Macmangan

1 hour ago, 3D-Pangel said:

still have a really nice rejection letter with the ILM logo). 

Wow!!! To have rejection letter from them at that time is amazing.   Love how a movie basically influenced your career path.  As movies did mine, and filling that void is exactly why I’m working on my unlikely movie, or at least the trailer.  If you couldn’t do it then, dang it, you can do it now on your own!  Haha

1 hour ago, 3D-Pangel said:

How are you able to animate moving vehicles so realistically?   Are you using a plugin? 

Haha Thanks Dave!

I tried using some vehicle plugins or the car rig, but the were a pain, So I just separate the wheels from the rest of the vehicle, and everything above the wheels I put on a vibrate tag with some up-and-down motion and some random rotations.  Takes a bit to dial it in but once you hit the sweet spot it feels so good.  It’s hard to tell but I even have some vibrating on the tire some selves, it’s just very small.

the desert is a drone shot from Pexels.com free.  I’ve got a drone now so I want to shoot as much of my own stuff as possible.  I’m really trying to integrate models into live action footage as seamless as possible.  Getting closer!  I really wanted to find an abandoned military base, or a large parking lot I could still shoot then add real elements to it, but I had no luck so I just had to do it all in CG.  I have vibrate tags on the camera as well although it’s hard to see, you can really tell when they’re off.  And I have those suckers moving pretty fast, like lots of small shakes, Which you could really tell when the camera slows down so I keyframe of them out to pretty much nothing, but that’s why the end looks too smooth and comes to too much of an abrupt stop which makes it look fake, need to fix that.

Haha yup, flight of the navigator indeed.  I believe they’re actually working on a remake of that movie right now.  Over the summer we’re actually going to shoot a lot of live action scenes for our full long trailer as a pitch piece.  What 1 million chance if we’re lucky, lol.

yesss the jeep wheels immediately bugged me, I wasn’t sure how to add that trailing water effect. I’ll definitely check out what you mentioned, and you also mentioned the idea of just using a flat texture to fake the effect is pretty great. I did that with the sparks hitting the ground when the ship flies through the hallways. It’s  just a flat plane with an image sequence of Sparks.

Also one thing I want to do with the shot is replace the closest CG character General with a live action person on green screen. Still use the CG character to cast shadows, throw that green screen footage on a plane, then will put the actor on a stool and when the jeep turns will turn them at the same speed.   Haha fingers crossed!!!

Wow, you’re going crazy with the level of detail. I love it!  Seeing the childhood wonderment coming to life again this is fantastic!

Redid the textures and trying to dial  in the lighting.

On 4/13/2022 at 11:56 AM, 3D-Pangel said:

Now, I am a mechanical engineer and I am absolutely impressed by the quality of the design and how nicely the servos fit into their respective slots that he had to design into the 3D printed model.  This took some planning and some solid design skill so bravo!

 

Honestly, would someone from Weta or ILM just hire Mike already!!!  He is a quadruple threat:  he can design, engineer, animate, and model his creations into various realities: both physical and virtual.    A rare package of gifts indeed!

Haha, that is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me.  How funny you found that video.  I’ve made progress on that guy, then I had a 3d print to get 3 axis body movement working break, and kinda stepped back from the animatronic fir a while.  But I’ve been making some good progress on the movie trailer.  Gonna finally g we the live action parts filmed by end of summer.  Just got done putting together an army base where the ship is captured because I just couldn’t find a location to shoot.  Lol.  I’ll post some iodates soon!  Thanks again Dave!!!   Just wish the community was a bit more active in the showing WIPs, kinda felt bad for posting too often lol.  

That short was impressive, some shots looked real.

Looking fantastic!  Haven’t tried the Corona render yet.  Love that metal look

3 minutes ago, Igor said:

Getting better and better each day...I very much like the progress dude

Thanks!  trying to keep the momentum up, halfway there.  Lots of little issues, but I'll leave them until I have at least a working shot for everything, haha.

It's funny, I spent a lot of time trying to find a good car rig, I ended up going with one someone made for maxon, but it was kinda complicated and just used it on the firebrid.  for the yellow ford I have no rig at all.  Just using the set driver and driven for the wheels and everything else is manual.  just needed to jump in to animating haha.

Having fun animating the metal eagle.  Although the rig isn't properly done, just have to fake it.

Nice to meet you, there are some great third party render engines out there that make it pretty easy to get photo real or at least close to it.  I've been enjoying Arnold and Octane recently.

Mike

41 minutes ago, 3D-Pangel said:

I cannot wait until I retire, and this becomes my "day job"!!!!

 

haha, great quote!  I just put in too many late nights and fall asleep at work.  I have gotten a talkin to more than once, lol

I'm excited to see the progress!  WIPs are my favorite.  I want a site of nothing but WIPs!  lol

Love all the behind the scenes research your doing.  I always watch every bit f behind the scenes for star wars I can find.  Brings me to my happy place.  I recently started to re-watch the old show Movie Magic, so many star wars episodes, its great.

Ok, finally making progress after a few weeks of Christmas vacation.

I've been having issues with motionblur in Octane, but I'm mostly It's just I can't get the wheels to blur properly or at all.  Maybe it's because I'm using a rig where the wheels are parented with a parent tag to the rig, but I've added the Octane Object tag to the wheels and tried all of the motion blur settings including transform/vertex, which I thought would work but no.  I might try a test with the wheels turning without the use of the car rig.  not sure what else it could be.  I think I just have to accept it as it is, not really a deal breaker, but hate that I can't figure it out, haha.

love seeing the modeling progress.  Fantastic work!

This fantastic!  Always fun to dip the toe into the star wars Universe.   

15 hours ago, 3D-Pangel said:

The discipline to just keep going forward rather than stop and fix what has already been done is definitely something I struggle with.

OH yeah, that's a tough one, but for me it's huge to keep pushing forward.   I've learned it's ok to not be perfect if you actually complete your goal.

Are you planning on doing any animation?  could be cool, haha.

So I had this idea a year ago to do a fake cobra kai commercial ( for those that know the show), as if Johnny hired me to make a semi old school cyber punk city chase scene with a giant iron eagle with fangs, car race, motorcycle chace a giant cobra and explosions.  But I couldn't get the Octane render to work on my mac, so now I have this PC I thought I would try to blast this out as fast as possible to be done before the newest season.  

I've switched the fog to suing VDB's which are cool, but cause weird black spots sometimes when interacting with the cars.  hmm.  In the last shot I rendered out a clean car only, then just composited it in because it had little black splotches all over from the tire smoke.  Stilkl lots of learning.

I did a fun test render if that car looked more real.  wow I'm super impressed with Octane

Love this fun little scene!  it's so subjective when it comes to adding things and making changes.  I personally would probably try to play with a little more fun dynamic lighting, although the lighting is nice now, feels like day next to a big window, but I figure that unicorn is drunk and it's getting late.  That octopus is trying to figure out how he's gonna get that guy out so he can go home to his family.  lol  

Yeah, Arnold definitely isn't as fast in the IPR as like Octane.  When scenes get big I do a lot of pausing the IPR so I don't crash it.  Hiding forester totally makes sense to get the performance boost.  My scenes aren't super big like that and I've got a pretty good card the 3080 and I'll still need to pause the IPR when I go do work in the project when my scenes get complicated.  That being said I still love Arnold, has such a great realistic render without a lot of work.

1 hour ago, Cerbera said:

Excellent - much better

Thanks!  Good call!

Ok, so I got those fog layers in the first show working, and added my Iron Eagle Fang, haha.

So I used those VDB cloud files\ from pixellab.  just did some low quality renders for test.  I do like the volumetric fog more than the zdepth versions.  the one with the eagle did't test the fog yet.

13 hours ago, 3D-Pangel said:

As with Kitbash3D access, I am pretty sure that you only get access to the Octane content (shaders, tutorials, etc).  I would be surprised if you got full Greyscale Gorilla + content such as plugins and models, but I could be wrong.  Plus this ONLY applies to NEW subscriptions so it is a one-time deal only.   

Yeah that makes sense.  I thought about joking for a long time to get the assets but hated you couldn’t buy the stuff outright you had to join.  Then I broke down when I wanted the texture libraries and the scratch and dust elements.  I dint really care about the plug-ins.  So I’ll probably cancel in a bit.  I would’ve gladly just bought the things I wanted.  Also I was hoping the community they had would be involved, nope.  But I’m using the octane shaders and the Arnold ones which have helped me learn to make my own.

2 hours ago, Cerbera said:

I like the colours in that, and the shot in general, but I am feeling the need for a more natural layered smoke / fog rather than the thin mist we have now.

Would it detract too much from your stylised look to consider using a fog or cloud medium here instead of the depth pass business ?

 

yeah that' a great idea.  I'll have to do more research on how to do that with octane.  I tried a little bit of octane vdb volume but that does a similar just mist thing I believe.  and the fog volume is intense on the computer, but that might be the way to go.  research time!!!  haha

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.

2 hours ago, 3D-Pangel said:

When you compare it to the Otoy subscription bundle, it is a bust.     I mean, for $30 USD LESS THAN the discounted price on a Fused plan, you get access to

1. Kitbash 3D Assets (for Octane only)
2. Greyscale Gorilla +

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.