Day 51 : Volumetric lights III

Trying to tweak and intervene with the attributes of the frequency/size of the holes, and the cone angle/delta of the spotlight.

Mr Ron advises me to try and composite them together to see how it looks, and try to make it glow even more.

Two more lights to go.

Various renders tryout:

Test out in after effects, screen it over the background layer and added glow

Day 50 : Volumetric lights II



I left the computer for test rendering yesterday, it took 16 hours to render around 160 frames together with the sea of glass. The lights are not divided to many lightstreaks yet. Here is some reference pictures for visualisation



Reference pictures:

I learnt from odforce forums that the steps to generate a volumetric light is not that fanciful. And to render fast, i could actually increase the step size on the volume object and to get higher quality, just decrease the step size.

This is a scene file posted by one of the user, using the technique of iso offset (fog volume) with the lights piercing through the trees done by L-system. Simple but yet fascinating







Mr Ron taught me to hide the object from rendering out by ticking the phantom in the geometry tab

Hid the grid

Mr Ron then came by and taught me a conventional method with copy/stamping of emulating many holes in a circle to segregate the one whole light into several light streaks. There frequency/size of the holes is manipulable

Done in photoshop
Another method is to use the light projection, by assigning a grayscale image to it. The light will be casted on the light parts, occluding the dark portion. However it does not work for fog light for unknown reason

Some render test:

Mr douglas told me to be mindful of the position of the light is pointing. And minimum 3 lights will be need

Day 49 : Volumetric lights I

The full hd renders of the lava terrain is suppose to be done by today, but alas the mplay crashes when i tried to save the sequence. Back to square one and re-rendering. Then Mr douglas clarified that actually we don't need full hd, that's only for joyces's clouds

Today, i was told to suppress the sea of glass displacement animation to a very slow and gentle movement, the height of the peak will be very low. So that ziyaad won't face much issues while placing his crowd simulation over it, because if the height of the peak were too high it might cause problems such as characters will be hard to creep on and may slide off.

 

Some flipbook renders test:

This is the one Mr Douglas compromise on

Notice the artefacts near the verge of the glass. It was caused by the extrudevolume, the faces/vertices over there will start flickering when playing. And Mr Douglas came up with a  good solution, by using z-depth map to conceal it, by screening over and blurring it in compositing



The ramp used to manuever the colours, it gets tricky to control because the UV projection is not appropriately set yet



The colour scheme done by Mr Douglas, but not finalized yet



This was the ice cube shader Mr Ron was trying out yesterday, the relief looks nice. I was told to work on the shader after the volumetric lights is done as that was my primary priority for now.



Volumetric lights

My basic setup was there, and Mr Ron reminded me to untick the matte shading for the geometry while rendering in case anything happens  

Suppressed the noise frequency and increase the noise amplitude
Now trying to render it overnight and see how it respond

Reference pictures of LOTR (God Rays)

Anyway i found a very spectacular image which is beautiful and is quite similar to the mood we are trying to achieve, just thought of posting

Day 48 : Processing some character data

Ziyaad taught me how to blend the skin of the character together with the mocap data in houdini, there is a lot of steps to take note. But once you get the hang of it, it is considered quite easy. I processed 5 characters today, however there are minor hiccups here and there, demon horns deforming, random points protruding out and stuff. Thankfully it could be salvage by painting weights manually later on

Screenshots:

Render flipbook:

Anyway i am still working on the sea of glass terrain. The problem is the beauty of the terrain lies with the position of the camera angle, in shot 2 it was a some sort of far and high angle shot. Mr Ron suggest me to reconstruct a new shader which possess the genuine properties of reflectivity and glass whereby the one apparently doesn't make the cut. Seems tough. But trying again tomorrow

Day 47 : Sea of glass V

Today Mr Ron and Mr Douglas came in today. Mr Ron sat down and try to obtain another layer of water texture to composite both (glass and water) of them together to append more details and realism.
It did not go so well, the points are all scattered in an disarray, the projection thus is messed up. We tried many textures and patterns for good results, anyway Mr Ron told me to search for shards of glass texture as it have some random symmetrical pattern. However it is hard to find a good texture on the net

Some tryouts:

Mr Douglas then told us that the deadline is tight, we have to finish as soon as possible. He told me to render a specular pass, for the handy manipulation in compositing. And also i changed the yellowish portion to purple. He also did the blocking of shot 2, gonna work on it tomorrow.

Render:

Day 46 : Remaining stuff to hone

Mr Ron and Mr Douglas drop by today, they assess the progress of our work and gave us a deadline of wednesday to utterly finish shot 5. Ziyaad also has the composition done in nuke. My terrain and water was somehow more or less finalized, but i still would need to apply the lighting of the clouds from joyces when she is done. Initially we were intenting to cast reflection from may tze's lighting and joyces' clouds, however due to the intensive rendering time and taking into account of the distant position of the elements, we scrap that.

The rock pattern details outstand more in close up

I have to dull the lighting later on as well, to match that dark gloomy and hopeless look. I was told by Mr Ron to suppress my rendering time by optimizing the setting with the remaining time left.

Rendered with joyces' clouds, with the reflectivity casted on the water. The mood of the whole look doomy and menacing, this single frame render takes very long...

Subsequently i guess i would polish on my rainbow bridge while yushi is working on his explosion part and help the rest with their workload.

Day 45 : Z-depth map works now

Ok i re-rendered the entire sequence because i accidentally overwritten some of them and bring them to AE. However some technical glitch pops up, then Mr Ron helped me to convert them in houdini compositing channel. By using a channel copy and equalizer node then a file output. He also said that the alpha channel contains the information of the colour channel thus that's why it is not turning out as desired. The node was used to delete the channel.

Now ziyaad is trying to compositing the elements that is already rendered together, then we will try to comp everything in shot 5 tomorrow once all the renders are done