there are some things I'd like to change but by the time it was finished I couldn't be bothered to go back, I ended up with about 103gb worth of frames so I had to delete some, it was supposed to be like 30 seconds long but it just kept getting longer haha
the youtube quality is pretty poor even with the 1080p version, the vimeo one is better but only 720p I think
it doesn't help that every time a request is made publicly some hanger-on will presume to speak for me with a snarky elitist retort about how 'the little guy' doesn't deserve it - I'm really not like that
I've had dozens upon dozens of requests over the years. I stopped replying because it was always a waste of my time, if I gave out a model they would never use it, or if I explained my reasons for not sharing I would sometimes get abuse. There was even this guy KnightRider who bad-mouthed me all over the internet because I didn't give him a model - that sort of thing really puts you off showing your work publicly
I know you didn't do anything like that, I'm just saying why I gave up responding, no offence intended by this but before I finished the model you had 1 post in 6 years of this thread, now it's finished and you're posting and sending me PMs, that's fine, but can you imagine how many others also do this? I'm treating you the same as everyone else who shows up out of nowhere asking for stuff, I don't mean anything personal by it so you shouldn't get 'annoyed' with me
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