extreme martial arts doco

[gvalent]

We did this for The Discovery Channel at Animal Logic using Vray.
It airs soon, so I thought Vlado and the crew might be interested. G

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/xma/xma.html

[cocolas]

damn!!! that's great stuff!!...the modeling and lighting on the bodies is stunning!!! can't wait to see it on Discovery Channel!!!....

it's good to see that high profile studios use vray on work like this - very tight!!

can you share some settings/tips about your mats for the bodies??...and your lighting??

thanks,

and great work!!

paul.

[blinkimage]

Very nice. how did you go about rendering the moving parts (the skeleton for example)? Was that with vray also or was it comped in later? If with vray, was it a 'brute force' solution?

...slightly more interesting than some of the industrial warehouses I've done in the past...

[deano]

uuuuuhhhh...... w-o-w

[Dman3d]

Interesting would be an understatement!
Settings and all the other standard questions!

[Neo2k1]

Just incredible!!!

[jujubee]

Looks great! Just can't wait to watch it!!!

[malleus]

The materials are relatively simple,
there's a glass material and a "neon" material. I put them both in a Blend material, and there's a composite map that mixes between them.

The Glass material is non-reflective, with a bit of blue or red fog.
The Neon material is just a gradient in the self illumination slot, goes from white to yellow to red, or white to cyan to blue, depending on the version.

The work is in the composite that mixes between one material and the otther: there's a stretched noise for muscle fibre, a gradient so there's more Neon at the tips of the muscles to look like tendons, and a falloff map so the neon shows up at the edges of the muscles.

the gradients were tweaked on a muscle by muscle basis, some muscles have tendons stretching half way along them, others only have little bits of tendon at the tips.

I had to use a blend material because the Vray material doesn't support self-illumination

There were lots and lots of revisions for colour tweaking...that's about it for the skeletons.
The background was rendered in the regular max renderer because at the time Vray didn't handle opacity well. The floor is also Max, except for the glossy reflections which were rendered with the skeletons. Most of the shots were rendered with Vray motion blur as well.

I should point out that this is a HDTV production, those little quicktimes don't do it justice...each one of those movies was rendered at HD rez.

So: glowing refractive ninja skeletons on a glossy reflective floor with Vray motion blur kicking the crap out of each other at glorious 1920x1080 rez.....rendertimes were between 16 and 40 minutes per frame, which I'm pretty bloody happy with.

Matt S

[gvalent]

What Matt said. He is right about the little movies not doing the HD res
justice. I'll see if we can get the ok to post some hi-res stills and maybe something about it on the Animal website. If you're in Sydney Matt and Jeremy will be talking about it at the Digital Media World expo.

[jujubee]

Your XMA special was excellent! Though I had to force my girlfriend to watch it last night lol. It was very cool to see all the technology applied to your set- from the mocap studio to all the extra computers and scientific equipment rigged up. I saw some screens and noted that there was more than Max used for the 3d setup. You're also correct in mentioning how the quicktime videos don't do any justice.

Now are you part of animalogic? It's the same Australian studio responsible for bringing the Matrix correct? How many people did your production take and out of curiousity- what were the overall costs? Timeframe? Btw, there's a brief mention of your video on hardwareconnect.com today- but not any reference to vray...

[lordshaitan]

The CG was awsome man. Although im VERY sick of this EXTREME this, EXTREME that, but hey thats not your fault.

Seriously, out of all the stuff i see on the discover channel that had to be the most top notch, great show!

[J_Bug]

You guys really did the Martial Artists good justice. The way that the sequences were depicted weren't only aesthetically pleasing but very clear and informative.

NICE JOB ALL AROUND

--Jon

[rgbxyz]

sensational work!!

[Notoriousbug]

very very good work!!!!!

[malleus]

Thanks guys,
Yeah we kinda rolled our eyes a bit when we heard the final title.
And yes we (Animal Logic) worked on Matrix and Reloaded, though it was a different crew that did the work on those films.

All up there's about 40 minutes of CG in XMA, about half is compositing work. We worked on it for about 3 and a half months...though by the end it felt like 3 1/2 years. It was a smooth project and I'm really happy with the outcome.
Thanks again,

Matt