environment :: busy street :: animation (3D)

[sunnyc1]

I really like the work you guys do. Great attention to detail.
Do you guys build your own characters? Amazing stuff.

SunnyC

[lrivero]

particlerealities:

to adjust the exposure settings more slowly

yes, this is a postpro effect in AFX

The cars look like they're making an emergency

we are working in corrections for the whole scne

share more information

in the next weeks i'll post a complete workflow for the whole movie that contents 6 scenes with interior scenes of an old theatre... and of course i'll post a full makin'of the movie, render engines, pipeline, plugins, team details...
thanks for the comments

malaguit: hey, i knew the story about a lot of malagueños talking and the gallego colleague didn't understand anything, hahahaha (sorry, it's a joke) yes, he told me about good guys from malaga, i'll send him the greetings

trick: yes, we have a lot of troubles with characters, personally i hate everything about character studio and the fuc.. crashes it makes adn in this preview we found a lot of troubles of time, i promise you to not fail in the final scene

sunnyc1: yes, we build our own characters from internet photos or our friends... thanks for the comments

[trick]

...i hate everything about character studio...

I suppose you know all your options in all other software, but do you know PointOven from www.ef9.com: this gives an easy, stable and memoryefficient way to do characteranimations at rendertime. Even if you animate inside MAX you can export(=bake) to MDD and do an import to do memory-eficient and stable characteranimations for networkrendering. Something to consider if you have 50+ chars to animate, especially since it only costs $99...

[lrivero]

hi

thanks for the link i have sent it to the tech dir to check it out

but troubles aren't with memmory, we experience troubles managing characters with character studio, a lot of crashes and abnoramlly corrupted files without anything strange done..those kind of problems that you'd find in large projects, unexpected troubles that hold you in the same place for days

thanks again

[trick]

I haven't used CS since V1 (which also was to reason to look for other options). I suppose v4 is more capable when animating lots of characters, but what I have read from users it seems that when using it on huge scenes there are a lot of memory leaks (it's always a memory problem; not about the quantity but about the correct handling)that give unexpected crashes. I know from programming experience that this kind of crashes are hard to track and can only be circumvented by baking in all animation (by key, by expression, etc) as much as possible. I do it with 50+ characters in LW all the time: and that should say s.th. since I don't think LW's strongest point is stability. This is s.th.that goes beyond the subject of this thread, but sure is worth investigating. The moment PointOven supports XSI you will have the Crowd/Behaviour option which is way more stable then CS: expensive but worth it. Since it was my last chance to upgrade my MAX3 license, I thought it was time to replace Lightscape with MAX/VRay, but personally I hope to see an extra possibility for easier character animation in CS (and the CAToolkit) that I can export via PointOven to LW.

[lrivero]

good idea, you are right, character consumes a lot of memmory and crash too many times, we alwayswork with baked animations from every kind of anmation types of CS, motion flow, mixer, workbench... becuase with animation only with keys CS is more stable... but with that soft we could use other packages i'll love to use like xsi...

nice option, thanks again

[trick]

... becuase with animation only with keys CS is more stable...

Maybe it's a little confusing. A lot of people mean by baking: putting all animation (procedural and expressions) into keys. I meant by baking: putting al animation in the vertices as displacement information.

Baking to keys still means you have skeletons which deform the mesh (and can still be an attack on stability when having lots of characters). Baking to the mesh however is a huge amount of data, but it is very foolproof since it's only loaded at rendertime...This only of course if the PointOven plugin is working 100% stable...I'm still waiting for options to relate the displacement information from PointOven to the path such an animated object travels, but I think this can be done easily with Maxscript...

[lrivero]

hi trick
i sent your post to my tech dir and he said me the same words about animating vertex but he found that method very good to avoid crashes but very big files with more than 20.000vertex each character

thanks again

[trick]

...very big files

Based on a 5k poly character (20k is awfully big for arch.viz: look at www.axyz-design.com) it's about 1 MB per 36 frames. So if you make a 10 second looping animation that's about 10 MB which I think is acceptable. With PointOven you can speed up or slow down the sequence when played back (at least in LW, I don't know about MAX). Since the files are played back from HD instead of MEM it actually does not matter much...

Edit: sorry, 20k points is still about 13k poly which still is too big...

[lrivero]

we need 20k... sure... i don't understand why you are always talking about arch viz as arch viz must have a "standard" look or a "standard" for scale of the characters... i share your opinion about ayz but i cannot understand

20k is awfully big for arch.viz

why? in arch viz you cannot do a short shot of a character???
this is the preview before changing materials for a camera of the interior of the theatre..


thanks again with your coments an suggestions

we'll show you the final scenes in a few days

tahnks[/url]

[trick]

With characters for Arch.Viz I mean characters as entourage. To make characters look photorealistic you absolutely don't need more then 5k polys. Sure there always is some character sitting and moving in the foreground, but then it is not entourage anymore but serves a certain purpose. And then I doubt if 20k is enough, but I also don't think you need more then five 20k characters at the same time !!! To make your scene realistic you should work with DOF which means there will be no more then 2 characters at the same time that need 20k polys and then still I wonder if your client will see the difference: but then again if you want some other work besides arch.stuff (like KDLab) I can understand your perfectionism. As long as characters DON'T serve a specific purpose I charge my clients the normal fees: in 90% of the projects the main goal is architecture with a pure informational purpose (I have 80 3-5k characters each with 20 motion clips for NLA). The other 10% could contain projects where characters might have a more leading role (I have 2 fully animatable 10k SUBDIV SURF chars for this incl.lipsync)with the purpose of delivering some kind of message, but then pricing is a a whole different thing, especially since they need to be adapted to the task. Since I am a one-man shop working with freelancers when needed it is not my goal to do these kind of projects.

Whatever, I'm really looking forward to the final results and don't doubt they will make your clients happy

Below is some peeps that will be used for a twenties setting: 1500 quads, good for either 3000, 12000 or 24000 tris. When textured and clothes deformed they all will look perfectly realistic for their respective purpose.

[lrivero]

finally i ask for some questions about characters, i told that i don't work with characters and the guys from the animation team told me about the account for the higher character is of 9k not 20k, those were some models we had and we are not working with them now



do you like him for "architectural viz"???

[trick]

Perfect

Although a bit dangerous and too
Maybe an actor on the stage in your theater?

Now let's see if I can push some deadlines to make my characters THAT perfect

[lrivero]

sure you can do it, a good web fashion database and that's all... let's go to model a charcater

regards

[johncg]

Is that good?

As always with your company, a very irregular scene. Some serious modelling and lighting in some areas is mixed with a weird deep background (what's goin' on at the end of the street? the end of the world?) and a dumb, amateur change of exposition.

Elegant camera and good "atmosphere" on the other side.

Needs more work and less self-satisfaction