Forest point 1

Soooo, I was hoping to post some more since I had a good amount of time to spend last weekend.
But crashes and workflow etc kept me from making the progress I wanted.
I decided to look for some snow covered tree models since I was not feeling like it to model those as well.
So I bought them at a archviz site, it was a good deal 120 euro's for 100 models and 55 of them covered with snow and that is what I need.
SNOW!!!
Sooo now it was time to put those puppies in the scene and I can say one thing, it sucks balls.
It will soon get out of hand so you have to plan carefully what you want to see and block the scene simply out.

Now I am making some forest setups which follow my story so I will elaborate on that more if I get further.
For the moment some first wips.

the mill

In my story there is also a mill involved, you could have seen that a while back, there is a thread about that here somewhere.
But now I am creating an environment around it that complements my story and that is my intention for this weekend, make the world outside of the village.
So here is a wip of the mill.
Tomorrow there will be more.

Village in the rough

Soooo my girlfriend was away for the weekend and that ment none stop working on my project right here.
Upped my macbook pro with 4 extra gigs to flow better and got a dvi to mini display converter to hook up my old 23 inch screen to my Imac.
My goal was to have my village done by sunday and guess what, I think it is done.
It is still rough but it will do, I put things in the scene as I had them in mind following the story.

For the clay look I used an HDRI and a directional light.
It renders about 4 to 7 minutes for HD with Distrubuted rendering.
I also had setup a fog but that increases my render times even more, I must think what I will do about that.

Also I used some 3D tree models to give it a bit more 3d feel instead of using cards, it renders a bit slower but it is worth it.
Also I found out that when I use cards and blend some 3D trees in to mix it up it will work much better, still there are some things that are giving it away but for BG stuff it will suffice without a doubt.

I kept my geometry low and the file is showing no severe lag, I also used a lot of instances, that is very important.
Now I can work with the scene, get my shots right and add all the detail I need.
Still there is another scene I have to make and that is a forest scene, that will probably be a problem but hey.
Sooo I will work on that one soon, but first some holidays will occur and possibly some jobs on the side so as good as I worked this weekend as slow it will go the next few weeks until x-mass perhaps:D

And now some stills!

village again

Well I am back to the old village again, after making some new houses.
I made a handful of new ones and did no texturing yet.
I thought it was easier to get a sense of things without being busy for a year or so with just texturing.
Now I can take my houses and put them where I want and render a draft quickly.
So now I am making a look for the village and there are still some houses to be made but that will come all very soon.

Now I am struggling again with some vray issues for the fog, it works ok but transparant cards still give it a hard time..
So Stefan is looking into it.

It all comes together about now and I hope to have some time next week to finish the global look of how everything sits in the scene..

house_01 update

Sooo I was making a nice light setup to get one setup working for all my future houses.
So every house I will build from now on has the same lighting and therefore I will be able to get make the look uniform.

I added some detail to house_01, still some work left such as snow and some stuff that resides in the rooms.
It is always more work than I expected but with my lightsetup and distibuted rendering I am making a lot of renders fast, so that works great!

A lot of time goes into finding good textures and mapping them on the models.
But getting to know all the new vray stuff  is also a bitch.

Sooo a few stills!

house_01

Sooo I will be creating some houses over the next few months.
I made them before but the quality was not good enough so I will create better detailed ones.
It will take a crap load of time but it will look good!
Soo, I am bussy with the first one.

Still a lot to do but I will take my time.

Latersssss

wrinkles

Some pics, fixing all the texture thingys and making some wrinkles in the textures to make it all more lifelike!
Also getting to know the normal mapping in vray and all the tweaks that need to be done to get it right.
I used the sculpting tools in c4d to create the wrinkles, outputted a normal map as 8bit image,
Imported it into the normal map sloth as a tangent normal map and don't forget to set the color mapping to srgb...
What can I say, those things cost time and suck to find out.

AGAIN WORK WORK WORK

Well, it has been a while and I am sooooo bummed I can't put more time in the project at the moment.
It is really busy job wise and with all kind of jobs coming all the time I had to put Timmy on the downlow.
But as of next week I will go on full force!
I am dying to dive into it again and feed my imagination into 3D land.
Sooo until then this was the reason for my absence.
Timmy rules and I will make it the scariest as it can be eventually.
It is a task I will hit myself over probably more than once but I love to think about the end result and I will end this.

Cheers!!!

work work work

Soooo busy at work at redrum I mean and those on the side projects of me are also time consuming as hell.
But it pays the bills:D
I did a character for a company, not certain of what they do but hey I am the middle man.
So this is it:

I am really happy with the result, it took some time to set it up but it all worked really well.
The weighting etc all went smoothly for once.
And I was excited to animate the little man.
I never did such a thing for a while and not so elaborately as now.
I used IK for the legs and FK for the arms, that worked really well.
For selecting things fast I made a visual selector and I am happy with how it goes.
There are a few things I have to figure out but it is useable and that is my goal.

Timmy Benson is getting some time this week.
I am fixing some camera movements of the flythrough to the indoorshot and using all kinds of things such as the time track in cinema and the morph camera tag.
The time track to smooth the linear camera move I made over a spline and the morph camera tag to morph between the constrained spline camera into the indoor camera.

Sooo I will be busy with that I guess.
One more week until my vacation... finally.

what up?

Hey there, it has been a while sooo how about an update:D
After being bussy with building assets etc I was thinking hey what about the story.
It was not yet finished, I know how it will look etc, I have figured that all out but I was not happy with the story so I decided not to sit behind the computer until I would find a satisfying end and plot.
Soooo after 2 weeks of thinking and beating myself with a stick I have something that I can work with.
I simply could not take it to the next level without a finished storyline.
So now I can and the next thing what I am gonna do is make an anamatic of it all.
It will take loads of time but only than I will see if it all works.
So no texturing and so forth, I must look at the essentials not worrying to much about stuff, just make a harsh version to go play with.

Sooo that is what I am doing.
I have some extra jobs coming up soon so they will interfere but hey gotta make money:D
Also I am wondering about eventually buying the new macpro if it ever will be affordable.
I have some concerns about the specs but we will see in due time.

Also the will be a new version of Cinema4D, it has some interesting features but nothing earth shattering, on the other hand there will be a new version of vray in september somewhere, I am really looking forward to that, all nice multipass etc.

Soooo see ya soon.

Nick

last months busyness

Sooooo, it has been a while.
I was making some extra cash so I had to put my project to the side for a while.
I made some 2d after fx animations that where fun but exhausting to put together, I had a tight deadline so I had some 14 hour workdays, not so cool but it was worth it.
Here are some shots.

So after that I had time again, still some jobs coming up but not as tight as this one, perhaps I have another 3 of those in the pipeline but I'll hear about it soon.

So back to the project, beuhhhh, not making the progress I was hoping for, I decided to texture timmy correctly, it all takes to long and I am jumping all over the place and the weather is also good for once soooo not making miles.

But yeah, I will make it work eventually.
I have got a small render of Timmy just to be bussy.
I am not happy with the rig but I don't want to do it all over again so still doubting on that.
The rig is not that bad but I would love someone to look at it and correct the things I did wrong.

Soooo I will post random things I guess, also every thing I do drains the computer of power so it all gets really slow and such, things don't work nice, aaaah technology has to catch up.
Also it would be cool if the new macpro would be even more awesome with graphic cards etc.
So perhaps I will get that machine one day.

BUSY MONTH

Well, I really wanted to go one with the previous shot but it has to wait for a little while.
I've got some extra jobs to design and animate so that will take some time, I still hope to squeeze in some hours for the project but hey, making money with the mouse and the wacom pen right.
For y'all who lived under a rock and did not see this..
http://www.youtube.com/v/-JCVGuYxJmI
So true.
So I throw a screenshot right in of the assignment, what the hell!

So yeah pretty awesome right, this is just the feel and mood.
I do not often make a whole style so I found it to be tedious but rewarding, I try to keep it kinda original so I hope to make it even more awesome when it all moves.

hottdamn trees

Oooooh, frustration time!!!
I was going for the flythrough and extend it out to the village, well that did not happen this weekend.
Seriously, I have cards which I use for trees and now all of a sudden the thing crashes like 50 times this weekend.
Freakingsjait!!!
I have mailed jack of surfacespread to take a look at the scene and find out if it could possible be a ram issue.
I have 8gb ram, perhaps not enough so I will learn more later I guess.
It fucked up my whole weekend, aaaaaaaah!!!
I hate it when not moving forward, sucks balls.
Also I was not happy with the look of the terrain, so I looked into the terrain shader, it is kinda cool.
And seriously I think that that will do for my scene

To let you know what I want it to look like is something like this.
I slapped the render and a sky together in Nuke.
I want my ride to go through a foggy piece of woods and than the fog lifts and in the distance is a ray of moonlight that shines onto the village.

Etc etc...
I guess that is for next week;(

See ya.

ATTIC pt 2

I enhanced the attic with some better texturing, lighting etc, still some stuff to scatter on the floor and such but still an enhancement.
Render times are ok, I have one directional light and an area light from inside to light things just up a bit, that 2nd light saved me a huge amount of render time.
Now it is around 12 minutes for a 2K render, not that bad I thought.

Also I modeled an old little mill its a mixture of 2 pictures of mills I found on the internet.

That is it, next up is some more cluttering on the floor of the attic, tidy it up a bit and giving shape to the village I guess..

attic

One or 2 scenes take place in the attic, so I made an tada attic.

It is offcourse not finished yet, dah so more on that soon.
Oh jeah major setback, I've lost a usb stick with some last versions of timmy and kathy, so realy bumbed about that.
FAAACK!!!
But I have some backups fcuz but still it will take me some extra hours to get it up and running.

TITLE

I have made a nice title screen also found a nice font to go with the mood and fcuz I will buy it eventually.
The titles will animate but this is the vibe!!!
I am continuing my flythrough, I fixed the clouds but I had some trouble with the giant size of the sea.

So still tackling that but I will render that Monday or so.
I thought about the story and I have a nice intro I guess, I have to fine-tune the story some more and therefore leave the computer be sometimes, it is hard but good to do.
And I will be doing some previz very soon I guess...
Soooo enough to do.

Flythrough

Well, I was sick of problem solving so I decided to make some eye candy to feed myself with some positivity and get back in the awesome vibe.
So I did, I am making a flythrough it is the 2nd scene of the short so why not already make it.
It was still enough work to make it but the end result is nice.
There are some things to fix and it is a renderhog but it will be awesome!!!

This scene starts as a look through a keyhole or crack in the door, next up are clouds, allready made and looking awesome.
After that you move through the clouds, diving into the deep end and end up in fog and move through this over sea, lighthouse shines into the camera, camera goes up just before the cliff and continues through the trees.
After that I will end up eventually in the village.
But that is something for another time.
I will not post any animations perhaps a preview but not the final!
That is for the end result:D

fog

turntable kathy

I've rendered out a turntable of Kathy
https://vimeo.com/62727108
There is still some work to be done, I can't get the hair to work!!!
So that is bugging me for a while now and I did send an email to maxon to up their game on the hair simulation, it is ok for simple things but this is hell!!!
I rigged the head some more, eyelids now close super nice, I made a small xpresso slider to drive that.
Simple but it works cool.
Also I made progress with the belt, I used a cage deformer so the body could drive the deformation of the belt, works cool, not 100% physically correct but I don't mind, the characters are still cartoons.
Also I downloaded a model of a gaslamp was a free model, textured it a bit and added a flame inside.
Thats it for now, next up fixing hair, hooooowwwww???
And do the same cleanup rigging for Timmy cuz now I know how it is done kinda..

See ya

renders

Just a few renders I wanted to share with you!!!

dmnzzzz

Last week was really frustrating I had to redo the rig cuz it was focked!
The buttons of the jacket flew all over the place.
Also the posemorph tag didn't worked at that moment...

I send my file to the guy from vertexpusher and he said combine all loos objects into one and redo the weighting.
Soooo I did and it worked, don't know why but yeah it is still software.
Right now I am struggling with the hair and still don't know what to do with it exactly.
So I will keep posting about that.

Render time!

Also I had great issues with the armpit area.
So I was playing with that issue for a whole while.

I hope to finish this crap asap cuz I wanna go on with this rollercoaster!

rigging final final def final

Soooo, g@ddamn!
What the fack, damn, frustration time again.
I redid the rigging of Kathy to make it better and that worked out but everytime you think you are about to be done some other problem pops up.
Well faaaaack@&@$^!!
So that was a great weekend.
But I found out a way to connect my buttons to the surface of the jacket and that was a big problem to solve so that was my victory moment today.
So what to dooo next, fix the hair it jumps and penetrates the hat.
Facial expressions.
Fixing the last weight problems...

AAAAAAh, man what a work:(((

Kathy rigging

So back to rigging, I used the advanced biped setup to rig the character, there are some things in there
I don't know what they are there for but eventually I will find out.
Sooo rigging went ok and weighting was also setup fast so that was cool.
This character was easy cuz the model is quite thin in the contrary of Timmy.
Soo now I can animate her, yeay..

Final look

So I was busy doing the dynamic thingy, that was soooo irritating, c4d has not one nice workflow for this so I found one myself and that works kinda but will only get me so far as the first problem will appear.
I used hair dynamics and spline wrapped a model of the balls en strings to it.
This is the short version, a lot of settings etc, not worth mentioning, helllll!

But I am really happy with the look of my character, it took a lot of time but hey I got time.
Soooo this is her, done!
Probably there will be some minor tweaks but that is normal.

Next up will be the tedious task of cleaning up and start rigging, ow I hate rigging.

new shoes

So I had my first turntable rendered last night, it has some flaws but hey it is a work in progress.
https://vimeo.com/59338734

So I was watching my model up close and personal and I had to clean up and improve some texturing and modeling of the shoes, so I did, tada!

And one total shot

Tomorrow I will go for the dynamics again, I must find a nice way to let the little balls connected to the hat jiggle in a natural way and naturally collide with the hair/model etc, pfuuuuh, not so nice.

TBC

Make it perfect

This weekend I am planning to make the final adjustments to the look of Kathy.
I am still tweaking some details etc.

Also I found a way to limit the amount of hair motion when animating.
This is very cool, you can paint in the weights for the hair to be influenced by gravity and motion.
Awesome and glad to have that hurdle out of the way.

https://vimeo.com/59305261

And this is a still of the model so far.

More to come...

Kathy update

It has been a while, I was busy doing some renders for the company I work for and that took some work and effort to make it work.
But now I have rebuild the face of Kathy, I wasn't happy with her face so face off and start over.

Next week I will have tons of time to finish her off so this is what I have so far.
There are naturally some things to fix but yeah I know.
It is in progress but she looks better.

On to the next one.