Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

[schultzeworks]

This design project took a minor detour when I tried to animate with V-Ray and ran into problems with flickering due to IR-mapping noise that can vary from frame to frame. I finally determined some ideal settings, so check out the results!

http://vimeo.com/7951005

FYI:
modeling in Rhino 4.0
rendering (stills + animation) with V-Ray
animation with Bongo 1.0
compositing with After Affects CS4

[LeoBonilla]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

Dave that video is completly aweosome!!!!!

1. How long did it take to render the stills and the image sequence?
2. How is the AE process?

[schultzeworks]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

Dave that video is completely awesome!!!!!

1. How long did it take to render the stills and the image sequence?
2. How is the AE process?

Thanks for the nice comments. I'm glad you liked it and I am glad it's done!

The stills were fast to render because I used GI+IRmap, even though they were rendered 1800 x 1200 or 2400 x 1800 in order to be much larger than the 720 x 480 frame size for 'zoom-ability.' They took anywhere from 10 - 30 minutes on a dual or quad core.

The image sequences were a killer. I had to use DMC+LC to eliminate the flickering, which takes longer than GI+IRmap. On the good side, the frames were only 720 x 480 with about 10-12 minutes each. On the bad side, I needed 240 frames, which took close to 45 hours on a 40-core render farm.

After Effects was the easy part. 99% of my time was designing, tweaking, testing ... and trying to pick a song! The final render output to H.264 was under 10 minutes.

[fpedrogo]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

I love it! Really nice and clean job.
Now you inspire me to learn more about bongo.

Best

[Davidooone]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

Very very nice. It's so fresh so light.
Best

[artupato]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

waaaaahhhh how i wish i can do that hehe
really really good!

[Micha_cg]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

Cool work. I like the retro design.

I havn't so much experience with animations. I don't understand why you need DMC amd don't used IM. Do you mean avoid flickering at the Intro? All other scenes are without moving objects and a presaved IM cache should help, that the IM solution is the same for all frames and no flickering should be there or?

[schultzeworks]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

Cool work. I like the retro design.

I haven'thad much experience with animations. I don't understand why you need DMC amd don't used IM. Do you mean avoid flickering at the Intro? All other scenes are without moving objects and a pre-saved IM cache should help, that the IM solution is the same for all frames and no flickering should be there or?

Thanks! Glad you liked it.

There are several reasons I avoided the pre-saved IR-map. First of all, it does not work if you have moving objects or lights, as occurs in the first intro-credits scene. Secondly, I am teaching Rhino+Bongo+V-Ray and needed one straightforward solution that works every time. The simple solution that works under every condition is LC. Third, the ASG tech notes on how to generate pre-calculated IR-maps are unclear and have missing images + dead links. I need to format the material to be taught in a one-hour lecture and it was not possible otherwise.

I would have loved to stay with GI-IRmap since I have several years of experience using it, but the animation results were extremely bad.

[schultzeworks]

Bongo training

I love it! Really nice and clean job.
Now you inspire me to learn more about bongo.

Thanks, Fernando! Glad you liked it.

I have prepared several Bongo handouts which I can share with you and the board. They consolidate a lot of information into what I call "the most important stuff that will fit on to two pages."

http://professor3d.com/pdf/bongo-intro.pdf
http://professor3d.com/pdf/bongo-animation.pdf

[fpedrogo]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

Hi David

Well done.
Best

[Micha_cg]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

Good looking handouts! Interesting for me are the the subdiv counts:

Light Cache Subdivisions:
250 Draft
2000 Minimum for final quality
5000 Maximum for final quality

Looks very high for me. Is it special needed for animations? Most I use around 1000 subdivs. Animations are rendered at quite low resolutions most, for example 800x600. Is your experience that less than 2000 cause bad effects?

In the near future I plan to render an animation per Bongo. I havn't done it for a long time. I'm curious in how many bugs I run this time.

[schultzeworks]

Subdivisions for LC

Good looking handouts! Interesting for me are the the subdiv counts:

Light Cache Subdivisions:
250 Draft
2000 Minimum for final quality
5000 Maximum for final quality

Looks very high for me. Is it special needed for animations? Most I use around 1000 subdivs. Animations are rendered at quite low resolutions most, for example 800x600. Is your experience that less than 2000 cause bad effects?

Glad you liked the handouts. Thanks!

You are right about the LC subdiv's. I probably ended up going overboard after so many bad experiences when animating with the IR-mapping, so I added extra subdiv's for "insurance" -- and to cover all contingencies when teaching the material. Also, the ASG manual is a bit unclear on the topic.

I'll adjust my settings in the future. Thanks for the good advice.

You are absolutely right about Bongo. I find new bugs every time I teach it! Fortunately, they are getting close to version 2.0, which will allow animation of almost all parameters in Rhino. Bongo is far from perfect, but you have such a killer combo when you can stay inside of Rhino with V-Ray and Bongo for everything! I got really tired of exporting to MAX and it was a real pain to teach another whole software app just to animate simple turntables. I have high hopes for the next version, so they better get it right!

[Hoop]

Re: Philco PC : concept PC design : now with Video!

Man, great animation, great handouts. This rocks!!!! ;D

[schultzeworks]

Philco PC : marketing phase

I am leveraging my design efforts on the Philco PC in order to get a little promotional visibility for my work and design services. I did a bit of research on press releases and just finished my first one ever, which has already been sent out to various design and gadget blogs like http://www.boingboing.net, http://www.engadget.com, and http://gizmodo.com

If anyone is interested, you can see the press release at http://www.schultzeworks.com/philcopc/

My research revealed that there is a very specific format for press releases and the goal is to keep it short, sweet, punchy, and above all, interesting. I'm not sure how the efforts will pan out, but it will definitely be interesting!

[schultzeworks]

The results are in. Beyond amazing.

The press release was sent out Sunday, December 13th, 2009 and worked a few thousand times better then I ever expected. In the first five days, over 75,000 people watched the video and there are 100,000 (and counting) hits on the web for "Philco PC." The design was featured in more than 10,000 blogs, including just about every design + gadget blog like engadget, gizmodo, yankodesign, designboom, and even the NY Times. The work is going to be featured in several magazines, including one or two cover stories. Its been totally nuts and a hell of a lot of fun.

This is a great example of what can happen if you pursue your passion. I know it sounds corny, but I designed, modeled and animated this project just because I love to design -- and I thought it would be cool and look good in the portfolio. The hardest part of a project like this is finding the focus and discipline to finish it.I encourage anyone interested to give it a shot.