I am curious however, and I didn't see any mention of it here or in the WIP thread, but how do those exterior hatch doors in the yacht waiting room open? There doesn't seem to be a lot of clearance wih the observation windows. Or do they open into the window divider (I just noticed that possibility)?
yeah I left a gap there so it could open into the hull, but I don't have any plans to show it open so I didn't have to worry about it much
...Only thing I can see that bothers me at all beside the wreckless driving is the blue engines firing up. Seems like they should do a little neon flicker on perhaps.
...i'd only nitpick the solid blue engines coming to life.
it's wierd, they were supposed to slowly power up, if you look carefully you can see the red lights from the front impulse engines slowly fading in, but even though they were keyframed in the same layer the blue just flicks on very suddenly, I re-composited that bit twice and every time I previewed it I thought it looked good but by the time it was tone mapped and post processed it was very sudden again, I guess it was too bright, I couldn't be bothered to change it a 3rd time so left it haha
So, not only do you have one gorgeous animation showing off a fantastic model, but also apparently bonus points for doing it efficiently. Do you mind if I ask what all you did post-process wise in after effects? I feel like I probably really should spend more time getting to know that program better. Excellently done regardless.
Anything I might offer in regards to how cool I think this is will seem inadequate, so I'll just offer you a massive well done! :thumb::thumb:
(Although it's your attention to detail that gets me every time! - I love it!!)
Extremely well done, sir!
Loves it.
So I can't speak for everyone, but I know I'd love to see some of the source imagery that goes into something like this. I know there's a bunch of passes going into the compo, and I'd love to see any of them. Wireframes, preview renders, all of it. I think this is easily one of the best animations I've ever seen on this site, and anything I can learn from it would be...valuable. I'm especially curious which AE filters you used for things like the lens flares, depth of field, bokehs, and exposure stuff. I'm pretty much trying to be a talent and brain vampire, here.
Again, exceedingly well done. I'd love to see more.
I can go over this frame which seems to have a bit of everything, I had to delete most of the frames after it was finished because they took up over 100gb, so this will be slightly different from the final one, but close enough
I kind of approach rendering in 3 stages, the first I think of as the light simulation, which is really just the render from lightwave and any compositing of passes - only 2 passes for this shot, main render and depth, but others were split up into foreground/background and specific lighting elements etc, all were saved as half float EXR except depth which was just a greyscale PNG
it looks pretty dark and nooby, but because it's EXR I can increase the exposure in post without any problems, I can use the depth pass to add very convincing blur to the image at a fraction of the time it would take to brute force it in lightwave, I probably could have done with separating this shot into foreground and background layers because there are a couple of errors on the chairs, but all in all it came out really well and the errors hardly notice when it's in motion, I use frischluft lenscare for that because it's very fast and flexible and seems to give the best post blur of any plugin I've seen, it's the only 3rd party plugin I use with after effects, everything else is just standard
the next stage I think of as the lens simulation, I do all sorts of stuff here - barrel distortion, irradience falloff, aberrations, bloom, flares, aperture reflections and lens dirt - this is where setting up surfaces and lights to have realistic brightness and saving to a high dynamic range format pays off, it's just lots of different blurs layered together, no need for any of that optical flares tosh - I can just load in the frames and it'll put flares on the brightest bits without me having to mess with anything or track highlights and do it manually, because it's uniform I think I can get more realistic results with it than I could with any plugin, I can also keep the HDR workflow which I doubt optical flares or knoll could do
the final stage I think of as the film simulation, here I tone map the image to simulate a film toe and shoulder curve, which removes all the problems you get with brighness that are big CG giveaways, nothing is ever pure white in my renders, I play with the colours to try and give it a sort of 1980s / 1990s quality film look, before films started looking like crap, I also add grain, gate weave, flicker and film dirt to try and sell it
It turned out even more impressive than I had expected!
And thanks for the de facto guideline/tutorial!!!
I'm currently working on something that's supposed to have an early-90's film look (think Star Trek 6). This should prove quite useful.
Thanks for the walkthrough, I can't believe the polycount is so low, it certainly doesn't look that low poly, I wonder if you could get close to that quality with a real-time engine like Crytek 2/3, Unreal or Unigine.
Thanks for the walkthrough, I can't believe the polycount is so low, it certainly doesn't look that low poly, I wonder if you could get close to that quality with a real-time engine like Crytek 2/3, Unreal or Unigine.
I think you probably could, certainly if you are able to render proper HDR frames from crysis and then use AE for post I think it could look a similar quality
wow....amazing! I was instantly transported to the movies and the excited I felt when I was a kid being aboard the Enterprise. Excellent and inspiring! I'll have to scour this thread and the build thread to learn more... great lighting and camera effects, it really sold the animation!
This is very inspiring IRML, it was difficult to look at it and think *hey, this is fanmaterial, not Paramount made*. I am concerned with the Captain Yacht's impulse engines, though, as they look flat without the ribbing that you usually see with impulse engines. Was this the same Captain's Yacht with the interior? I'd love to see a walk through from the observation room into the yacht :cool:
Posts
(Although it's your attention to detail that gets me every time! - I love it!!)
Loves it.
So I can't speak for everyone, but I know I'd love to see some of the source imagery that goes into something like this. I know there's a bunch of passes going into the compo, and I'd love to see any of them. Wireframes, preview renders, all of it.
Again, exceedingly well done. I'd love to see more.
I kind of approach rendering in 3 stages, the first I think of as the light simulation, which is really just the render from lightwave and any compositing of passes - only 2 passes for this shot, main render and depth, but others were split up into foreground/background and specific lighting elements etc, all were saved as half float EXR except depth which was just a greyscale PNG
2 render.jpg 3 depth.jpg
it looks pretty dark and nooby, but because it's EXR I can increase the exposure in post without any problems, I can use the depth pass to add very convincing blur to the image at a fraction of the time it would take to brute force it in lightwave, I probably could have done with separating this shot into foreground and background layers because there are a couple of errors on the chairs, but all in all it came out really well and the errors hardly notice when it's in motion, I use frischluft lenscare for that because it's very fast and flexible and seems to give the best post blur of any plugin I've seen, it's the only 3rd party plugin I use with after effects, everything else is just standard
4 comp.jpg
the next stage I think of as the lens simulation, I do all sorts of stuff here - barrel distortion, irradience falloff, aberrations, bloom, flares, aperture reflections and lens dirt - this is where setting up surfaces and lights to have realistic brightness and saving to a high dynamic range format pays off, it's just lots of different blurs layered together, no need for any of that optical flares tosh - I can just load in the frames and it'll put flares on the brightest bits without me having to mess with anything or track highlights and do it manually, because it's uniform I think I can get more realistic results with it than I could with any plugin, I can also keep the HDR workflow which I doubt optical flares or knoll could do
5 flares.jpg
the final stage I think of as the film simulation, here I tone map the image to simulate a film toe and shoulder curve, which removes all the problems you get with brighness that are big CG giveaways, nothing is ever pure white in my renders, I play with the colours to try and give it a sort of 1980s / 1990s quality film look, before films started looking like crap, I also add grain, gate weave, flicker and film dirt to try and sell it
6 post.jpg
hope this is the sort of thing you were after
And thanks for the de facto guideline/tutorial!!!
I'm currently working on something that's supposed to have an early-90's film look (think Star Trek 6). This should prove quite useful.
NICE!
Really IRML, you should be doing more interiors - that was simply too awesome for words.