I think Scarecrow needs more "hair" he's got some weird looking bald spots in these shots. Anyway, here's how things are coming, any comments? I've still got a bit of "sourcy" lighting and I need to balance things a bit more...

Kevin

I have mixed feeling. On one hand, I find the lighting very attractive with the right balance of contrast with nice soft dark corners and bright lights and highlights. It really gives the textures and materials a nice soft look. Overall, it is very pleasing.

On the other hand, I really miss the shadows. TM looks like he is floating over the ground and in the second shot, the throne looks like it is floating too. SC hat looks like an addon through composition and his sleeve look like it is not part of the shirt. The table feets also look like they are not part of the table. On the fourth render, woot suit looks flat. All of that because the shadows are so soft that they are practically non existant except for the larger objects. Adding shadow would take care of the apparant missing hair on SC for instance.

Also, not related to lighting but I mention it anyway, the throne room lacks a sense of vastness. This is mainly due to the long camera angle. A very short camera angle would increase the depth of the shot. Right now, the stairs look like they are 6 feet behind Woot.

BTW, what is a "sourcy" light?

The lighting is amazing, Kevin, though in the images of Woot I wonder what could be casting that intense light on his face. Also I would prefer to see Tinman facing the other way in the first shot and his heel appears to be penetrating the step. The throne room could use a few tapestries and furniture which would help to create a feeling of comfortable spleandour. This is a place that Tinman and Scarecrow have spent a very long time in. Long enough to grow tired of listening to each other's tales of adventure. There should be signs of their obsessions about the place.

The lighting looks beautifully crisp and well balanced.

Maybe the shadows could be made abit bluer so they stand out from the scenery. I agree there could be more too. But you're certainly on the right track.

And some stuff not concerning lighting.....I also agree the camera focal length should be small. I guess each of the cameras will have to be changed in each of the projects. And the reflective marble on the floor behind woot seems abit too reflective. Finally, there should be some "guest chairs" spotted around the sides of the hall too.

I agree with Yves second comments. I'll have to check on my machine at home as well, but the lighting looks to even. There are probably only two main sources of light in the room.. the chandalier and the window. The side lights could be main sources but if so the room looses all atmosphere. Give it some dark corners and try adding color in the ambient areas by adding a light you can move around to point from one side or the other. I did this with the window light but I moved it around allot in order to give a slight blue tone to the dark side of the characters.

the thing I do like about these shots is that we are finally getting closer to similar lighting between our scenes ;-)

Perhaps its the camera angles, but I don't remember seeing the detail you have in my shots, maybe its because I had about a 15' to 20' depth of field on all of my shots, except for the outdoor scenes.

cool stuff Kevin. I'll let you know if the washed out look was just my monitors at work or not.

I wonder how you guys are doing the lights. Are you doing every shot individually? Do you not use a "Light model" that only has lights in it that corresponds to the lights in the throne room. Then you can just drop that into the shot chor. If it needs tweaks, just save it out as a different name. Or am I thinking it through wrong?

You'd think that wouldn't you ;-) Martin said in an earlier post that he wanted to see different takes on lighting in the beginning. So we're all doing it "our" way which was pretty different in the beginning. Now they're starting to be similar. Who knows how it will end up.

I did light all my shots that way so far.. I worked on one scene till I got what I wanted then replicated that same light set up with the ability to modify slightly out to all the other shots. I've had to go back and tweek twice now and its fairly easy to replace and redo... so I'm happy with working that way till someone shoots me in the head.

Thanks for the comments guys, lots of good stuff here.



Thanks, glad you like the overall feel. I assume you mean you miss raytraced shadows I know what you mean and I do agree with what you are saying, one thing I would love to do is be able to use AO in a similar way to the way I did my Christmas contest entry, it added everything that was missing to those shots just like it would to these shots (especially since the throne room lighting would likely be pretty diffuse anyway. What I'd like to be able to do (and I wrote a report somewhat along these lines) is be able to render a separate pass of all these shots with purely white objects and AO. Then composite that shot over these renders with a multiply to get some nice diffuse shadowing. You can see what a difference it made in my christmas entry (note it was a straight multiply, I had to adjust the brightness of the AO shot a lot to get it to work). The big problem with it though was the fact that I had delete all the materials/textures and delete the roof. It would be so awesome if we could have something like that plugin marcel made that could work for AO and also awesome if we could set a min and max ray distance for AO, but I digress. Anyway, I will try out raytraced shadows to see how they look/how much time they take (Marting already asked me to try). I will try to play around with depth of the shots, I'm a little worried about doing that though because there is likely a lot of missing characters/animation that I'm not about to do ... but I'll see what I can do...

Sourcy just means that the lights don't blend together very well, as in you can see the "source" of them. It is usually used to describe bounce/fill lights but since the chandelier would produce fairly diffuse lighting i thought it fit.



Thanks Paul! I probably do need to turn the lighting down on Woot a bit, at the same time there's lots of white marble around reflecting all that light so his face should be somewhat well lit...oh and I totally agree about the throne room. I'm hoping someone else can step up to take on some set decoration and texturing of the throne room, it feels so empty and can use some work. The modeling of the room itself is fantastic, it's just the texturing and the rest of the room that need some lovin (except for that cool window Colin did). I've got more than enough stuff going on that lighting is pretty much all I've got time for now.




Thanks Ken, I prefer not to color my shadows, any color should come from other lights (which might be part of the problem, too many other lights drowning out what shadows there are). I also agree about the reflection, problem is the ole fresnel effect (I wish we could disable that, hint, hint Yves). I've got the reflection down to 1% but it doesn't matter because of the angle of some of these shots. I tried increasing the specular, which I know should lower the effect, but there's a DT material on there and it caps at 100%. Again, if someone has time to do some work on the throne room ... please, please do it.




Thanks Colin, did you go in and change a lot of the camera settings on your shots? And yes, we are getting there...

Kevin

Hey Kevin,

I havn't changed the camera settings much yet. thats a todo when I get some free time from work. the only things I changed from the original chors I got was the depth of field and the final render sizes.

I agree with the AO stuff.. it does add a nice effect.

For the record.. you don't have to delete the materials and the roof. You can turn off cast ambient occlusion for individual objects. Might be slightly more complicated since an action builds the set, but still doable, perhaps in the individual objects or even just create a plane as the only thing that casts occlusion for walls and floors.. somthing like that.

and you should be able to set the render ambient shader plugin to Ambient and a white color which will give you the black and white shading without disabling the materials.. then just turn off the lights and render ;-)

And you really don't need to render AO as a separate pass. You composited the AO and the color pass with multply and this is exactly what the renderer does. You just need to turn AO on on your scene that's all.

AO adds that additional oumph! in the render. I agree. But that is not what I'm thinking with your throne room scene. I'm really thinking about ray-traced shadows.

In fact, I don't think such a large room with so few lights in it and with those dark corners everywhere would generate so much indirect (ambiance) lighting. A room of this size would require considerably more lights everywhere to really get an ambiance lighting feelng. Or the current lights would need to be considerably brighter. Light loose its energy by the square of the distance it travel.

The lights themselves, however, would generate very noticeable direct lighting and shadows and this is what I feel is missing in those shots.

I've been working the whole week on improving the efficiency of ray-tracing acceleration structure (sorry, I did not work on SSS this week. I needed a break from it) so we can render ray-traced shadows in more reasonable time. We need to start experimenting more with those shadows. BTW, I'm using scene 1_03_01 as a benchmark where I replaced the multi-klieg-z-buffer-shadow lights on the chandelier with a single-bulb-ray-trace-shadow light and other klieg lights arrangements with a single klieg. So far, I'm getting good results.

About the floor reflection, Fresnel effect should be reduced when the specular size is large. But there might be a bug due to the use of DT. This said, all complex materials lile DT and any deep material trees based on noise and turbulence are huge CPU resource eaters. Replacing those materials by decals should be the first step to improving render time.

I see what you are saying Yves, that's really cool you are working on raytracing optimizations, that will really help. Do you have any previews of that shot we can see? I guess one thing I was concerned about without using soft raytraced shadows would be that the lighting might end up being too harsh. My other concern was the hair, how does that look? Did you add a bulb for every bulb in the chandelier? My first attempt with replacing zbuffer shadows with raytraced didn't go so well, I guess I like the soft lighting even if it isn't too realistic. Anyway, I'll keep experimenting. I still think Scarecrow needs more "hair".

I also didn't know the renderer multiplied the AO, that's pretty cool, I'll have to play around a bit.

Oh, and one more call for a texturer/set-decorator for the throne room, Martin, can we get someone to do some additional work on this thing?

lol.. thats the setup I had when I was getting the 4 hour renders. I'll be happy to get back to raytraced shadows as well. zbuffer is cool in a pinch but raytraced just looks better to me.

See attached render. This is not a beauty render by any measure. That was just a 1 pass multipass render and hair OFF because I cannot afford to wait too long when I do development but you get the idea. I adjusted the lighting so that this render should be gamma corrected to 2.2 but the attached image is not gamma adjusted. Edit: I just added a 9 pass ray-traced shadows with hair and with a gamma correction of 1.8 on it.

There are all sort of ways to adjust the light harshness. Enlarge the light to get softer shadows and decrease the darkness to get lighter shadows. I find I have more latitude for adjusting the shadow "quality" with ray-traced shadows than with z-buffer shadows.

Of course we can't see that on the attached render but I find hair look better with shadow than without. Without shadow, hair just look like they were painted over the head and the face.

Yes.

I agree.

While on this subject, I think the corridor scene would also need some decorations. The walls should, at minimum, have large framed pictures. And I would put lights on the corridor column too. It does not make sense that Woot is looking around with a flabergasted expression but there is really nothing to see.

Hi Yves...
I was just wondering if you will render Oz with the new SSS-feature, or if you think it is just to early to render with it in a big project like that...?

*Fuchur*

I've definitely been thinking about that aspect of Tin Castle.
Not only is Woot facinated by all that is surrounding him in the courtyard and corridor but he nearly goes into shock upon seeing the open Courtroom.

I've experimented briefly with a few options but realize most are extremely time consuming and might not be of interest.
Shortcuts could be made however.

My thought is to decal images onto little tin squares on the wall... as in a mosaic.
When Woot enters the Courtroom then he see's an animated extension of that.

In essence it'd be moving pictures from the land of Oz cascading down the walls changing imagery as it flows.
It would mirror what was seen earlier in the garden but push it further.
When finally addressing Woot, Tin Servant might be seen in the background pushing a lever that would bring it all to a stop.

Too much I know... but that's where my thoughts were taken.
The setup would be fairly straightforward. The hardest part would be in determining what scenes would go on display.

That'd be a major addition so... I'll just stop there.


Love the lighting thus far!

Interesting idea there Rodney, sounds little busy though (and hard!). No matter what, Woot definitely needs something to be awed by, and so far there's really nothing there for him (or the audience). Maybe we can just make some of Nancy's fancy renders of TM and SC into paintings to put up on the wall?

Just out curiosity Yves, what kind of speed up might we be able to expect? For instance, how long did that last render with hair take? I did a little experimenting this weekend with different shadow types comparing render times/results. I guess I still feel unless we are using soft raytraced shadows (are you planning to?) and you are able to get some significant speedup, that shadow maps still have the advantage. Oh, and by harsh I meant that standard raytraced shadows have no blurring, which in most cases doesn't look very appealing. Don't get me wrong, I love using soft raytraced shadows for stills/when I have time to wait. They certainly are a lot easier to use, no messing with shadow bias, adjusting map res, etc, and can look way better, but they still add so much time to the render that it doesn't seem to be worth it, especially with so many frames to render. I was missing a lot of shadows with my lighting, which I think I've been able to fix in a lot of cases now. Of course, all this is moot if you've got some good speedups going for raytracing. And if you guys decide we really should use raytraced shadows I'll go ahead and make the switch. Anyway, here are my results, the shots of tinwoodsman were 16 pass, the shots of Woot were final (no multipass):

btw, are we planning to use multipass rendering for everything, and if so how many passes? Also, does anyone know why the frameburn looks so bad on all the frames I render? It's unreadable...

Kevin

Edit, added a 9pass version of 1_03_01 with shadowmaps for comparison.

Well, I only took about one week to optimize. That is not much and that was mainly just enough time to write down my ideas. So far I got about 15% improvement on an equal setting comparison. I tried a technique that gave my 35% improvement but in order to really use that, I would need to write quite a bit of new code for hair, particles, blobies, booleans, etc., and I don't have this time. SSS is waiting. So for now, I would not promise more than that 15% because I don't think I will have more time to dedicate to optimizing in the near future.

About 2 hours for a 9 passes. Hair is taking a lot of that time. The same render, 9 passes, without hair is taking a little less than 8 minutes. I think we will need to think about tweaking the hair density if we want lower render times.

We haven't decided anything yet. We are still in the experimenting phase to see what works and what doesn't.

There is a new property in raytraced shadows in v14 called "Distribute among passes" or something like that. This can cut down render time quite a bit when rendering multipasses because with that ON' you can set the number of ray cast to just one and the light sample will still be jittered on each pass producing soft shadows. This could cut render time by at least half.

Actual number of ray cast to produce a nice soft shadow depends greatly on the width of light and the distance from the subject or more to the point it depends on the width of the projected shadow penumbra zone. I usually set the number of rays to one in V14 and render at 9 passes. For most situations, this gives good results.

Also, this is little known but we now have a de-noiser post processing plugin in V14, So it is now possible to set the number of rays lower than for perfect soft shadows and then run the de-noiser plugin on the final render.

Yes. It looks like you've been to fix a lot of them. z-buffer shadows precision depends on the klieg cone angle and the shaodw map resolution so when we can use a tight spot, like you did on Woot, we can get good shadow precision. But if the klieg spot angle was to be larger to cover the whole of Woot, then we would start loosing the shadows that separates the packsac shoulder strap from his collar and it would look flat. This is actually, the result we see on Tin Woodman shoulder plate where with ray-traced shadows, the relationship between the shoulder plate and the arm is obvious but that same relationship is missing from the z-buffer shadows because the cone angle is larger and covers more scene area.

We haven't decided anything. We are examining the results and still debating the pros and cons. Your tests are part of that and us discussing that here is also part of that.

There are no hard cut rules on that either right now and I don't think there will ever be. The decision between multipass vs a-buffer and how many passes will be decided on a scene by scene basis. Scenes with little tiny details will probably require multipass with more passes but in all event, we will need to examine all the other alternatives for optimizing the renders. I don't mean programming optimization alone but I mean selecting alternative approaches like using decals instead of materials which not only render faster but are also easier to antialias, reducing the density of hair when the characters are not in a close-up, etc.

Amen to that. My witch example has fuzz on her clothes and some hair added, but I went sparingly on the density and thickened the hair enough to compensate. 16 passes at 1024x768 with raytraced shadows (2 rays) and SSS on, only took 20 minutes to render.

I think we could cut over half of Woot's individual hairs out and get results just as good or better. That should cut the render times down a bit, same on any character with hair.

My rule for whether to use multipass would be if the scene has hair in it, I'd go 16 passes, if it has no hair but fine detail, I'd go 9 and anything else would be open season depending on the shadows and whether it needed soft reflections or not.

The lighting is looking much better Kevin.

Here is another render. This one took 44 minutes for 9 passes. Hair density was lowered from 200% to 100%. There are 3 lights for the chandelier and 4 lights in the corridor (although one of them is actually not of any use but not turned OFF, that was a setup mistake, so it is still using render time). This is more an experiment to see what takes up time and what tricks can be used to reduce render time. In the end, I thought the light in the corridor added some texturing without actually having to texture anything.

The "harsh" shadow is because of the 3 lights from the chandelier. I expressely made those lights with small width because I wanted to recreate the effect of individual lights from the chandelier.

And note the very obvious moiré pattern on Tin Servant blouse caused by the Symbiont material used. This render would need to have much higher number of passes in order to get rid of this artefact. That is why it is better to use decals instead of materials.