What I have been working on since August...

[cpnichols]

Actually the rendertimes were not that bad at all. 2k fully motion blurred maybe an hour. But that was not what was cool about it. With every plane we outputed a huge amount of data from renderman. To be exact, 63 channels of data. All of which came into Nuke (DD's awesome compositing package) as one EXR file where we did all the "real" lighting on the plane. We called it Shader Compositing, or Shampositing. You could virtually relight the plane completely within Nuke.

With that said, that workflow is not unique to Renderman, Vray would do an awesome job of it.

Anyway, the shots that I did that I am most proud of are the ones of Edi (the robot plane) on the aircraft carrier taking off for the first time.

There are some images of it in this article:

http://www.cgunderground.com/intervi...?featureID=66#

[percydaman]

ya great stuff. i am currently exploring the added possibilities of doing more lighting in post by separating out the individual lights and creating a quasi bent normal type pass. Its hard to explain cause I dont fully understand it alot myself...

any suggestion as where to look to get a grip on this more "feature film" style to lighting?

[RErender]

Now that you mention it it was the file size that I remember being huge, I think they said it was around 70 megs per frame? I was very impressed by the work you guys did with the clouds. Very nice work all around. I am also interested in how the shots come together in post.

[cpnichols]

Clouds were the big thing (size wise). Many a terrabyte was used to store all the voxel data. Especially when you have clouds that need to span 100s of KM of sky. DD used their amazing volumetric rendering system, which I guess is now officially called Storm to render the clouds. It is the same thing that did all the tornados and stuff in Day After Tomorrow, and the avalanche in xXx. I actually did not pay attention to the filesize of the exr files. EXRs are actually very smart at having effcient lossless compression. The can automatically draw crop boxes around your elements. So little planes take up very little in terms of filesize. The best part about EXR is that it is open source, so if you want it to do anything fancy, you can write it in yourself. I think you can even include the 3d model if you wanted. Not that you would need to.

[Morbid Angel]

cpnichols...can you explain why use renderman if you were going to entierly relight the whole shots in nuke anyway?

[cpnichols]

cpnichols...can you explain why use renderman if you were going to entierly relight the whole shots in nuke anyway?

Well Nuke was not used as a 3d package, it was used to assemble all the layers generated out of renderman. Normally, a rendering engine does the compositing for you: Diffuse x lighting + specular + reflection, etc... they broke all that down (and a lot more) and were able to reconstruct it all in Nuke and then change it on the fly. This is not new... combustion does it well. Just imagine being able to do that and x10 with lots of custom controls (I am not sure I can talk much more about them). I think what may be confusing is that when I say relight, I don't mean change lighting position. But generally, the sun position is the only thing in the scene that is pretty much set.... at least for planes. But I can do things like rebalance key to fill.

[Morbid Angel]

i see, another question this one more for render man, would you suggest renderman artist tools or prman for maya? whats the difference and which ones are more usable in production (which one should i look at, because Im interested in it)

[cpnichols]

The basic different is that RAT offers Slim which is their own shader network system. Very powerful and very customizable. Hopefully, one day, Vray wil have someting like slim. It then uses mtor to translate the data from maya to RIB and send it to the standalone prman, similar to the way the old MR worked in MAX, where it would make an MI file and send it to "ray". The prman for maya work inside maya (sorta like the way MR does now) and uses the hypershader (which I thinks sorta sucks). It is, however, a lot cheaper.

[Morbid Angel]

I hear a lot of people saying that unless you know how to write shaders for rman, there is no point of using it otherwise?

[cpnichols]

welll... two things. First is that it is really easy to write shaders for renderman. That is why so many people want to use it. Again... hopefully... this will also be true for vray. Second, you can do a LOT in slim. It is all node based which makes it super easy. And I hear the the new RAT is even better.

So yes, writting shader is important, but it is easy, and you can still build shaders through slim, even if it is more "efficient" to build it from scratch. Once you write a shader, you can bring it into slim.

[Morbid Angel]

thanks for the tips, i apreciate it :P

[Da_elf]

i see in reading up on you on the underground forum thing website that you used to be into mathmatics. i studied enough of it to be sick of it when doing my mechanical and electrical engineering course hehe. anyhow. came across this today and i honestly thing this guy is onto something here..you be the judge...........

[cpnichols]

I was more into the "abstract" stuff...

non-euclidian geometry, topology, abstract algebra, real analysis, ... stuff like probability and statistics and calculus, just bored me.

[percydaman]

i see in reading up on you on the underground forum thing website that you used to be into mathmatics. i studied enough of it to be sick of it when doing my mechanical and electrical engineering course hehe. anyhow. came across this today and i honestly thing this guy is onto something here..you be the judge...........

he lost me after the first line.... Hell i was actually lost BEFORE that... theres a reason why I became an artist...lol

[jujubee]

I just read this in Computer Graphics World and thought to share with Chris in case he didnt see it:

"It's one thing to have a CG airplane zipping by other, real planes; motion covers a multitude of sins. But to have a CG aircraft sit beside a real one on an aircraft carrier takes the kind of skill demonstrated in Stealth. "I thought the effects were astounding," says Taylor. "It was the toughest things to put the CG plane next to the real one in broad daylight, and you couldn't tell the difference." He also applaudes the decision to shoot the fighter cockpits with no canopies and install CG canopies in post. "You have great-looking textures in the canopies, such as microscopic crazing in the plastic and all sorts of little reflections as the sun hits," he says. "It raised the conviction level of those shots a tremendous degree."