Macmangan

Started playing with octane and the city rig. Took forever to get away from the realistic look and get more of a cyber punk feel but I finally like it. problem is the zdepth pass I render out to give it a nice nice depth look which really helps in post, has some issues around some areas. Like the top lip of the foreground building gives like a flickering feel. Which is a bummer. I used the zdepth pass in after effects with a blending mode. Can’t get that same look straight out of the beauty pass and without it it's no where near as nice. I guess for this project I’m going to put a vhs glitchy look to it anyway, but would still be nice to start clean. Not sure why it does that. I guess I could render the forgeround buildings separate, hmm.

wait, what!?!? with the Otoy subscription you get access to Greyscale gorilla +. why am I paying for that, haha. I need to check that out.

haha oh man, wow yeah that's a crazy hard deal to walk away from, lol. 🤣

I just missed the turbo squid Black Friday deals. Was about to buy like 10 models for a side project but was one day late is gonna cost me about $250 in savings. I was waiting to see if I could pull a cyber punk look from a realistic city. I figured it too late lol.

🤣🤣🤣

Oh that was super fun, nice work. Definitely looks like you put a lot into it.

These are great, thanks for sharing. I’m a long time Star Trek fan, even love the original slow motion picture. I thought the first season of Discovery was a little weird but I still enjoyed it, I thought the second season was great! Can’t wait to dig into the 4th. It’s very different from the originals, but I thought they did great.

Yeah I may have gone to far on the dust layer. It’s interesting how different it reacts from different angles. Finding that right amount do it’s not too new or to dirty so it feels out of place. Like I liked how it looked in the first still but from this angle it’s a bit much. Plus I need to go shoot a proper HDRI on location on a similar day to get better overall lighting. thanks!

Yeah they are hard to see after the color correction, which is a bonus. Technically you can see the first light pole shadow under the car. I think part of it is me adding those elements to cast shadows and reflections causes your eyes go there so you don’t really notice the imperfect shadows. It’s funny before these tests I was never concerned about things like double shadows. Haha. Now I’m like, what a pain I need to learn how they do it in movies, need to just shoot on overcast days now, lol. thanks, yeah getting some reflections of the scene to help sell it helps, even though it’s super subtle. lol, yes, somewhere on the car needs to be a “wash me” a written in the dirt for sure, haha. I think i’m Finally getting a nice track after watching some tutorials and not just hit the full auto haha. The bad track was killing it. thanks Dave!

So lots of issues with this test shot. Some double shadows, the track isn't very good. I tried as bunch of times to get a nice smooth track but I need to learn more on how to add manual trackers in the c4d tracker. I think I have an idea for the double shadows though, using after effects content aware to remove the shadow from the video, then use the shadow mask so that clean plate only shows up under the shadow. In theory it makes sense. I was successful in making a mask from the shadow, but using that mask didn't have a very clean overall effect. so we shall see. I eventually want to add my little ship following the car.

So I've been searching for the fastest easiest and least expensive ways to make decent HDRI's on loacation. I was about to drop $500 when I found this free app for the iphone HDReye. It works similar to some other cheats that use the google street view 360 feature, but intead of just taking a bunch of nomral images instead of bracketing a bunch of images at different light levels, this will take an HDRI with the bracketing at the same time. you still have to take like 50 images, but from your phone its soooo much easier. And it gives great light information. I was really focusing on trying to get a nice dirty car, but thought I would add that cool find! Trying to get some texturing that didn't look terrible took some time. I did some mattes with the specular and cheen, then I added a separate layer of dust on everything. getting those elements dialed in was killing the Arnoldas IPR renderer. I crashed so many times, impatient, lol. I'm really pretty happy with the lighting from the iphone HDRI as well. It's finally stitching of the images together had quite a few glitches, but for reflections and lighting it's fine, IMHO

the mountain range is looking really nice!

Fantastic work! Love the emotion in you illustrations.

WOW!!!!! this is an amazing resource! oh boy, so much to go through. thanks!

And this is the nicest thing anyone could say! Also so inspiring for to keep pushing forward! I just need work to ease up again, hehe.

Haha good eye!!! Yeah I tried to pull a luma mask fairly unsuccessful and tried some rotobrush. yeah I think that makes a ton of sense trying to pull from a better frame, I also just noticed there are 2 branches so there’s some parallax, but that helps I can hopefully do them separately. It was such a pain when I was doing it I decided to worry about it later after I figure out the shadows. Haha, but this could do it.

there's something special about making your own a short.

Those are great suggestions, Will probably try all of them until I find something that works with the least amount of time, lol. I mean worst-case mocha is a great planner tracker so theoretically masking out the shadow shouldn’t be too horrible, but still, as a lazy person I’m always looking for a faster way.

holy cow those are cool. that first one with the mustang was so wonderful! I do love the old muscle cars, but I've never seen interactive sites like it. I can' imagine what it would take.

So this is an early test. Shot some footage from my truck as a dolly, was gonna get my buddies little girl on a tricycle riding and the ship was gonna follow her, but she got sick. So this shot became temp and I added a dog I found from a youtube video just to have something to test. the lighting isn't quite right on the ship, I was going to capture my own HDRI of the scene but didn't have time. we got a few other shots I'm trying to add some cars into. So one problem I never really thought about until this shot where it stood out, overlapping shadows from the CG on top of real shadows! They wouldn't overlap. I did a little bad roto of the shadows for the first few trees, but near the dog gets messy. So in order to do it right, I need to mask the ground shadows. I wish there was a cool plugin for that, haha. I have a few ideas that might help though beyond tons of roto. Never thought I would be rotoing shadows.

This is incredibly helpful, thanks so much. Especially since coding is not my thing lol.

I’m actually getting super excited about this, never thought Houdini would even be a possibility to legitimately use. Will see how that learning curve goes.

This is so absolutely true! I’m actually thinking about trying, if the union doesn’t strike on Monday, hehe.

It looks amazing!, but the indie version has a watermark though right?