3DFlipping the switch

[Deleted User]

Prop for my new 3D short, first proper foray into Mental Ray, pretty useful materials and the lighting was easy, all rendered in Max, no postprocessing might mess with this in Photoshop see if I can't tighten up the image some more, change the lighting values etc. Onto the modelling of the brain, hopefully be with you Monday sometime, don't hold your breath though, busy Saturday night might lead to a Sunday of recovery not meshes, you know what I mean

For context it's a thick glass WW2 styled electric lightbulb, the project has nothing to do with WW2 save this bulb and it's in such high resolution (119,000 polys) because its' one of only two props in the animation (the other the aforementioned brain).

Anyway, enjoy, constructive crit is always welcome.

Melak

The bulb looks very nice! But now I can't wait to see that brain

Starship

No nipticks at all. Looks very reallistic to me.

somacruz145

Yup that's looking really good so far. The glow is very realistic and the model of the bulb seems nice even though it will be hard to see in an animation. Looking forward to the brain !

[Deleted User]

Well I've messed around all day trying to get brains (geddit?!) and managed to finish the fore and top of the brain detail. The reason the brain is yellow is that quite a few pictures that aren't bloody have brains with a yellowish hue I assume this is because whatever process is used to keep them for long periods without deteriorating makes them yellow.

All my brain preserving postulation aside hopefully I'll be back tonight at a reasonable hour without becoming so inebriated that tomorrow does not involve lying on my bed moaning like a zombie who has flu. If I manage the feat of not succumbing to the holy grape / grain combo expect updates tomorrow, if I do, expect updates Monday.

Until such times come and go, enjoy my brain....

Melak

That's pretty disgusting, good job

[Deleted User]

Order of brains? Anyone?

I'll work on the animation now, probably be updated with an animatic / animation before the end of the coming week. I'll post a picture of the overall idea today.

Stats wise the brain is 450,000 polys and with MRs' draft function these pics took less than 2 minutes to render, additionally the shader is not a MR shader it's just a standard Max shader with noise maps applied for diffuse, bump and specular attributes.

Enjoy, crits welcome, it's red because I want it to look 'fresh' although I'm aware from medical journals that the brain is not actually that red it's more for dramatic punch than strict realism, you know how it is when you mix brains and lightbulbs

P.S. Not really sure why but the jpegs look really dark, when I open them with Irfanview or Photoshop they look fine but in Firefox and Windows picture viewer they look different / wrong, if anyone can tell me why that'd be helpful, thanks.

Melak

The model looks great!

As for the darkness, did you by any chance adjust your max gamma setting? If I open the images with irfanView and save them again the look fine in firefox.

[Deleted User]

Melak, thanks for the tip, the previous pictures have been fixed the animation is setup to run tomorrow when I'm at work so hopefully I'll have something to look at tomorrow afternoon / evening. So far it's a 7 second animation the pic below is a frame from the animation at 1080p and yes, it is a brain in a lightbulb but it was that or stick a bulb in a brain and that would just be weird....

Enjoy, crit would be nice, not sure I've got the lighting right the aliasing is because I'm still rendering out on draft I don't want to wait 15 minutes for a 1080p frame, no matter how glowy.

[Deleted User]

I've rendered out a simple animatic, low resolution low detail MR pass, no shadows, no raytracing and no Final Gather largely because at the same low resolution the raytraced refraction makes the frame render time goes through the roof. It's fine when the camera is up close to the brain or further away from the bulb but while it's inside the bulb the render times at 480p come in at 17 minutes a frame which is no fun waiting for I can tell you.

Additionally I've remapped the brain, new diffuse, specular and bump, the animatic was rendered with the old texture so I rendered you an image of the new texture, some veins a little less glossy I think it looks better and a little bit more of an old dead brain rather than a new brain.

I rendered the animatic out as uncompressed and then used DivX to compress and as you can see on the video I get some tearing I whacked the bitrate right up but no joy does anyone have tips for video compression? Codecs? DivX? The uncompressed version is 170mb and it has no tearing or artifacts so I'm fairly sure with a clean source I should be able to produce a decent video, just need something that's in your head not mine

Melak

The animation - from what I can tell - looks nice!

When it comes to compression, I am about as clueless as you. Generally I use VirtualDub to render my image sequence into an uncompressed AVI file, and then I use MeGUI to encode to h.264 in a MKV or MP4 container.

This usually works great for me, it even has a lot of presets to look at for bitrate and other settings. Quite recently though I rendered a simple clean animation with a grey background, and for some reason that just wouldn't encode without major ugliness. I even tried ridiculously high bitrates like 16.000 kbps (for a 720p clip).

gm2378

The brain, when healthy and alive is more of a pink colour, not as dark as the interior of the mouth but the same shade just a tad lighter.

The outer whitish appearance is due to the white matter (myelinated neurones) when the brain has no surrounding blood supply.

The models above are excellent, can't wait to see more

homerpalooza67

gross and cool at the same time - i think we have a winner!
I like the animatic, but the post-compression just kills it . Cant help you there mate, cant wait for it to be finished properly!

[Deleted User]

Melak -

Yeah I've a black background and I think if there was more detail then maybe the image wouldn't tear as much, I'll do some online research and see what I can glean from the combined knowledge of the virtual world.

gm2378 -

Thanks for the information on brain colour it's tough to find images that aren't during an operation so obscured or covered in blood or of a brain that's been quite obviously preserved for some time and therefore discoloured through age and chemicals. Sure the geometry is easy to dope out but the colour I pretty much just guessed at, horror films and general: "errr red(ish)?!" was my basis for texture creation. Glad you like the models

homerpalooza67 -

Thanks very much, yeah the post compression is a bit rubbish not sure how I'm going to overcome that, might need to rush out a background see how it goes.

Everyone -

As you will notice in the animatic the screen flashes to white, this is not the end of the animation just the end of 3D geometry in the animation the screen will then fade in with the attached logo. It's the name of my website, it's not a 'real' studio (yet) but I'm hoping with enough work by me on various projects from 3D and traditional art to writing and web design I can get enough of a portfolio together to get a decent job doing something I like.

The icon was made in Adobe Illustrator and imported to photoshop where it was given its' present colour and illuminating gradient. I'm aware that the grey I've chose for the bulb outline is pretty dark if any of you can't tell that there is an outline or find it hard to distinguish it from the background please tell me so I can brighten it up.

Crit welcome and appreciated,

P.S. - I made both fonts on a site called www.fontstruct.com, it's remarkably easy to do, I've made 2 base versions with 3 different spin-offs (bold, light etc.) give it a go, the site will package the font as a TTF in a Zip file then just drag and drop into your fonts directory and start using.

Melak

Nice, I like the logo a lot!

The image appears dark in firefox, they gray outline is invisible here. Irfanview shows it brighter, with the outline clearly visible, and photoshop shows it even brighter.?!


I'd be very interested to hear what you find out about video encoding

Edit: It appears you have somehow embedded a color profile into the picture - discarding that it shows the same in PS as it does in irfanview.

gm2378

I can see the bulb outline fine in firefox, but I have a suggestion.

I think you should make the outline of the bulb a white colour with a yellowish or blueish tint, kinda like the electricity is going through the bulb to the yellow brain part. I think this would make it pop a little more, but I like it as it is too

[Deleted User]

Melak -

Thanks for finding the colour profile, I've gotten rid of it and the colours appear far more consistent now. I think that's what was messing up my jpgs too I saved the frame rendered from Max as a png then resaved the png as jpg with the colour profile so I've stripped the colour profile out and will re-upload tonight.

gm2378 -

Thanks for the feedback, yeah the bulb does have several different colours to choose from not sure which one to pick you'll be able to download them as wallpapers from my website when it goes up, I think the blue idea is a good one though, could also be used to get some of the shininess of the bulb across.

Everyone -

While waiting for my animation to render out I'm working on my website, which will be up this Sunday and will include the animation I will post a link here so you can take a look, I think it's going to be too big to host here, we'll see.

[Deleted User]

Got a new brain render, changed up the lighting made it brighter, added an extra rim light and tightened up the bump mapping some more. Also made a render with the brainbulb with a lighter background to see if it would stand up to a brighter environment, I think it looks pretty good.

As Melak suggested I dropped the embedded colour profile and I can see the images fine, if anyone has issues please tell me.

Enjoy,

[Deleted User]

Here it is, the first pass for the animation, it's got its' problems but I worked out how to compress it using DivX and I resampled it to 1000p and it doesn't look too bad and most importantly it's only about 4mb.

Your thoughts would be much appreciated,

Melak

Nice!! The brain is looking excellent, I like the veiny things...capillaries? (read: they disgust me )
The images are showing up fine now, and the animation is looking much better as well!

The only thing about the animation is that, what I presume are the reflections on the bulb, are taking away contrast from the brain - would it be possible to animate the specularity, fade it in, so that it's obvious the "loss of contrast" is intentional, and in fact, the bulb's reflection? Just a thought

gm2378

Love it, the brain looks great as does the bulb. I like the whole illumination too! Well done