My 3D crap

[Benza]

So yeah I'm working on a project in 3d max really just to teach me how to use the program since I only had a pretty basic knowledge before hand. Thought I'd post what i've got.

The animation is running way too fast and is still pretty rought at the moment.

This was really just a first pass at the animation so I would could get all the obstacles and shit in the right place.

Not sure why this one cuts off at the end. Something weird with youtube. But this was basically me just filling in the details in the background.

And I've just started texturing.
Pretty stoked about how the textures are turning out.

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[rankodour]

Makes me want to dabble in 3DS Max again...

[Sin Ogaris]

I quite like it, though it moves a bit too fast for my liking.

My personal favourite point is where he hits the wall and drops for a second, then continues. Really nice animation but yeah, it's hard to really see it all given how quick it's going.

[Benza]

[segax]

Nice one Benza .. animation is really tough , but stick at it and learn from the disney masters .. they offer alot of great building blocks to make your stuff really come alive. With your texturing try to make things more to scale for example if you were to stand beside a brick wall you should count how many bricks it would take to make the length of the door . Then continue using this scale with all your other objects in your scene.
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[Benza]

man I hadn't even taken scale int account at all doing that stuff. Thanks for pointing that out.
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[Frozencry]

Have you got the Animator's Survival Kit? That book is amazing when it comes to timing and spacing of your key frames. Used it a lot when I was studying. Also check out Gnomon, if you're heaps keen grab some of the dvds they offer. I have a few for colour theory/lighting, modeling and digital painting and honestly I learnt more from those dvds than I ever did in an entire semester at TAFE.

What's the animations framerate at? it's definitely really damn fast, and it looks like you've just got some keyframes too close together and the lack of spacing makes it zip by crazy fast.

Once you've spaced them out you'll have a pretty damn smooth and distinct animation style going. Trick I've found with the running cycles is to keep the in-between poses very small but the keyframes widespread. Eg you do the starting key pose of the beginning of a run at frame 1 and the end key pose to reset at say 11, then do the in-between pose at 6-7 and fill in the rest either with default tweens or tweaked out splines (I use bezel splining most of the time; this might be diff in 3DS as I used LightWave). The in-between succession flicking by fast is what gives the effect of fast movement. That and need to get the weighting and 'bobbing' right, which is f**king painful sometimes.

If you're animating at 25 frames this'll give you a fairly fast look but remain consistent over a second as it'll give about 2.5 quick cycles within that second. Coupled with motion blur it turns out fairly smooth.

Really just a patience game. It's shaping up super well though and yeah once you've got that spaced, it'll look sweet. I really dig the style of the movement.
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[Benza]

cheers. Yeah I have to go through and space out the keyframes. At the moment there's a keyframe on every frame. I just wanted to get the basic animation out first so I could make sure the spacing on all the obstacles and shit was correct before I started texturing and detailing them. I've still gotta go through and space them all out and fix up the timing as well as fix up the hands cause they are kind of all over the fucking place at the moment.

Yeah I've got my animators survival kit, that fucker never leaves my desk it's brilliant. Haven't picked up any of the Gnomon stuff though I've got a couple of things of there for free on 3D world cd's. Might have to look into buying some of there stuff though.

Mad props for the hints on the spacing of the keyframes for the run cycle.
The bob in his run looks really terrible in those videos though cause I think putting it up on youtube made it lose out every 4th or 5th frame or something.

I'm still not used to the whole letting the PC do all the inbetweens stuff. I'm used to 2D animating and 12fps so the timing and figuring out what I need to do versus what the PC can do for me is still kind of throwing me for a loop.
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[Benza]

So I got a bit more textured and thought I'd give a rough shot at compositing to see what the final image would look like.

Still pretty happy with it.

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[admeister]

Looks great, nice work Benza.
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"The first person to prove that cow's milk is drinkable was very, very thirsty." - Fact Sphere.

[jprockbelly]

This is the first time I've looked at this thread, and been at a computer that did not have YouTube blocked

Great work! look forward to seeing the finished product.
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Da Bessssss

[Frozencry]

I like how it's lit, and really stylish texture work. Looking great!

Have you applied an AO map over it? Should definitely try putting that in as it'll add even more depth, and what kind of lighting setup is it? GI based?

Sorry for the questions, my obsession in 3D is lighting and colour >_>
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[Benza]

[Frozencry]

I can definitely help you out with lighting, as that's pretty much my biggest area when it comes to 3D and 2D.

GI = Global Illumination or Radiosity. It can increase the render times by quite a bit but with a good setup you can have some really strong lighting going. Basically you can set how many indirect bounces happen throughout the scene, and with enough attention paid to diffusion levels in your scene you can end up with some really natural and realistic looking lighting.

Because your scene is more cartoony you don't need super hardcore fainter lighting sources though, you have the ability to give more vibrant and pronounced levels of light, so try increasing the intensity of them and try have 3 light sources in your scene or alternatively, one light which would be based off the Radiosity setup, as because your scene is based outside the one light can act as the sun etc. Just need to play with diffusion and indirect bounces, as you can get a really nice colour bouncing effect where the surfaces all 'reflect' their colours off each other, giving a nice subtlety to it.

As an example, I did some experiments with a scene I built for an animation a while ago with 4 different lighting conditions, can find it here. The scene is interior so there are 3 lights in there - the main one coming through the window which was a Point Light set with manual inverse distancing (going off lightwave naming so sorry if this doesn't sound familiar), which allows me to give it a 'range' and fall off. The second light is the lamp but only in certain scenes like the night ones (this was also a point light iirc, set with a minor inverse distance level and then I used luminosity on the lamp shade and slight transparency to get the glow), and finally a 3rd light which was my ambient shadow light, which was set at about 1-2 intensity but with high inverse distancing and a bright blue ambiance colour, which basically killed pure blacks for shadows (as a rule, try not to have pure blacks as shadows. The best way to eliminate that is using a fake light source based solely on ambiance), though because this scene is a little older it isn't as pronounced.

Pretty much lighting is all about achieving balance between colours that you might not expect will work together but they do. You want an ambient source which kills darker shadows (or alternatively for radiosity setups, the main light just needs to have a bright blue colour set for ambiance), a main 'key' light which is best with manual range set ups, and then add in the rest depending on what kind of conditions you want.

I'm at work at the moment so my explanation is pretty rough with not many examples, but I'll try bring in some stuff when I get home to show examples of different lighting conditions.

Also, this dvd. Buy it. It pretty much taught me almost everything I know now with Light and Colour. It's absolutely invaluable and from the mind of one of Pixar's main lighting artists too.
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[Benza]

Awesome post Denny, I'll have to play around with some of the settings and maybe cut back on the amount of lights I've got going at the moment. I kind of just threw them around with only a vague hint of were I wanted the shadows to fall. I'll have to check out that DVD but I'm a little tight on cash at the moment thanks to christmas

[edit]
Just looked up that ambient occlusion stuff. Seems pretty simple but you'd need some composting software to get it to work for an animation wouldn't you?
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[Frozencry]

[Benza]

so played around with the lighting and upping the bounces and some ambient occlusion and holy shit that upped the rendering time by a lot.


Looks better but think I'm gunna focus on getting the textures finished for now before I play around with the lighting.
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[Frozencry]

Haha yeah, lighting destroys render time the most. I've had singular light sources with high indirect bounce settings take like 45 minutes to render, and that's just one frame.

That's looking really nice though, awesome improvement.

Also found some more recent light experiment renders using radiosity and more specialised conditions. Much more natural on both this one and this one.

Then there's building my own nodes for Sub Surface Scattering on this.
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[Benza]

although gotta say, ya got me to start using mental ray as my renderer instead of the default one. Using it at the same quality I was rendeirng before has absolutley shredded my render times. A single test frame for a texture was taking me like, 30-40 seconds now it's taking me about 5 seconds at most.

Also love the mood of that second picture. The slats really make it.
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[Benza]

been playing around with lighting

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[segax]

Cool .. any animation videos ?
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[Benza]

I'm rendering one now to play around with motion blur.
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[Benza]

finding the main guy is getting lost in the background atm, gunna have to find some way to fix that. But I am really fucking excited about the way it's turning out.

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[grim-one]

That's awesome Benza.

Maybe make the guy a little bigger, a different colour, or get some fringe backlighting happening?
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[Benza]

changing his scale at this point in the process would be a nightmare, and I'm not sure how much changing his colour would actually effect it since it's mainly the lighting. I'm thinking of trying to do rim lighting on him but not sure how it will turn out since he's so boxy.
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