Spot Unionen, Seagull made with Vray and Yeti

[griml0ck]

Hi,

This is a spot I recently worked on. I did the modelling of all the parts of the gull with detailed sculpting in mudbox and textures was handpainted in nuke/mudbox. My very talented friend Simon Ekeberg worked on the groom and shading of the Yeti fur (first project we work with Yeti), which covers the body and parts of the wings. VrayMtlHair3 was used for the fur shading.

We split the work in two, I did the lighting and comp for the first spot and he did the second. We had two freelance animators working on one spot each. The rig was made in Softimage by the very talented rigger Edy Susanto.
Rendering was done in Maya 2011 with Vray 2.0.

Each frame took about 20 gigs of ram (we only had 24 gigs). We had to do a lot of optimizing during preproduction as we were way over 24 gigs at one point and then the whole farm crashed
Rendertimes was as low as 15 min / frame on some shots, average around 1-2 hours / frame. The landing shot was Hardest to render, it took 5 hours / frame at the most.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J4GH9AXAAo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eG6foUo6Yw





Thanks for watching, remember to use HD quality when watching!

Cheers,
Johan

[Yannick]

Really good.

[sandykoufax]

Looks very nice and realistic bird.
The costume of the robocop is CG too?

[griml0ck]

Thank you, no only the bird is CG. We are working on a small breakdown, will post a link when it's finished.

cheers J

Looks very nice and realistic bird.
The costume of the robocop is CG too?

[ajlbeer]

Jätte snygg!

I think the animation is exceptional as well. Great job!

[CHRISTOPHE.DESSE]

really good ,
really like how the seagull is looking

[Sakdon]

very nice image!!! too realistic!

[RobPhoboS]

Great work !

What kind of issues did you face during this, anything special you had to overcome/workaround ?

[griml0ck]

Thanks for all the positive feedback!

Well, we had some issues during pre-production where Vray would crash on some frames, but Vlado did his magic and then it was gone Biggest problem was probably the amount of fur and how much ram it took. We used tiled exr textures so that we could have the amount of fur we wanted but still have high res textures. I don't think we have ever pushed our renderfarm to use 20 gigs of ram per frame.
This was our first production using Yeti and I can highly recommend it for everybody who is looking for a good fur solution.
Feathers and fur are tricky business, and this was the first time for me. But the whole team worked hard to make it as good as possible within the small time frame that we had.

Cheers J

[RobPhoboS]

Really good to hear about Yeti, and more importantly CG providing valuable support in production, something my work is afraid of here unfortunately (I keep trying to get them to at least test out vray as I think it's brilliant).
Looking forwards to your next piece

[timdog]

OMG! Helt fantastic!
Tell us something about the shading!
Feathers 2-sided material?

[griml0ck]

Hi,

Thanks, the feathers are shaded with vraySSS2, the yeti fur was shaded with vrayHair3. Tested with 2 sided but the results looked better with SSS. I think 2 sided works best if you have single surface, but we had a thickness to them so we could have different shading on the top and backside. I don't have any screenshots of the shaders but it was nothing fancy, just tweaked all the settings to get the right kind of light scattering in the feathers and fur.

Cheers J