You know what would be really handy, photos of models/objects that have depth information and/or normal directions
Depth information should suffice as from that alone you can generate a normal map and that gives you all kinds of power like relighting a photograph from different angle, shadow casting, adding reflections/specular. At the moment integrating a photo into a 3D comp either still or worse; in motion, is a real pain in the ass/impossible
2D Comp work in general just looks so flat when they try and integrate photographic elements.
I'm going to have a go at faking it, I imagine I will be largely unsuccessful, but I won't know till I try
:-)
check out ZbornToy if you want a better idea of what I\'m on about. In fact just check it out anyway, It's freaky
Heres the original photograph
Heres a real quick draft
It works better than I thought, It's far from perfect I only messed about with it for a few minutes. It definitely brings greater flexibility if you want to quickly integrate an images lighting, and you can adjust the lighting in realtime.
If it was done properly you could even change camera angle somewhat
More refined model (started from scratch using another method, It's still really basic)
Really It's amazing it works at all given how crude the model/displacement is... I\'m not even going to show the mesh as It's so bad
:-P
To be done properly/easy it should be done in either Modo 301 or Zbrush, or by someone more skilled at modelling than me
whatever way you look at it, It's a damn site faster/more powerful than hand painting in lighting changes, at least for organic shapes
Original (badly masked, just for a quick test) followed by my alterations
Again using a very rough model
Nup, I don't know what it is.
Been waiting for this, Trapcode Form plugin for AfterEffects
I knocked up the above image in a few minutes playing with it, very nice, but I have a feeling it will produce images that were obviously done using the plugin, you'll soon have a trapcode form look.
And some more of my quick tests:
Very fire like.. yet not fire
Just wondering if I can achieve similar things within Cinema 4D, which would then have much more power, but be slower to render
Done with Trapcode Form
The following are all from Cinema4D:
The same principles apply for the accumulation of HUE, shifting from red thru orange to yellow depending on the density
A bit coarse. Done with lots of transparent cubes. Deformed by a noise shader.
Same as above but further deformed by a spherical deformer.
Problem is, that seems to be the hard coded maximum number of objects you can clone.... shit!
Max matrix size is 50,000...... lame! I need millions!
So uhm.. that essentially makes it useless
I tried using plane to place objects on and sure enough I can place more than 50,000 clones but it crashed
:-P
also that's then limited to only polygonal objects and cannot generate thinking particles (for no good reason)
So some kind of internal problem going on there, 50,000 polygons easy peasy, 50,000 1 polygon objects.... forget it
Had an epiphany! use visiible lights instead should be super fast...
You can make a light emit no light and cast no shadow, yet still be made visible. Which basically just draws a circular gradient around each light:
Loooks ace, sadly took 13 minutes to render :-S so much for being fast, I guess It's calculating it volumetrically
which seems very expensive way of basically putting a gradient round a light.
So the only way I can go above 50,000 involves using lights and they happen to be by far the slowest method,
which is not better if the render never actually finishes.
I've tried using Hair on splines, but you can't effect the color via mograph effectors.. why not maxon!?
I've tried cellrendering/sketch and toon
Less lights = 33 seconds
2 Minutes 24
18 Minutes
2 Minutes! that's faster!
2 Minutes
1 Minute using
cluster.. not bad
:-D
Sadly this method doesn't seem to work with deformers because it uses thinking particles
and there no way to change the color with a mograph effector... why not Maxon!!
download my example file from:
Link: helios.mine.nu --- PryoFrax.zip
This uses pyrocluster so It's nice and fast and smooth.
25 Minute Render, no idea WHY it took that long and after all that it was incorrect, It's not meant to be stripey
So frustrating, this could be such a powerful technique if it wasn't so slow.
You could use this for all sorts, generating volumetric trails from moving objects for example.
The future is volumetric baby! voxels rule! polygons suck! sub-poly-displacement can only take you so far.
36 Minutes 90,000 particles rendered with pyrocluster
I wrote my own Xpresso in order to get past the 50,000 limit of mographs matrix object.
Trying to render this many items using visible lights well... It's painfull, it just runs out of RAM almost immediately. And I\'m not short on RAM either.
8 Minutes 44,000 Particles, fairly uninteresting result. *thinks*
Finished the Flowery dealy
Needs to be viewed at high brightness
I've unknowingly cropped about an inch all the way round by mistake, oops, ah well it looks good for it, just wondering how I could have done it without knowing
:-P
Spent all yesterday crashing, reaching some kind of limit in VRay, maybe even the 4gb RAM limit of 32bit address space, but who knows.
