. While it's still a little slippy I'd say I have more of an understanding of the program now and setting the co-ordinates/scene geometry made a lot more sense than previous tests. I'm going to work on it till there are no slippages and then concentrate on shadows/lighting etc.

I did come across a few problems within Boujou and Maya, looking on various forums I found the solution to some of it. Here are a few tips if you are unable to find them.

The image plane sequence may not load in Maya, or if it does it may only be freezing on frame 1. If this is the case you will need to make sure the sequence is something like filetype.sequencenumber.fileformat - eg testfootage.1.jpg - having it as testfootage_001.jpg can cause some issues.

If you are using XSI remember that it is required first to change the playback speed to the correct fps (in my case PAL) as well as rotoscopy playback and size. Overall I found Maya easier to use for getting a preview as XSI did not render the background image plane on the default pass (as this is test footage currently I'm not splitting up passes till I have the camera moving smoothly with no slip).

I managed to get a smoother camera within Boujou when testing geometry in there but unfortunately I'm getting crashing issues when trying to export the sequence with the geometry within Boujou. In future I might just get some screen capture software to capture it.

Anyway I have a lot of work to do although it is coming up to Christmas so I'm going to take it a little easier and take the time to really learn the ins and outs of the program, maybe try some harder shots to match when I have become comfortable with the software again.

Previous Lighting Tests

No Comments »

Looking through my old footage on my laptop I found some test shots of my Final Year Project at university and I thought I'd put them on here so that I can compare my lighting techniques after learning some new tricks and techniques later.

My final year project was based around mainly using fluid particles to make a glass of water turn in to a flower (well a flower growing from the water). I knew I was going to be shooting it on just a black background as I was wanting to emulate the slow motion Sainsbury's food adverts that were out a few years ago. Lighting was obviously going to be one of the key things I looked at as I needed to make it efficient and yet still look good. For this I decided not to use caustics as the was no solid background for light to reflect to. Then I created a simply lighting rig using grids with a white or gray Lambert texture on them, hiding their primary ray visibility in the render and then using final gather. This cut the render times down by a great deal without the need of global illumination/caustics and gave me the ability to create a nice studio lighting setup using grids as reflected lights and reflectors themselves.



Above: a wireframe view of the full lighting setup for the stem rising up from the water. I added an environment map to add a little extra to the reflections.
Below: A closeup of the lighting setup used when the petals are created.


I don't remember the exact render times but they were at most 2-3 minutes each per frame. The only troubles I had were actually with using XSI and Realflow together. I made a decision at the time to stick with the package I knew as opposed to which had better fluid/Realflow integration and it caused some pretty nasty glitching problems during the render phase.

Here are a couple of test videos of the petals growing, hopefully the video compression on here doesn't make them look too bad. Unfortunately I don't have the final render/shot on this laptop but I was going to re-render it or infact reshoot it completely using Maya to make the most out of it.


XSI 6.01 Physical Sky/Final Gathering/Environment Maps + Glass

No Comments »

OK so I've recently started delving in to XSI 6.01's features (after being stubborn and sticking with 5.11 for most of my final year project) and thought I'd test the Physical Sky that was added with 6.

To start off i created a simple scene with a simple poly grid for the ground (with a Lambert material added) and a poly sphere with a very simple glass setup i created. Here is the rendertree for it;



Usually i would use a shader downloaded as xsi's presets arent very good but i thought i'd make my own so I can tweak it and learn how well the glass works when using the Physical Sky.

For those that don't know how to create a physical sky go to render mode (3 on the keyboard)>Pass>edit>initialise Sky Shader (alternatively this can be done through 'edit current pass' and adding 'physical sky' in the environment section of the pass shaders tab.

Final gathering needs to be turned on and the effect is quite impressive, I played around a little with the physical sky options (the final options i used can be seen below) and also after seeing the intensity of the light used a tone mapping lens shader on the camera (select camera>lens shaders>tone mapping)



Here is the final result;


And just to test how the glass works using Final Gathering and HDRI mapping i tested it with a simple photography of mine for the environment (instead of using physical sky in the pass shader tab> environment add 'Environment instead' and apply an image, preferably a HDR image). here are the results of that. Any Questions don't hesitate to ask :)