Qhimm.com Forums
Project forums => Team Avalanche => Topic started by: Mayo Master on 2015-04-12 17:41:34
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Getting started...
(http://i.imgur.com/xhd54im.png)
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Looking good :D
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Proof of concept...
(http://i.imgur.com/HTuaFnl.jpg)
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That land looks like it had the life sucked out of it even more than the original, good job
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Quick update: currently trying to make the camera tracking of the mtnvl video. There's still a fair amount of error in my camera solution, I still need to optimize that before I try to link trackers with geometry.
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I think spoox was able to pull the camera data for a different movie from the psx version. Maybe he can do the same here.
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If he could: awesome! However, there are many things uncertain: a/ I think he could retrieve camera information based on walkmesh data, and I don't know if mtnvl includes any of that (since there's no sequence involving an overlay of characters). b/ I'm not sure if camera information could be passed on Blender easily (since he uses max scripts to get it).
So I decided to get a headstart. I may be able to come up with something decent-ish :P
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mtnvl first video test - proof of concept. What you can see is the reactor, the walkmeshes, and some extremely basic mesh to represent geological features. I made it in around 15 pfs so far. The frames have been rendered in super low res (320 x 224).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8DOsJ-B-Q5VWDRsVV81T3dVWEE/view?usp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8DOsJ-B-Q5VWDRsVV81T3dVWEE/view?usp=sharing)
For reference, the actual video is the following one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUglgIS6XwA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUglgIS6XwA)
Still with a few jumps, but I think it's a pretty good place to start.
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Seems fairly close - I suppose it won't have to match exactly anyway since there are no 3d models pasted on top of it
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Ok that is looking pretty good. Does cycles have a network render component? I just added another computer to my arsenal.
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I think spoox was able to pull the camera data for a different movie from the psx version. Maybe he can do the same here.
Oh yes, but not limited to the psx, as the pc version is a lot easier to get the data from (it's all in one single lgp file).
But, as there is no walkmesh involved here there is no data inside, except for:
at time 1f c0.position = [0,0,0]
at time 1f c0.Target.position = [0,0,0]
at time 2f c0.position = [0,0,0]
at time 2f c0.Target.position = [0,0,0]
at time 3f c0.position = [0,0,0]
at time 3f c0.Target.position = [0,0,0]
at time 4f c0.position = [0,0,0]
at time 4f c0.Target.position = [0,0,0]
at time 5f c0.position = [0,0,0]
at time 5f c0.Target.position = [0,0,0]
at time 6f c0.position = [0,0,0]
at time 6f c0.Target.position = [0,0,0]
But this is not a real bad thing, as there is no fading from or into field files, you can make it as you want. ::)
and I must say, from what I see, it looks good so far.
Keep up the spirit, when I have more breathing space I'll join the workforce again.
8-)
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Oh yes, but not limited to the psx, as the pc version is a lot easier to get the data from (it's all in one single lgp file).
But, as there is no walkmesh involved here there is no data inside, except for:
[...]
But this is not a real bad thing, as there is no fading from or into field files, you can make it as you want. ::)
and I must say, from what I see, it looks good so far.
Keep up the spirit, when I have more breathing space I'll join the workforce again.
8-)
As I thought: if you don't have a walkmesh, you can hardly retrieve camera data. And as you said, since there's no "seamless transition to a field scene involved" or overlay of character, I can do it however I want.
Anyway, we'll all be looking forward to you being able to join the workforce :)
Oh, by the way, back to the video: I've manually reconstructed another camera path based on this initial motion tracking (by taking the camera position and target every 10 frames and make spline interpolation), with the idea of accomplishing:
a/ a smoother path to avoid jumps from frame to frame
b/ being able to make a 60 fps video (although I'm dreading having to render 1200 frames at 1920 x 1080 :-\ )
I just need to learn the very basics of Blender's animation interface, for now I am not able to fine tune the camera speed along its path (at the moment it moves at constant speed on its path, which isn't quite the case of the original video). Once I can do that, the camera will be ready to roll.
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Update! Using SpooX's fbx data, I was able to come up with the following movie at 30 fps.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8DOsJ-B-Q5VTDFLVVotOEllVjQ&authuser=0 (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8DOsJ-B-Q5VTDFLVVotOEllVjQ&authuser=0)
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Nice :D
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Looks very nice! :mrgreen:
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As I thought: if you don't have a walkmesh, you can hardly retrieve camera data. And as you said, since there's no "seamless transition to a field scene involved" or overlay of character, I can do it however I want.
Anyway, we'll all be looking forward to you being able to join the workforce :)
Oh, by the way, back to the video: I've manually reconstructed another camera path based on this initial motion tracking (by taking the camera position and target every 10 frames and make spline interpolation), with the idea of accomplishing:
a/ a smoother path to avoid jumps from frame to frame
b/ being able to make a 60 fps video (although I'm dreading having to render 1200 frames at 1920 x 1080 :-\ )
I just need to learn the very basics of Blender's animation interface, for now I am not able to fine tune the camera speed along its path (at the moment it moves at constant speed on its path, which isn't quite the case of the original video). Once I can do that, the camera will be ready to roll.
I can help with the FMV rendering at 1920x1080 :) Also, does the Cycles renderer have a network rendering component because it would be nice to be able to do the rendering in batches over a network, kinda like LightWave's ScreamerNet and ScreamerNet II
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If one frame takes a day and a half to render as it is... You can absolutely use my idle clock cycles if blender has a distributed render capability. That looks pretty spot on too, I love following these threads
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I dont think the frames take a day and a half to render, probably less than hour but thats because there are no textures or bump maps for the mountain's rocky terrain or reactors and plitems laying around. However once you add rock textures with offsets, a shiny Shinra reactor that requires ray tracing, it will take ages. Maybe we can all pool some resources into this ;)
PS I've looked into some network renderers. LokiRender seems promising since it can also distribute single frame renders as tiles to networked machines.
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Thanks for your interest, guys!
Right now it's still the "proof of concept stage", the mountain "sculpt" from the video is meant to be remodelled. The video resolution was at 320 x 224, and given how basic the scene was, each frame took between 15 to 20 seconds to render.
I don't know how much time the frames from the final scene will take to render. I think it should be quite long (between half a day and one day?) because the final scene will have a very large population of the very distinct-looking geological formations of Mt Nibel, so I guess it will be very high poly. I was also thinking of decreasing subsurf and poly counts for the video frames renders, whereas I'd ramp them up for the field scenes renders (after all, the video frames will have a significantly lower resolution than the field scene images).
By the way, I also have a very basic question: so far I've not been able to find a free software which could generate 60 fps movies from still frames. Windows movie maker doesn't seem to allow frame duration below 0.03s >:( That being said, maybe 30 fps for these videos would be enough (plus cutting down overall rendering requirements). Any thoughts?
I appreciate you looked into network renderers, that will certainly make things handy. I also know there are a few online render farms for Blender, although I never used them myself.
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I think it would be a shame to have 30fps FMV after all the effort of redoing it :(
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so far I've not been able to find a free software which could generate 60 fps movies from still frames.
DaVinci Resolve (https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve) might have this feature. It's primarily targeted at color grading and correction, but as I understand, it is a fully functional NLE, and a suitable substitute for applications like Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas in a pinch. I haven't used it myself, and I cannot confirm that it has this feature, but I'd not be surprised if it does.
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Thanks for that tip, Covarr. I'll give a check to the Free version and will let you know. I've already rendered all the frames for the 60 fps at 320 x 224 proof of concept, so if this software can do it, I'll have the video out in a matter of minutes.
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So... quick update. I made a quick try to Da Vinci Resolve.
So far I've not been impressed because very basic operations (such as opening the directory containing your media files) didn't come as being very intuitive. One may argue that Blender 3d isn't exactly intuitive either, but when it takes you to browse online tutorials (I've not even found it in the User's Manual) to figure how to "Open/Import files", it's another level.
Once I managed to finally do that, after loading all the frames into my project, if I click on the media files to do anything, the software crashes. It crashes "automatically" (tried 6 times, 6 crashes). Right now I've decided to give it a rest, but the "Uninstall" function is very tempting :-\
Any help would be appreciated :P
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I am almost positive you can do this sort of thing with FFMPEG from the terminal/cmd. Just make sure that your frame images all share the same naming convention in numeric order. "frame001, frame002" etc
http://ffmpeg.org/faq.html#How-do-I-encode-single-pictures-into-movies_003f (http://ffmpeg.org/faq.html#How-do-I-encode-single-pictures-into-movies_003f)
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After quite a bit of fiddling, I managed to get the camera rolling for mtnvl2. From SpooX's camera data, I managed to solve alignment problems by adding a "Shift" (offset in camera position and target). You can check it out with the link below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8DOsJ-B-Q5VNTNMZ21DX3U1enM/view?usp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8DOsJ-B-Q5VNTNMZ21DX3U1enM/view?usp=sharing)
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And now we have a bridge!
(http://i.imgur.com/EUwU3O7.png)
By the way, modelling that bridge got me thinking that this was probably one of the most idiotic bridges ever conceived. A bridge at a 45 degrees angle, really ::) Quite a way to make a restricted access to the reactor!
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The last half would have to be climbed like a ladder. Lol
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It's okay, it was designed to break anyway. :P
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A bridge at a 45 degrees angle, really ::) Quite a way to make a restricted access to the reactor!
That's why Shin-Ra sent 1st class Soldier agents there.
Either that or the Jenova sample needed some peaceful sleep so it went out of the seal and changed the way the
bridge was built, then returned to its place of rest to dream with giving some love to Lavos (from Chrono Trigger).
BTW, you are doing some beautiful work with that scene.
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Update!
Bridge is textured. I also worked on some atmospheric effects with low-altitude mist and clouds. It may look slightly odd because the mountain scape doesn't extend as far as the clouds do (which will be remedied, of course). What I'm quite happy about is that I managed to make the clouds and the mist without using any scattering shader, while scattering shaders are usually quite demanding in terms of computing power (and render times). In other words, the method I used (clouds are made with a plane with a properly crafted texture, the mist is made by a combination of Z-depth and height pass in the compositor) is rather quick to render.
(http://i.imgur.com/iqqz7sR.jpg)
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Great work! Looks really nice so far :mrgreen:
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Awesome effort! Well done Mayo!
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Looks nice without the materials, bit like an iceberg, I'm glad you made progress.
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Going down looks pretty challenging, might as well try to slide :)
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Spent some time on the modelling and texturing of the mountain range which will make the horizon line... Maybe it will need some color/brightness adjustments, but I think I have a good base for it.
(http://i.imgur.com/hFctRiO.png)
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You make this look so easy!
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You make this look so easy!
Well, if it makes you feel better, I spent more than 3 hours fiddling and experimenting with it :P
In more details: The model is based on a giant subdivided annulus, where the central circle of the annulus was given more elevation. Add to this more subsurf levels and 2 displacement modifiers using procedural textures.
For the texturing: the trick is that I wouldn't use UV mapping here, because of the insane size (the annulus being about 50 km in diameter!) of the object. So textures are a combination of procedurals with texture images, where images had to be mapped along a spherical mapping scheme. Unfortunately, the spherical mapping scheme isn't available by default in the Cycles render, but fortunately, it can be recreated (thankfully someone made it before because it's not obvious! (http://www.elysiun.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=343835&d=1415700292)). Now the other trick is that I found a good way to make texture functions depending on the slope of the mountain (as you can see, the cliff-like texture shows only on the near vertical areas of the mountain), using the scalar product of the surface normals with a vector along Z (which is pretty neat).
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Quick update... still working on the background landscape. Here's the latest render...
(http://i.imgur.com/IjrgDDy.png)
However, I'm not really happy with the results, and I find it a bit difficult to put the finger on what "doesn't work". If you have some feedback on this, it would be much appreciated. Among the possibilities I'm considering:
- Have more variety in the shapes of the geological formations which stick out from the base level of the ground
- Harmonise the textures between the ground and the geological formations
- Introduce several layers of clouds and mist, not just one
- Introduce depth of field, to slightly blur the elements of the landscape located further away
- Reboot my background texture for the clouds, because at the moment it doesn't follow how perspective should stretch the clouds towards the horizon.
That's all I can think of for now, but if you have other ideas it will be good for me to have that input. Note that I'll be away for the next two weeks.
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What does the background look like in relation to the scene?
Or in other words, what does the scene look like as a whole?
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I know you have mentioned the shape of the geological formations, but also consider the size. They may not be, but to my eyes they all look a similar size.
also are they supposed to be fir tree shaped? I remember them being more weird shaped
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One of the tricks of the shapes is to have them non symetric instanciate and rotate them randomly. That would give a more natural look.
An other option would be to include a nois modifier in the objects, I expect Blender has something like that...
Hope it helps.
8-)
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they all point up! that's what was bothering me about it!