Digital Dreams

An Update

Chris Schoo — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:43:05 +0000

Here is a you tube version of the video. The audio sounds horrible…

On a sad note, as I was transferring all my animation files to a new hard drive today, I somehow lost all my raw animation frames and premiere pro video file. It’s super annoying, and fairly distressing. I still have the max files, so it’s not all bad. I can re-render if I really need to…

It’s HERE!

Chris Schoo — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:51:16 +0000

The reel that I showed for my final project review is finally here, in a somewhat smaller net friendly form. It’s still weighing in at 50mb, though… The link is below. Please let me know what you think or share any suggestions or maybe even techniques.

ps: it’s in a quicktime format, you need at least quicktime 7. I was working on an avi version today as well, but the lab is closing in 10 minutes and I’m running into some errors. I’ll put it up if enough people want it…otherwise quicktime will be the only one.

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cschoo/reel

or right click and save as

Soon…

Chris Schoo — Thu, 10 May 2007 23:36:29 +0000

It’s been a little while, but school’s out! What do you expect??

I’ll have the animation on the net soon, by Tuesday, perhaps. The computer lab is closed until Monday. Hopefully this summer I will continue to explore mental and max and get some more animations cooking. I’ll be shifting to Cinema 4D as well (cause i got classes in it next semester) so watch for that too.

Check back very soon for more things.

Final Animation and Stills Reel

Chris Schoo — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:22:04 +0000

There are only a few days left to get my final things ready.

I’m still searching for music for my animation reel, I’ve got a few ideas in which to use, but I’m still keeping my ears open for something better, or different. I will post the reel when I’m done. For now I have many rough edits, and I’m still getting a few clips of animation rendered.

I plan on releasing everything on a dvd, so I gotta learn how to make menus and things of that nature really fast.

Also, I’m trying to get the technical details or the mental ray renderer “dumbed” down enough to be either visual or easy to understand. What it comes down to, I think, is knowing how light works, knowing how to observe it and then understanding how the renderer handles it. That, and understanding how to manipulate shaders. Makes sense, right??

Back to work…

No GI and stuff

Chris Schoo — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 01:36:41 +0000

I’ve just got my re-rendered frames back from the Greeble Water Box animation. I turned off the GI (global illumination) to get rid of the flicker. It seems to have worked, yet oddly increased my render time. I say oddly because I would think that not calculating GI would be faster. It’s still a bit of a mystery…

The new video will be posted tomorrow.

On another note, I have 2 new camera animations set into my Teapot Pavilion scene. I also plan to do one more camera move in each of the previous scenes to help make a more dynamic sense of the spaces in the context of the animation reel.

There are less than 2 weeks left and I hope to finish almost all of my animation rendering this week and take the last week to edit my reel. It’s really going to be a big push, considering the amount of mysterious errors I always find when rendering animations with mental ray.

On a very side note…my glare shaders are not working when I render my animations. I may be pulling a some tricks in post production to get the look back, or not…maybe two versions to compare. More as it comes.

Final Reel…

Chris Schoo — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:08:16 +0000

Here is a very rough begining to what I want to be a final reel for my semester of work. I’ve got a bunch of animations waiting to be rendered and will be filling the reel with at least 2 more animations and a bunch of my still images. The music is very preliminary, just playing around mostly…

Next Animation update 2

Chris Schoo — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:04:34 +0000

Here is the video. I’ve brightened the levels and increased the contrast in post production in an effort to undo what youtube does to the video. It helped a bit…

Notice the GI errors along the walls as the camera pans away. It flickers like crazy. I’m going to rerender this scene without GI in hopes that it will solve the issue.

Next Animation update

Chris Schoo — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:03:54 +0000

After almost 60 hours of combined rendering time the animation is done…sort of. There are some errors with the GI, so I will have to re-render. Sucky. For some reason in my tests turning off the GI increased render times, when I thought it should decrease. I thought the GI would be a problem and I was right. I;m just going to brute force the render again and see if everything looks good with GI disabled…

I’ll be posting some frames of the render sequence to show what the problems are. Check back on Wednesday.

Next Animation

Chris Schoo — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 22:14:52 +0000

On a whim I decided to do another abstract type animation in relation to the last one. This fits in with my goal to have a small animation reel at the end of the semester (I’m still planning the content of it and will have another post devoted to the goals).

The last few days have seen me revisting some water shaders. Today I have something close to what I will be sticking with for the animation. Below our my test images produced today. The teapot shader is blown out and my exposure levels are a bit out of whack…this will be fixed as I narrow in on my final look for the sequence.

The second image starts to show the water shader very nicely! I’ve got caustics working in full force as well as a volume shader simulating light scatter with depth. The glare lens shader is also being used to get the “blown out” whites and highlights.

IES Light Library

Chris Schoo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 20:58:52 +0000

Today I’m building a library of IES light files for Erco Lighting and Lithinia Lighting. I’m including everything they have and also all the 3d models from Erco.

Since Erco packaged averything fairly messy this will take a while to do. If your interested in the finished package – all neat and tidy – then let me know…