Yeah, that's right, 44 Don't ask my why I started towards the end of the scene... it just ended up that way. Anyway, here's what I've been playing around with this weekend. It still needs a lot of work and we've got to get some of those textured objects in here but here's what I've got so far. Let me know what you think...render times are currently around 2-1/2 minutes per frame - straight up abuffer render, all shadows z-buffered and regular (i.e. no soft) raytraced reflections.

Kevin

I like it but isn't Colin doing this set? I can't choose but your render times are great.

Kevin,

I'm also confused as to who is doing what, but to comment on this image, the first thing that pops out is the absolutely dark black shadow Tinman is casting on the stairs. It would probably be better if that shadow or any other shadow in the room not be pitch black, there would be too much light bouncing off all the surfaces for that to happen. Also, the edge of the axe and chair show aliasing but I recognize that as being the A buffer. I use the A buffer all the time but I find you have to at least render twice the size then reduce the size back down in a paint program, using bicubic image resize, to take the harsh aliased edge off. I think the term for that technique is oversampling? I'm not sure.

I like how the whole image has a softness to it, like it's a diffuse softness around the highlights, that's really nice.

-Jim

Hey Kevin,

Is your scene day or night? I thought it was day, but I may have been mistaken. I'd put some ambience on the windows or shine a light through them to brighten the back sides a little. I do like the softness in the scene and you can't argue with the render times ;-)

Whats going on with reflections on TM? I can't see to much in him. It also seems very warm.. almost monchromatically warm.

I'll try to post the throne and the textured windows tonight.

(edit)

I looked at the image again and wondered what was going on in the base of the dias. There's some banding in it. Could that be the shadow maps being to low res? I wonder if that would flicker in animation.

I like the athmosphere of the background very much. I agree with the Window should be brighter. My critique is that Tin Woodman does not separate from the background and more generally, does not appear prominent enough. The lighting should make him pop out of the background IMO. Right now, the throne chair is catching our attention much more than TinMan.

I like it as it is. (Just another opinion to throw in the "Opinion Basket.")

Hi

Good rendering average time , nice effect.

some suggest:

-Add some torch light in the background

-Put a spotlight list to tinwoodman to light his back or side(rim spotlight/no shadow)
...to increase light coming from back of the throne

-increase light or color saturation coming from the window
-Column , stairway and throne should be made of tin too
-no red carpet... royal blue or green carpet with white stripe would be better...IMHO
...always use red with parsimony.

that's was my 2 cents
Thanks

Al

Quite a few comments, thanks for the feedback. Finished rendering out the animated scene ... ignore the camera move for now, I screwed that up at the end...

Ken and Jim, Colin is lighting scene 5, I'm lighting scene 3, both of which take place in the throne room.

Jim, thanks. You are right about the tinman's shadow, it's getting no light whatsoever right now, it was on my todo list. Good suggestion on rendering large and scaling back down, I might give that a try later to see if fixes some of the aliasing issues on the throne/axe. I think the softness you are talking about is the subtle bloom I tried to add in photoshop after it was done rendering (just experimenting).

Colin, this scene takes place at dusk. There is a lot of light coming in from the windows, notice the bluish hue on the columns. I might need to make it brighter though. I'm also not sure why the windows are so dark (I've had more trouble with those windows...maybe your changes will help), it's got the same skydome behind it that yves used for scene 2 I believe. I also think I added that monochromatic warm tone when playing around in post (though some of my lights probably could be cooler). Not sure what's causing the banding, could be the shadow bias (doesn't appear to cause too much trouble in the animation does it???). Also, the tinman I'm using has a very strong fresnel effect right now from my experimenting earlier. I'd really like to see how Nancy's finished Tinman looks.

Thanks Yves, I'll have to see if I can work on getting Tinman more prominent. Part of the problem might be that really strong red color on the throne really catches your eye. Might have to dial that back a bit...

Thanks Martin

Al, where do you want the torch light? Down that hallway? I already have a really strong rim light on Tinman and I know it doesn't really show up... this is why I hate reflective materials, they are so dang hard to light properly. I'll play around with it some more to see what I can do. Do we really want that much Tin? I like the carpet idea but I think Colin may have already made some changes (?).

Holy macro! I'm speechless! It's beautiful

Dark, atmospheric and beautiful! Probably too dark for the tin emperor, but I love it.

Oh, lordy... I'm a believer.

Is that the current voice track just sped up? Interesting? Hmmm...

I tried to download the movie to play on another PC but I get an error that says it is missing a wav file. I've got no sound on this machine. Any chance of providing the wav file or using a different format, even if it means degrading the image?

The animation is amazing too, Kevin! Did you run all the frames through PS to get the softness?

This is such a great look!!!

Thanks Dhar, Paul and Martin.

Paul, I was pulling things in with quicktime pro to create the movie, I must've just linked the wav file instead of actually embedding the sound, whoops, I'll try to fix that tonight .... no PS work on the animation, never got around to it, those are the frames straight from AM.

The sound is sped up Martin? not sure about that, maybe I screwed up the frame rate, it should just be the current sound track.

I look forward to that!
(oops! posted a movie here by mistake. Sorry!)

Hmmm... I wonder if you rendered at 24fps and I played it at 30fps. Very interesting. This could be one of those quirks of fate people talk about? I actually like the Munchkin sounding voices... Does anybody else hear Munchkins?

Ok, here's a fixed version with the proper sound. Still no idea why you would be getting Munchkin voices. I checked and everything was done at 24 fps.

I'm working on some tests with the Tinman Nancy uploaded, should have something soon. Did you ever upload the throne, Colin?

Kevin

looks nice -

(sounds to me like you're getting double voices - sometimes happens if the sound is in the chor as well as in an action - perhaps?)

I tried to last night but when I tried to commit the changes to SVN it asked for a name and password, which seem to be different from the ones I used to download the repository in the first place.

Does it require a seperate password and login to upload files?

My guess is you "fixed" the sound by processing it to get a lower pitch which is why you get that typical double sound effect. The sound track is still accelerated although lower in pitch. I listened to the original track and it is of slower pace. Not only lower pitch. You probably mixed fps somewhere. What is your default framerate in the option panel? What is the framerate in the project properties and what is the framerate in QuickTime when you save to QuickTime?

"Update" on SVN does not require a password. "Commit" does. Email willp and give him the SVN password you want to use. He'll hook you up as soon as he reads it.

No idea what happened to the sound. I don't hear munchkins still but it does sound different than the wav. I'm assuming quicktime did that when it compressed everything. I'll see if I can improve that next time.

So I did a few test renders last night with the new Tinwoodsman. I fixed the banding on the carpet (shadow bias), added a fill light for his shadows, and made a few other tweaks as well. For comparison I rendered 3 versions, one with reflections, one with soft reflections, and one with no reflections. To be honest, I prefer the 1onewith no reflections (except for maybe the arms and boots) and I don't really see much difference with the soft reflections (except for taking the render time from 2-1/2 minutes to 30 minutes @ 40%!). Anyway, just my opinion. BTW, what happened to his eyes? They are just tin balls now...not very appealing, maybe they were lost in that problem Noel fixed?

Kevin

As you release the scenes from 1_03 to render, Kevin; we'll put them on the render stack.

I'd like to see what "reflections" look like animated. If they are distracting, then can them, (tin... can... Get it? Ha, ha).

I agree. I like without reflections too. And yes his eyes were lost, they are supposed to be green.

And one other thing...I've never noticed in any of the renders that I've done his shoulder pads going bright orange like that. I only use white sun, orange klieg z buffer shadows, blue sun lights. Only the white light contributes to specularity and I use reflections (1 level). I only do final render (no multipass).

I prefer the one with soft reflection. By far. The soft reflections makes Tin Woodman pop out and better separate from the background. This is very obvious when looking at the attachment thumbnails side by side.

I like the soft reflections as well, except for the face.. the beard looks to tinsel like with them. The straight reflections are even more unreadable.

Kevin,

The throne is up on SVN now as well as the window with textures instead of geometry. If you have the top of the window modelled or textured in some form let me know otherwise I'll finish that.

What are your render settings? I'm having issues getting shadows as soft as yours and my render times are still no where near yours. Not sure why.

Thanks Colin, already downloaded and played with. Below is my latest attempt (no reflections for now).

Actually, after looking at the three again, I think you are right about the soft reflections being the best, except for the beard like Colin said. In fact, I think it was the beard (and the rest of the face to a lesser degree) that was distracting me the most. The rest of the reflections do look quite nice. I tried another render (which I unfortunately am redoing right now) with multipass at 16 and soft reflections at 30% and it only took 17 minutes, which really isn't too bad. Couple that with multithreaded renders in V14 and the renderfarm and it might actually be doable. Closeups would probably be quite a bit longer, but I guess we'll just have to see. Are you still doing that closeup shot Colin? Maybe those large reflections are what is taking so much time? As far as the rest of my render settings go, I'm only using kliegs and zbuffered shadows with a 512 maps size and probably a 10% blur in most cases (I think I have one light that is using a 1024 map). ABuffer renderer final - shadows and plugin shaders on, all other settings off. There's no hair in the throne room set is there?

Oh yeah, go ahead and finish the rest of the window, I haven't done anything on it.

update, here's a 9x9 soften-multipass rendering with soft reflections, only took about 12 minutes. Not bad, and it got rid of some of the jaggies on the throne and axe. Now, if we can only do something about that beard and face...

Easy. Increase the specular size on the head. I don't know what size it is right now but the reflections in his face seems quite tight. Increase the specular size up to 200% or 300% maybe even larger and see what that gives.

Hey Kevin,

when I uploaded the throne the links to the bump map where broken. Just click on the image and reset it to the full bump map in the textures folder. That'll know back the throne allot. I'm liking your lighting allot better than mine. Can you upload your set so I can check it out?

I've got my render times down to 3.5 minutes per frame now, so I'm rendering an animation overnight to see how those faked reflections look.

You're right though.. 17 minutes for soft reflections isn't bad at all. It was probably all the omni lights I had in the scene. I reworked them into spinning kliegs (not optimal) and the set render time came down to 40 minutes. I guess I was just trying to use a sledge hammer to pound a ten penny nail.

I think we're cooking with gas now ;-)

Anyway, I know it's about lighting here, but the carpet's not looking very used. Maybe a little footpath would look nice?

The lighting looks good, great job!!

Nancy, it's possible I had screwed the should pad material somewhere (though I don't think so). Not sure why it looks so orange, could it be because it has and env around it to reflect now?

Yves, I'll play around with those values tonight (unless someone beats me to it). Is it just me or do those strong reflections all over make him look less tin-manly and a lot skinnier? Maybe we could turn off or reduce the reflection on his torso (except for the heart door), upper arms, and shoulder pads? Again, I'll play around tonight.

Colin, I'll try to upload the changes tonight so you can take a look at what I've done. I somehow need to transfer the lighting to an action but I can do that later on I think. I just need to do some clean up and try to properly name my lights (not very uselful when all lights are named light<#>). 3.5 minutes? Is that with 16 multipass? That ain't half bad I'm anxious to see how those faked reflections turn out. I assume you are going to upload a fixed version of the throne with the bump maps? And oh yeah, lots of gas now

DeeJay, thanks. I agree the carpet needs something. I'm not too fond of the color and I'm not sure it has anything besides diffuse on it. In fact, we are still making lots of texture changes to the set, The columns in the background still need work as well along with that axe. Still lots of work to do but things are starting to come together...

Kevin -

In general - skin parts of tinman are set to 100% reflect, 100% ref.filter, 100% refl. blend, white spec color. Spec size = 100, spec intensity =100. This includes the beard, arms, boots

Only the face is 40% reflective. (Should probably do the same to his eyelids now that I think about it)

In general, I was setting all his clothes: "torso & leggings & arms " to:

reflectivity = 50%
reflective filter = 25%
reflective blend = 100 %

spec size = 100
spec intensity = 100

Torso and arms have a orange/yellow spec color, pants have a green/blue spec color.

The heart door has an orange spec color, 100% reflectivity, 0% reflective filter.

As for the shoulder pads - They too are 100% reflective - BUT the reflective filter is set to 100% (should probably be 25% or 0%). The specular color is a bold orange/yellow - so that is probably the reason for the irradiated look.

I am attempting to upload my new version of tinman (tried last night - but ran into conflict - again). It should fix the eyes, and I added a pose slider to change costume - just for giggles - I need some giggles - It goes from Whimsy to Bumpy (as he is now) to Smoothy. It does not mess with any reflectivity settings - just decals.

I will set the shoulder pads to 25% reflective filter.

I do not intend to touch him (after Noel helps to get him uploaded) - so that you can have a stable version to play with.

May the SVN gods smile favorably on us all.

To me it looks more like Tin or painted tin with transparent paint. But I think that at this point, this is more a matter of subjective taste.

That is worth testing. At some point someone is going to need to decide though. We don't want everybody to start modifying Tin Woodman. But seeing the results of different experimentations and approaches will help take a final decision.


That is exactly the reason for that irradiated look. If you set a specular color, then this is the color that will be used to filter reflections.

I agree, and anyways, all this experimentin is fun...

Ok Colin, I've checked in my changes (all of them). You can take a look at my lighting setup now.

Thanks Kevin,

I'll backup my stuff just in case ;-).

I've been working on the throne room window. Here's a wip (not sure if its to odd. I like the oz in the center but the styles don't quiet match, not that they need to I suppose. Can I get some oppinions before I do much more? I went warmer on the colors to try to add some reds, oranges and fuschias into the lighting. for night shots we could tone it down to blues and greens.

[attachmentid=22314]

My opinion? You'd listen to me?! Oh, well then.... Ummm...

I think it's great!

Yeah, that's great looking stained glass. Martin could actually use that in his office

I like it, Colin. But what do you guys think about having only the upper portions being stained glass, and letting the lower panes look out upon the kingdom?

I like this stained glass design. Bright and saturated colors suit Tin Woodman well.

I like that the glass is stained all the way though because I like that when we are in the castle throne room, we really feel enclosed inside the room. The window reminds us that we are inside and that there is an outside but we don't actually see it. I like that.

I also like it...



How about a magic window since this is oz? It can turn transparent so they can look out when they want to?

Since we're bringing magic into the fold how about a stain-glass design that changes, morphes into other designs? Like the animated paintings in Harry Potter?

Looks great Colin - love your design - definitely not too odd - nothing odd about it...(but how would I know what's odd?).

One could do the lower portion with a landscape scene in stained glass - that looks like OZ landscape - or integrate clear portions of glass in the design or do the magic window thing or do the clear bottom portion thing. Or leave it the way it is - they all sound good to me.

My preference would be to only have 3 bottom panels (rather than 4) - with the outer two using the design you have or a variation on it - and either a clear center bottom panel or have the center panel have a landscape stained glass design or some other different design then the outer panels.

And then again one might want to use a fractal type (julia or mandelbrot variation) stained glass pattern to insert in the entire bottom portion of the window, instead of a landscape ... see eg - only example - but think of portions of it as clear, like maybe the green & yellow

Love how it's shaping up. And whatever you do - I know I will love it as I always do.

Oh boy. I can't imagine the craftmanship that whent into designing such a fractal stained glass. Although I like the idea of fractal stained glass, I think that the tin castle decoration should be kept relatively simple to not distract the viewer's attention away from the characters and action.

I agree - I wasn't suggesting that the design should be that detailed - or that deep in self-similarity - but that a simpler design with some basic shape - reminiscent of fractal - or any other hand crafted design would work as well, and might be nice to include a heart motif.

I should have posted something simpler... just a hint of a possibility to make a variation .....but I'm sure Colin will come up with something better.

I'm already thinking along the magic lines. I was thinking that there should at least be two maybe three slightly different windows that reflect the time of day. sun in the day, moon at night, etc.. or if they actually had seasons, which I think they don't you could do winter, spring, summer, fall.. maybe the seasons where trapped in the window by the magic that created it?

I also thought if there where any flashbacks in the scenes in the castle.. you could animate them and run a stained glass filter on them to make them happen in the window.

I had done William's poster in stained glass but I thought it odd and to pompous for Tinwoodman to have stained windows of himself.. and it only fit in one window.. I didn't want to do 4.

The thing that seems odd to me is that the top is illustrative, but the bottom is plain. they don't match. I think the style should be the same across both sections.

I'll keep thinking on it. I've got one last medical procedure tomorrow (hopefully) so I might not post anything for a day or two. We'll see how it goes. I might have to scout some churches. Martin, are there any good shots of the hash windows? I know they reflect religious iconography, but I might get some ideas for scenes or styles that can be converted.

It is certainly fun to imagine all those scenarios but the actual TWO scenario doesn't require that. There is only one sequence where we see the throne room and this happens after the sunset. After the throne-room discussion they go to bed and/or get a rest for the quest next morning.

I agree with William about the window.
...and It look too churchy to me.

Here is a work around so everybody can be happy .
the stained glass windows should be OPEN to the outside.
that way we can keep the "stained glass" and have a look on the outside.

Since the castle is very tall and huge the point of view from the window should reflect this.

---------------------
Some personnal OT toughts on the set:

The light setup should be revised,IMHO add bright torchlight burning on the wall or something else
...to create a mood of a BIG place, distance and depth of a vast room.

...reflection on Tin Wood man is important but a reflective floor for a tin castle should be cool too ? forget about those heavy reflection rendering option and workaround, keep it simple

maybe some small(in background) guard/vallet nearby wall and on window side would populate the castle?
it seem a bit empty, it would help for the depth by giving a character size to compare to

my 2 cents again



Al

good point about the number of shots Yves. I'll try to keep that in mind. After seeing a Normal Church the other day.. I've got an idea on how to proceed with the top. that matches the bottom better.

Al,

I don't like the idea of opening the windows.. It overly complicates the scene and probably muxes up the lighting a bit to. With the layout of the throne room and the shot angles that have been selected.. it would be hard to make the throne room look overly large anyway. Over lighting the room with torchlight will make it harder to seperate TW from the background as Yves has pointed out before.

The lighting probably appears to dark do to the differences in Monitors and other things. Once I calibrated my monitor.. I went back to most of my shots and they seemed much brighter than I had percieved them being when I created them on my uncalibrated monitor.

I think Kevin has done a good job of bringing out background elements without over lighting the scene. I do like the notion of a reflective floor though.

I think the floor already has some reflection, maybe 10%. We could probably bump that up. We need to finalize the texturing of the throne room pretty soon. Wasn't there some talk of adding some chairs/tapestries to the background?