Robin Hood "Memories" and "Teaches Us"

[tricky]

As already asked, could you explain how you lit the scene - bacground, characters and composite. You are so cruel leaving us with such a fab piece of work and no explanation!

[Da_elf]

i wouldnt call him cruel. infact there quite a few project he went into detail with including doing a "making of section on his site for some" so more or less i expect we can see the same on this project as well

(psst. the ball is in your court now richard. hehehe )

[DaForce]

I think poor Richard is very busy, as his last 2 posts in this forum have not had many replies by him. As well as the cgtalk thread.

But who knows

[richard_rosenman]

Hi guys;

Yes, I'm sorry - I don't mean to ignore anyone, but I am in fact, really busy with so many things right now.

And Elf is right, eventually, when I find some spare time, I will make a 'making of' section for these spots but I can at least shed some light (no pun intended!) to some of your questions in the meantime.

About the lighting. Well, it is split up into two major layers - the background (without the table and kids) and the foregroound - the table and kids. The entire scene has a light setup of about 4 VRay lights - the key light from the window, one from the ceiling, an opposite cool color from the opposite side of the window and another opposite cool color from the front of the kids. There is also a standard 3dsmax spotlight from outside the window which casts sharp VRay shadows to simulate a sunny mid-day.

The scene if of course rendered with GI - the background pass with a precalculated irradiance map which eliminates any flickering at all, and is perfect since it is only a camera move (ie. no moving objects). The irr. map rendered surprisingly fast, despite it being for an interioir, and I think it was calculated in less than 3 hours! (Good work Vlad!)

The kid and table layer was rendered with GI single frame - as we all know it has to be when dealing with animation. The min and max samples for the GI have to be quite high if you want to get any quality GI details and this was set to about -1,-1. Because the room is no longer included in the render, the frames rendered fairly quickly - about 30 minutes per frame for the kids and table. The background frames rendered in about 30-45 minutes a frame (since the irr map is already calculated). Since we're dealing with 24fps/sec, that's 720 frames for a :30 and with a 30 machine renderfarm, it got done quite quickly.

Volumetric layer was done with VRay as well and as a pass of it's own, as was a highlight layer. Both were composited together using various modes in Combustion to add the 'sunny' atmospheric look. The glows were also added then.

The depth of field was done with my own plugin as it was much faster - but because it is very bright in general, bokeh effects are lacking.

The most important thing out of all this is that GI is used as a secondary addition to the lighting only AFTER an effective lighting setup has been developed. If you use just GI with no lights, you'll get a really boring, flat scene. But once your lights are set up, the GI takes the colors and blends then nicely together, as well as taking any dark areas and boosting them up to a more realistic level. (Which is further tweaked in Combustion).

Well, hope this answers some questions (at least for now) until I manage to get a making of done. There is one final spot in production for this campaign which will be out in November and that is keeping me quite busy, as well as other projects.

Regards,
-Richard

[Da_elf]

ive one question about the 24fps thing. i was working on a DVD and thought that for the hell of it i would render at 24fps (to save myself approximately 6 frames since render times would be high). however i was never able to get a correct conversion to 29.97 NTSC frame rate. can you or anyone else shed some light on this?

[richard_rosenman]

You have to introduce 3:2 pulldown. This means that you will get 3 whole frames and 2 interlaced frames (or vice versa - can't remember exactly) which makes up the other 6 frames. You can do this with most compositing or editing software like After Effects, Combustion, Avid, etc.

Same thing goes if you want to add CG elements to film that has had 3:2 pulldown introduced. You have to first remove the 3:2 pulldown, add your CG elements to the whole frames, and then introduce 3:2 pulldown again to get it back to 29.97.

-Richard

[Da_elf]

right. i tried that. guess i didnt get it done right since the mothin still didnt seem smooth. i guess ill have to read up on it some more

[Morbid Angel]

good work Richard, I just seen it on tv the other day So are you saying you have used irmap for the forground element too?

[richard_rosenman]

Hi Dmitry;

Yeah, presaved irr. map for the BG, single frame calc irr. map for the FG.

-Richard

[Morbid Angel]

right, what kind of settings for fg animation (irmap) ?
reason Im asking is that when you have animated objects like cheracters irmap take quite sime time to calculate...

[percydaman]

great job richard. love the style

[richard_rosenman]

Hi Dmitry;

Pretty standard settings - default 50 hem. subdivs. -1,-1 GI, 0,2 sampling.

and the other settings in GI 0.3, 0.3, 0.2 (I always forget their names).

Single frame calculation.

The killer is basically if it's an interior or exterior scene. Interiors will take FOREVER to calculate because of the trapped GI samples. Exteriors are lightning fast. So in most cases, you can hide the room, and relight the characters to match what they looked like when the room was there. Then they'll render really fast with irr. map since they are in an exterior location.

Sometimes, they will even render quite fast with the room being included in the GI solution but not visible to camera (so you don't have to hide the room at all or relight the scene).

-Richard

[percydaman]

you could always of course, create a spherical HDRI of your interior to use as lighting, then no interior needed.

[Morbid Angel]

yeah I understand. Have you considered quasi monte carlo method? Its pretty good with exterriors too and needs fewer tweaks.

[ngrava]

you could always of course, create a spherical HDRI of your interior to use as lighting, then no interior needed.

Has anyone had any luck with this? I have tried all sorts of things but can't seem to get the map to render out properly. There's always some seem or really bad distortion when I re-apply it.

-=GB=-

P.S. This is a really fantastic commercial BTW Richard. Congratulations!!