starting with the previz

Previz is about to begin, I fist finished the look of a flyover scene and now I am connecting my first 5 shots as one complete long shot.

So from now on I will post probably more previews than "final renders".

Also I fell in love with a new plugin called cm nodes, it makes texture generation more natural and keeps things organized, node based hence the name.
So download that plugin at cmstuff.com, it is awesome.
It is still a work in progress so there is still no good vray compatibility but it is on its way.

Cheers!

preppppin

Last christmassssss, whohohooo...
Well those bells sounded a while agoohoho but yeah, happy new year and what not to all of you.
I had an immense amount of free time which I fcuz did not use completely to my advantage but hey, I rested, watched a lot of movies and got fatter with all those nice meals:D
Sooo back to the program.
I mainly worked on getting my scenes ready to previz.
And that is almost done sooo I guess another month or so and I will be ready to previz this hell.

Also whenever I go to sleep and wake up I always walk through the story in my head and since I was/am not completely happy about certain things I am getting closer every day.
I am making the story and not only the part I will be showing in the short.
There will be something what happens before and after and that also makes the story viable.
But sometimes I doubt about things you will not know when the story will be told.

But yeah, time enough, I have enough work to do before I get into this drama...
These are all things I can fix, the main story line and flow of it stay the same.

So back to what I was doing, making things ready to roll previz wise.
Most of my scenes are done and are waiting to be used but there are some scenes like some forest scenes that I have to make.
Today I made a first step into that.

These are not to big of files unlike the village, that one is the biggest to date.

I also made a transition between the village and forest, soooo when going out of the village it just flows on.

I also worked on my mill scene, still not getting there but it is ready for previz.

Lighting is also a lot of finding out, I have an HDRI and let that one influence the fog and I have a directional light as moonlight, slightly and the lightposts are area lights>>object lighting.
Sooo that can take a huge amount of time tweaking and I am still not happy.
What I do like is the brownish look, I did not like to have it all blue, it is to obvious.
And this will perhaps give it some more unique feel.

 What to do next, what not fcuz, a shitload...
But slowly I am getting there.

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!