Parmareggio "The Snack"

[kagemaru]

Hi all,
I just wanted to share one of our latest work at the studio to thank the chaosgroup team for the great effort put on the hair/fur in the last years. I have always been asking for performance and features on this and being able to finally extensively use it in production for a small place like ours it's just great.
We had 12 furry head characters, but most of all they were white mice, and i was almost never able to match that kind of "fluffiness" before.
Hope you like it.

[^Lele^]

Very pretty!
Some of the best CG i've seen coming out of good old Italy since, well, forever!
Congratulations!

[thablanch]

That's really nice. Congrats!

[Mokiki]

Excellent Job!

[kagemaru]

Thank you guys!

[Oleg_Budeanu]

Really nice looking , fur is just excellent i'd say !
Any details ? Render times , machines used , breakdown of workflow ?

[kagemaru]

Really nice looking , fur is just excellent i'd say !
Any details ? Render times , machines used , breakdown of workflow ?

Hi Oleg,
well i'd say we don't have any kind of special magic, not really anything that stands out apart from single talents from artists here that in a small studio can make the difference.
This project is completely 3dsMax, CAT rigs with some small custom stuff. Fur is hairfarm since we always did this characters with it but we are planning to transition this to ornatrix since it has major issues that with primcurves are sometimes very visible. We collaborate with alembic back and forth the pipeline. Lighting for the environment was pretty straightforward with a sun and some area lights, for characters i opted to render out a cubic hdr that was used in dome to fake gi bounces and mapped on the room for reflections: i had about 2,5x speed improvements and results were very very similar.
We have a small renderfarm of roundabout 30 machines, they are almost all dual exacore, 16/32 gigs of ram. Render times for both env and chars i would say was a total of 2/3 hours per frame.
Here are some images from productions:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/2987...snack-ABC-2015

Cheers,

fede

[Pixelcon]

The stills are great. Much easier to appreciate all the work that's gone into it, I think

[jstrob]

Wow! I like the fur! Can you explain what was the problem exactly with the primcurve with hairfarm?

[AJ Jefferies]

Great stuff! White fur is an absolute nightmare and you've done a fantastic job. I love the concept sketches too, they're gorgeous.

[kagemaru]

The stills are great. Much easier to appreciate all the work that's gone into it, I think

Thank you very much. We spent several times transitioning these characters up-to-date, considering we have been doing for them 1/2 commercials per year for the past 8 years!
It's kinda strange looking back

https://www.youtube.com/user/PRRE07/videos

These characters proved to be very successful here in Italy and that cheese company is planning to do an animated series on it

Wow! I like the fur! Can you explain what was the problem exactly with the primcurve with hairfarm?

Thank you
Well we didn't have problems rendering hairfarm in vray as primcurves per se, it's just that strand interpolation in hairfarm is buggy and when rendered as real curves artifacts are much more visible compared to his own shaders and lights that tends to "cover" them.
We pointed this out to Cem and was acknowledged as a big error but too difficult to get rid of for the moment.

Great stuff! White fur is an absolute nightmare and you've done a fantastic job. I love the concept sketches too, they're gorgeous.

Thank you!
We tried for years now to get this almost impossible white fluffiness with short fur and it's a dream now to render these mice all together for us.
I'm with you also about concepts, they're made by the very talented Giacomo Tappainer, it's just a shame that clients almost never have the courage to do something more "strong".

[jstrob]

And about Ornatrix, they were offering a big discount for hairfarm users in the past. So you should ask them if they still do!

[kagemaru]

And about Ornatrix, they were offering a big discount for hairfarm users in the past. So you should ask them if they still do!

We already had Ox up and running for quite a bit
We bought it with the offer you mentioned.
It's just that these mice were groomed in hairfarm since, well, ever.
This guy is Ox and Vray