Last Pixel recent work

[davemcd]

Hey Everyone,

Below is our latest showreel plus one of our recent dubai projects for Palm Jebel Ali.

This project was done in 3ds Max v.9 with Vray 1.5. It included a green screen shoot which involved stitching different takes together into seemless passes using a 'fake' motion control technique.

The project was completed in 6 weeks with 5 people (about 10 people on the green screen shoot day tho)

Render times were usually under 5 mins per frame on 8 core blade servers.

Some of the grades are a little out as is some of the keying which I'm a little dissapointed in but such are the perils of commercial projects with defined deadlines. 3 days before delivery the client wanted change our original water to a brighter more turqoise version which I feel didnt look as real or as nice.



LP_Reel_08.mpg 42MB



Palm_Jebel_Ali 59MB

For those interested here is a comparison video showing the green screen breakdown next to the final and the pre-vis
Palm_comparison 14MB

A variation of the Palm Jebel Ali project was also done for one of the specific sites, here it is.


Palm_69 50MB

Enjoy.

DaveMcD

[DrJan]

Very nice movies. A bit overbright for my liking but we couldn't make it that nice (lack of manpower and hardware etc).

In the Palm_Jebel_Ali movie, at 2:57 in the right corner of the image there's a car driving REALLY fast around a corner That looked quite funny.

[GALACTUS]

Nice work there Buddy

Did you, and how did you break up the scene for render, in particular the expansive shots where it seems all is in sight?

Was it all GI? Did you render passes?

Once again great work there.

C

[tct70]

Very nice work indeed!

[pg1]

hey dave
nice to see you finally got it up

[AJ Jefferies]

I've been trying to write a reply without simply swearing.

I don't think I can...

F*** me, that's an enormous amount of work!

Really, really nice job. Some of the compositing doesn't work too well, but considering the logistics of shooting & matching people in a 6 week production schedule it's still not bad. The car shot works really well in fact.

[Andre Tobo]

Hey Dave, Great work!
Really great work to this scale of project and deadline.

best regards!

[davemcd]

Cheers everyone.

Galactacus: Yeah it was all GI but calculate every 25th etc. Most shots were usually just a single render (So not passes). The car shot had the car rendered in 3 parts; the road and buildings etc, exterior of the car, interior of the car.

Hopefully no-one noticed the strange double layered audio track that ended up in the Palm Jebel Ali clip I posted. Somehow a phantom audio track got encoded over the top. I've updated it now, but how embarrassing to upload that. Apparently it was downloaded 4000 times over the weekend :0

DaveMcD

[suurland]

Really nice renderings, I especially like the reel.

You mention you use GI but do you use saved calculations or? if so how do you handle all the moving objects in the scene?

/Thomas

[davemcd]

Really nice renderings, I especially like the reel.

You mention you use GI but do you use saved calculations or? if so how do you handle all the moving objects in the scene?

/Thomas

Aha... We do use saved calculations but we do some dodgy tricks with a lot of the moving objects. All the people and moving cars (unless they are right in the foreground) are excluded from GI. They just have their own old school lightring of direct lights that only include the moving objects to fake the ambient sky light and still get lit by the scenes main direct light. Sometimes you can tell there is no GI on them but most people are too busy being distracted by all the nice GI on the buildings

If its a key feature object in the scene... say the main car it will be rendered in another pass with GI calculated every frame, all the other objects set to matte shadow. If the key object is very reflective then everything it reflects will basically calculate GI every frame so I cheat by excluding all the matte shadow objects from GI and do some basic standard lighting on them to make them illuminated enough that the reflections look bright enough. I dont think anyone has looked at any of the reflections and noticed there was no GI in a building that is reflected in the body of a car.

All cheap hacks but they get the renders done and no-one tends to notice that we cheated.

DaveMcD

[pskdude]

hey

Great Job! i work with nakheel a lot and they are not easy clients lol.

Love the work !!

[zoranm]

Fantastic work guys, congratulations for a job well done. I guess it's a logistical nightmare but you did it just fine. keep up the good work.

Zoran

[bernhard]

great

Yes, this makes me really happy.

A lot of efforts you put into your projects, and very well done - ohh, sorry, let me correct, it's really awesome.

Hehe, congrats - it's really great to see something like that.
go, go, go,

and best greetings,
bernhard

[pskdude]

hey

what kind of trees are you using ?? Sorry im used to using vray proxies from evermotion libraries and im trying to get a start with billboarding trees seems like it would save a lot of rendering time. Anywhere you can refer me or maybe just give me some pointers on where to start seeems like you work with them very well.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

[davemcd]

what kind of trees are you using ?? Sorry im used to using vray proxies from evermotion libraries and im trying to get a start with billboarding trees seems like it would save a lot of rendering time. Anywhere you can refer me or maybe just give me some pointers on where to start seeems like you work with them very well.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

The trees are a mix of Onyx trees made into vray proxies, and some other plants and trees we modelled ourselves. I havent used billboard trees in years, especially now with being able to make stuff into vray proxies I find that billboards just don't look that great.

DaveMcD