So I started lighting the "plan" scene in Tinman's throneroom.

First a question, Is there a "finished" version of the throne room put together. I found all the parts but no model or chor with the stuff laid out. I also noticed the windows aren't complete. Is that for me to finish? or is someone else working on them? I can put all this stuff together, I just don't know who's toes I'm stepping on doing so.

Anyway. Here is a first draft of some lighting ideas for the throneroom. Basically a bunch of lights along the walls and a backlight from the moon outside. I'm also playing with some compositing tricks to help the render look, ie blooms, blur and AO.

Here are some pics for comparison. Any input is greatly appreciated.

[attachmentid=21682]

In addition I had to modify Tinman's materials. The reflection was way to mirror like. I gave him a reflection falloff of 2000 to 3000 cm and that helped make him show up. I think its a good idea to add reflection falloffs to every reflective object in the movie in order to make them work in darker scenes. These could be tweeked for distance. Can the powers that be let me know if this is cool before I start to update my changes to SVN?

C

Kevin (cosmonaut) Waldron is working on Sequence 3, which is also in the Throne Room. You two should split up the chores, and give me a list of any new modeling you need so I can assign it. We don't have "texturers" available, so you'll need to do that.

Cool.

I'm a "that be" but my "powers" are rather limited. However, with SVN we can always "unwind" whatever you do if we don't like it, so do whatever you want, (coordinated with what Kevin's doing, of course).

The throne room was modelled pretty extensively by Rodger. I believe he made the parts and used an action to assemble them. You'd want to get this straight before doing any more work.

Cool! Welcome. I'm glad I'm not the only one doing lighting.

I don't see a large difference between the 3 images. In the last one, Tin Woodman is more contrasty. I think I see where you are going. Finding a way to have Tin Woodman detatch from the background. Looking for the same effect, I've experimented with depth of field and fog but I was not very satisfied with the separation the I got from those approaches. More on this further down.

That's me. I was trying to texture Tin Woodman as if he was made of non-painted metals.

Please read what follows not as a directive but only as an explanation of my approach because in retrospect, I don't think this approach is suitable for Tin Woodman but I currently only have hypothesis as to what would be the best approach.

To properly simulate metals, the reflectivity needs to be set to 100% and let the diffuse do the filtering. Unfortunately, tin metal have a very pale reflectivity color (silver is even paler) so the 100% reflective metal ends up being almost like a pure mirror. The other reflectivity attribute that help is the reflectivity softness which is driven by the specular size property.

The Tin Woodman texturing I did was really designed to be rendered with soft reflection ON and I also implement optimizations in v14 render to improve render time for 100% reflective surfaces. Those optimizations will only kick in if Reflectivity, Reflective Filter and Reflectivity Blend are all set to 100% though.

What gives the metal its characteristic appearance is really its reflectivity. The fact that it reflects the environment. Not using soft reflection results in mirrorlike surface which does not look like true metals. Metals are usually rougher than highly specular mirrors. Ultimately, metals could be so rough that they would look almost like diffuse surfaces but they also would require long render times so it is still better to not push specular sizes too high except on some of the smaller parts.

Now, this is for the theory so to speak. In practice and in retrospect, the results are not too satisfactory for Tin Woodman because, since he is reflecting the environment, it becomes difficult to make Tin Woodman separate from this same environment. So the issue revolves around the need to make him look like made of metals while keeping him different enough from the environment. I can see two elements of solutions:

1) We could darken the different metals diffuse colors so the reflectivity would in effect be lower while still looking like metals. But he would not look like made of tin anymore.

2) We could paint Tin Woodman. Nancy did a very good job when texturing Tin Woodman's heart. We could do the same thing with the rest of his body. This too would effectively lower the effective reflectivity while still looking like metals, although painted metals. Right now Tin Woodman have not effectively been textured. This would be the appoach I would personally privilege at this point.

Reflectivity Falloff is a hack, designed to replace soft reflection without the expense of actually computing the soft reflection. Unfortunately, Reflectivity Falloff does not play well with transparency in the scene and can produce render artifacts when reflecting transparent or partially transparent objects or when reflecting objects seen through transparent objects. I worry that this could eventually get us into troubles in some situations. But I can see what you are trying to accomplish and I would like to try to find a technical solution.

The choreographies each have the throne room floor in them. Rodger placed the rest of the set in an action which is applied to the model of the floor. You can load the full-res model by changing the action that's applied to the throne room floor model. It's in:

/Shared Data/Models/Set_chors/Tinmans Castle/final castle/Throne Room Interior/throne_room_assembly.act

The Throne has its own action too. The final version is in the "Throne Room Interior" folder, too.

As an experiment, I lowered Tinman's reflectivity to 50% and got a good result, enough was reflected in him to let you see he's shiny but he remains "flat" enough to stand out from the background.

Rodger modeled one of the windows but rather than copying a lot of geometry we all thought it would make more sense to add that detail to the windows as a decal. It just hasn't been done yet.

I like the center image the best (bloom with no AO) but that's just my knee-jerk reaction. They all look good after seeing just the realtime renders for so long

Did you add the green color to Tin Woodman or was he like that? I don't remember him being so green...

Thanks Colin! I'm excited to see the next update!

Rhett

Tin reflectivity is green.

Thanks for the input guys. I figured out the finished throne room, and started lighting it based on the light positions. With the exception of a cheat light on the tin man it worked well enough. I ended up taking the reflection down to 60 percent in order to keep the red of the carpet from overwhelming Tin man. Overall I like the separation, but I know this is only a cheat for now... I'll check the reflective softness next.

The only difference between the first 3 pics was mainly bloom level and adding a slight AO in the bottom one. Its hard to pick them out individually, but when you run them as an animation they pop allot, in different ways. I think the blur and bloom is better than a straight render since real footage would have this naturally, otherwise the shots would be to clean.

here's where its at with Depth of field and I played with some volumetrics coming through the stained glass. Its barely noticable and probably not worth the render hit.

Oddly the baseboard material around the room didn't seem to pick up the Depth of Field.

[attachmentid=21697]

C

One other thought.. when we look at these shots for contrast and gamma, we should look at them on a neutral background. I had been seeing them on the default white of firefox and and thought I must be going blind, they seemed much darker than my renders.. I set the background to 50 percent gray and their looking normal now ;-)

But movie-making is the Art of Cheating
That looks very nice Colin, I like that the window is blue against warmer colors inside the room.
I don't anything that jumps out as volumetric light but I have only seen this image. But you're right, unless volumetrics will be a bigger part of the image it's probably not worth the render hit.

Oh that's looking great. We'll have to put tinman's material on the chair too to finish it off....it may add to the reflections though. I also wish Tinman had his beard.

Sorry I'm a little late here. Was too busy yesterday to chime in So, as Martin pointed out I've been lighting Sequence 3 and have done a fair amount of work on this set as well (we most likely will have some conflicts). I think we'll need to discuss how we are going to split this up since most of the set lights and texturing will only need to be done once (obviously). Any thoughts on how best to do this? Maybe the first thing we should split up is the texturing? I'll post what I've done tonight.

Kevin

btw, that is looking very nice, but I don't like the green tint on tinman either, even if it is realistic (sorry Yves)...

Me three... Remove green tint.

Out-voted and already decided but just my two cents...
I think it looks GREAT just the way it is! When he's in the sun it will be brighter and at night it will be bluer, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I like the green tint too. I thought it was quite nice, more interesting. I didn't think it was realistic, I thought it was artistic.

But I also think the reflectivity was way too high for reading Tinman's expressions - they definitely got lost. I noticed this when I did a sample final render of one of my animation assignments - all the nuance was gone. 60% may not be low enough for the face.

I also like the green tint, but i think it could be toned down a little. I love the lighting for this scene so far, Colin.

Yeah, the green tint does make him stand out. I'd like to see a comparison. I wonder how it would fare in the greener of the forest.

But I didn't think the lighting would make it look as good as it does. I love the depth of field.....it would be nice to have volumetric streaks come through the window. The glass needs to be in the shape of tinman and scarecrow.....maybe we could "stain glass" a render using that filter in photoshop.
Also, that space on the wall behind needs filling.

PS I can take a stab at doing the engravings on his jaw and torso if no one else is going to do it.

I kind of like the green tint too. It gives him that something extra, kind of like the way a brushed Nickel faucet can look more interesting than the same design in Chrome. Maybe a few side by side shots would help.

BTW, I'm not an expert, but are we using Anistropic Shading on Tinman? As I understand it that helps make metals render more like metals, but I've never played with it.

-Jim

i think the tin should keep the grey hue...

I do like the idea of creating some things using photoshop filters of A:M renders, like for the stained glass. Here is a quick test of making a mosaic out of a render:

I like green too if only to add my voice to the votes.

I'm surprised by comments about it being too green though. What about making sure the monitor is well gamma adjusted and white balanced? Like I said in another earlier thread considering comments about colors as displayed on a monitor is tricky at best. It is not only subjective but can be very objectively influenced by the material calibration or, more to the point, lack of calibration. Try to look at the same image on 3 different monitors to see what I mean.

For those reasons, I learned to be cautious about comments like "too dark", "too bright", "to contrasty", "too green", etc. unless the person making those comments can assert that the equipment was well calibrated. Otherwise, trying to make modifications based on everybody else's assessment of the perceived color is a frustrating and never ending experience. This time is no exception.

But in the end, the one who do the work is the one who is right and who decides. So I say, Colin, you do it the way you feel it. You decide from your own perception and your own equipment.

In the interest of keeping this discussion in one place I'm posting my progress with lighting the throne room for sequence 3 here. This is some of what I've got so far (ignore the missing railing, I was experimenting earlier). So far I've removed the ambiance setting from all the materials, changed the lamp colors, copied the window (which is way too saturated and doesn't match the light coming in), made the lamps separate objects and set them to not cast shadows, added sky light (I figured a throne room would probably be getting more of a "north light" instead of harsh/direct sunlight). and added lamp lights for the chandelier (I did the same for the other lamps but I had them disabled in this render). I'm using shadow maps on all the lights (the lamp is a rig with six lights). I still need to add some bounce / fill lights and see how this looks on an actual scene. I was planning to do the character rigs on a shot-by-shot basis. Texturing wise how do we want to do this? Is this room going to be made out of tin? Marble/stone like it is now? Are we going to do some ornate engravings?

Kevin

Cool. It would make sense considering the outside, that the walls and flat areas are made of tin. The supports and bases could be other materials.

Yves, my monitor is calibrated. I just think it looks too green. Not too green for tin reflectivity, just too green for the Tinman.

Kevin,

that throne room is looking really good. The lights could be a tad brighter but those deep shadows add a touch of mistery to the throne room. I think the lamps on the wall should cast a bright spot of light on the wall just behind them. This would add a touch of glitter.

Concerning texturing the room. My experience with texturing the outside castle with metal is that it makes it difficult to get good separation between the different elements of the architecture when everything is reflective. It will also make separating Tin Woodman from the room difficult. So I would advise texturing the room mostly with other materials like stone or marble, and parcimoniously keeping metals for some specific and select architectural elements like the handrails, the column bases, the light fixtires, etc.



Jeff,

Your monitor is calibrated, then we can talk color.

Tin reflectivity is green but actually not as green as I made it for Tin Woodman. I admit. I forced the greenness because I wanted to force the separation between Tin Woodman and its environment. Like I mentioned, because Tin Woodman is reflective, if he is of a neutral color (any gray) it becomes difficult to separate him from the environemnt because he basically acquire the environment color through reflection. By saturating its hue, any reflected environment will be tinted by this hue. Personally I would force it even more by increasing the green saturation and darkening it but since I'm not going to do it because I don't have to work on him anymore, consider this as just my preference.

While I did not choose green per se because it was the natural reflectivity of tin, I nevertheless like the forced green tint on him. Yes, it is obviously green but still not outragously obvious IMO.

What's wrong with green anyway? What color would suit him better? I would take the first color that comes to the majority's mind and reject it as too obvious, too unimaginative. That would probably be blue. Personally, I would paint Tin Woodman. What about a royal color such as deep red, purple, deep violet?



A word about lowering reflectivity:

I understand the temptation to lower reflectivity on Tin Woodman. As Nancy pointed out, it is difficult to read the facial expression when reflectivity is so high. And I agree with that completely. It is also more difficult to read the body posture and language for that matter.

But lowering the reflectivity is not the proper solution IMO. This will only make Tin Woodman look like made out of coated plastic. And this will undermine all attempts to get nice specular reflectivity on him.

If pure metal is not appropriate for Tin Woodman, I would not go toward the plastic look. I would suggest, as I mentioned earlier, that we paint him. Sort of like a car.



I think I've said all I had to say about Tin Woodman. Since I'm not working on him, I will try to not interfere anymore.

Hi,
cool room !


...some comments.

About tinwoodman and reflectivity:

What about setting Tinwoodman reflectivity to something like 2-3 feets distance ?
that way you preserve reflectivity but with a fuzzy reflections of the background ...more as brushed tin or less polished tin would look like...reflecting nearby object only...would help with character contrast

Using color reflectivity is a good idea...but IMHO it should be limited to one tint color only
...green tint ? why not .This would mean that Tinwoodman have a special magic blend of tin and it seem ok to me.

Personnally I would test : grey, charcoal or blueish tint
...and what about a special image used in the reflection field ?

About tin stuff inside tin castle:
My idea would be to change all woods stuff to tin and add more engraving tin details (map?).
Like the wood inside the arch ,window and on column...everything brown should be turn tin
...less marble and more tin on floor would be cool too...
...interlaced celtic tin design around the floor would be nice .
...different reflectivity tinted tin would be something to look at ...some black tinted and some white tinted
...a reflective floor would be cool
...Tinwoodman contrast should be emphased by lightning

I don't know but maybe adding some rivet dots somewhere(floor tiles?) would help the "tin" effect of the castle.

my two cent on the subject
Al

Kevin, the room looks great!
David

Responsibility and authority for decisions about a model should lie with the person doing the texturing, (after listening to suggestions of course). Yves thinks Nancy should have "Tin Woodman texture ownership". Plus, Tin Woodman still isn't done (scroll work, etc.) So, Nancy, at one time you said you'd take responsibility for texturing the main characters... Are you still up for it?

I had a discussion with Martin about this statement and I want to rectify some possible misunderstanding.

Obviously, we want to avoid the situation where anybody who might have to work with Tin Woodman in a scene, would do changes to its texturing to suit the particular scene. We want to avoid having several peoples doing texturing changes to Tin Woodman at the same time or redoing whatever someone else did previously.

So what we really need is an officially assigned Tin Woodman texturer (or texturess). It is this officially assigned texturer I was refering to. However, the statement
was premature since nobody is officially assigned to texturing Tin Woodman yet. Nobody was asked to do that and nobody have commited to do it either. So until we have an official texturer for Tin Woodman, I will advise that we all refrain from modifying Tin Woodman texturing. You may experiment at will and post your results but don't commit your changes to SVN.

Edit : I hope Nancy will say yes.

Sure...polka dots, paisley & pink girlie flowers coming right up! - kidding kidding - I think?

Yes I'll take a shot & I notice that the decals that Will had originally done are on the svn - so will try to incorporate them as well.

But warning: I do like the idea of Royal colors for Tinman

Be gentle with him Nancy. He's only made of tin.

My "Two" cents...

The final lighting for "tricky" scenes will require some compromise on texturing or else they (the scenes) will stick out as bad. Tin woodsman and any other predominately metal character will be extremely difficult to light well in dark or complex (noisy) scenes. There will have to be trade offs.

Nancy can go ahead and texture him, it'll just mean we'll have to adjust lighting or his textures later (hopefully only slightly)

I'm playing around with soft reflections Yves, but they seem to cause my renders to crash.. I havn't had a successful render finish since I turned them on.. I'll check that when I get home.

Kevin.. I'll work on painting some stained glass textures for the windows.. they take to long to render with all the geometry and they look to plain. Otherwise it looks like our lighting schemes are pretty close.. I to stuck lights in all the modelled lights, but our times are different.. ie your's seems to be day and mine is night. I'll focus on the windows for now and let you work more on the day scene then modify from that.. how's that sound.

C

For the Throne Room's textures, I'll go with what Alain says and make certain elements of the room into tin.

Just throwing out ideas
It would be nice to have to whole room LOOK like it's made of metal but if everything were reflective I'm afraid that it would be very "noisy" and distracting to look at. If the larger features of the room (walls and the stairs and such) could be made to look metallic with some engraving/embossing and specularity (maybe a reflection map?).

Digressing back to Tin Woodman, the simpler he is, the better. The audience is going to look at this character for more than an hour and the busier his "costume" is, the faster our viewers will get tired of looking at him. His reflectivity makes his body very busy, with strong reflections all over. Changing the reflectivity falloff doesn't solve the problem because he still has the same too-strong reflections, just fewer of them. BTW, I can't get soft reflections in V13, are they available?

I really like the way Tin Woodman looks in Will Sutton's old poster. To me, he looks like he's made out of metal. I see that image all day every day and it's never jarring or hard to look at. I don't mind changing his color so the door in his chest is gold or his body is breen but adding spots of detail to him (through reflections or paint or nurnies) are just going to make him harder to look at.

Back to the Throne Room: Kevin, yours is a Sunset scene so the rich orange in the windows works for that... The intensity and amount of shadow in the room looks very nice; I don't know what I could suggest to do differently but you know much more about what could be adjusted than I do.

I don't know whether Kevin or Colin is more interested in managing the materials in the room but it should definitely be only one of you. Until we figure out who'se going to make the changes to the materials you shouldn't commit any changes to the set models. If either of you want to experiment with some of Alain's suggestions I'd like to see them but hold off on committing to SVN for now.

Rhett

Rhett,

Soft reflection have been available since v10.5 and is available in v13. You set it ON through a "Soft Reflection" property under Reflections in the render pannel. Then, you can select a soft reflection "quality", "Quality" only controls the number of samples for soft reflections. I set mine to 10% and get very good results. You specify the reflection "softness" with the "Specular Size" property. Small values of specular size will produce sharp reflections and the larger the specular size, the softer the reflections. If you set the specular size very large, you end up with a reflectivity that is so soft that it looks almost like diffuse reflection.

Colin,

Soft reflection shouldn't crash. I rendered scenes in 1_02 where almost every pixel is soft reflective and I didn't crash. However, if it does crash, then you found a bug. Please open a report on A:M report and state the TWO scene that makes it crash so I can take a look at it.

Just an opinion...
I think the wallls look great as they are too. I don't think tin should be so overdone. I'm almost thinking the larger feature should be stone/paint and all the detail should be tin.

And ouch, the render hit alone;)

Yeah I think going overboard with the Tin thing in the castle could be problematic and in my opinion rather boring to look at.

Yves.. you're right it's not the soft reflection.. I turned it off and I still get a crash. I'm trying to get to the problem of it right now. If I figure out whats causing it, I'll submit a report. As it is right now, I've changed so many things it could be any of them.

Once I get a render again I'll post the result.

Rhett.. don't worry I wasn't planning on updating SVN until we worked all the issues with multiple people working on the same things.

I'm sort of in the debug phase right now.. figuring out whats problematic.. i.e different things with reflections and lighting, and dark scenes. Its good we are having these discussions though.

C

Ok.. I finally got a render.. turns out... the crash had to do with rendering so many light buffers with a .exr file. Once I turned that off.. it rendered fine.

Here is the shot with soft reflections and a guilded throne.

[attachmentid=21741]

I love the throne and the general warmer lighting gives a better sense of interior lighting.

About soft reflection, the shoulder pads would look better if they had a larger specularity size. Normally, those shoulder pads are exposed so they would be much rougher due to scratches and dents of all sorts.

Colin

I love the soft but warm look of the scene!!!

Steve

Yeah, It's looking great! I can't wait to see an animation rendered like this.

I've been reading a lot of the TWO threads, and after seeing renders like this and following along with some of the animations, this is going to be one kick-ass (can I say ass?) movie!

Kudos on this render Colin. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.

Sigh... I have so much to learn...

Al

Wow, that last render looks incredible Colin! I really think the green stands out nicely on the tin man and as Yves mentioned before, it isn't the most obvious choice but works so well.

Once again, WOW!

Heres an alternative camera focal length and angle. It shows more of the throne room but lets me get closer to Tin Man as well. This is my usual MO.. but I'm not sure which I like better yet. I also dinked with Tin Man's face a little the stare didn't work from any other angle.

Oh and thanks for the kind words guys.

[attachmentid=21789]

This is a little too short focal length IMO. Something in between the previous one and this one might work better.

I prefer camera focal lengths to be as wide as possible....around the 27 mark.

lol.. I thought I was the only nearsighted individual here Ken. Thats around where I usually sit as well. I think this one is 35.. Maybe 50 would work better for all. It was 95 in the first shots. I'll keep playin... I mean testing ;-)

Hi
...not related to lighning but , I can see some texture in the red velvet...kind of stitchy losange or
tone on tone flower design ?

Al

Yeah, I'd say try 50. I do like the newer focal length better than the older one though.

Not seeing it. where do you mean and which image? The last or the one before? The Chair or the reflections of the carpet. I did change the velvet on the char to show more diffuse shade and gave a wider spec amount to it, but I don't see a pattern in it.

Colin,
I think Alain means to say that he would like to see that... so much that he CAN see it.
Now... close your eyes... Visualize with us now.

Ahhhh.. I see. Yep.. definately. Good point.. I'll play with that.

Colin,

Just wanted to chime in and say, the lighting looks awesome, and it's amazing when we've animated these scenes in Shaded mode for weeks, to see them look like this!

-Jim

Here is another render with a narrower camera angle, some fixed reflectivity (still don't have a good grasp on this guy) and my first attempt at tufting on the back of the throne. I've got a much better velvet in the hopper right now, and will post that when it renders. Oh and its HD for real close nitpicking ;-)

I still need to turn the windows into textures (they take forever to render)

Once thats done I'll start the other sequences in this scene. Oh and hopefully we'll try some of Nancy's cool renditions of Tinman in this shot.

[attachmentid=22050]