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Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 03 May 2014, 18:16
by mirkoj
just love the style! :)
can you compare scatter_tools and forester please?

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 04 May 2014, 01:24
by grendizer
I'm more and more found of it! It really has a fairy tale feel! The quality is second to none. Wow. =p~
I want to learn all your secrets!! How did you do it!
So first questions:
- Why is it grainy?
- Is the scatering of the grass still with the scatter tool or forester?
- Trees are procedural? You mean you didn't model them? They were generated?
- You said you didn't texture enough the tree's trunks, but they look well textured to me! Is it simple displacement, or bump?
More questions will come :)

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 04 May 2014, 22:59
by milanvasek
nice style! and great to see WIP like this here... looking forward to see how it goes

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 05 May 2014, 20:46
by Draise
Yes! Awesome WIP! And yes, so many questions! I'm just quipping in all enthused by your work, it's great. =)

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 05 May 2014, 22:00
by druitre
mirkoj wrote:just love the style! :)
can you compare scatter_tools and forester please?
Thanks, mirkoj.
Forester at first looks like scattertools but in fact it's quite different - it has a part that is concerned with scattering, for sure, but that is only one half. The other is generating trees, flowers and rocks procedurally. Which really helps speed things up a lot - trees are so hard to model. Plus, you get instant UV's and wind-animation.

The scatteringbit streamlines filtering and adjusting in a few ways that are not standard in scatter_tools. Filter by slope, turbulizing, straightening. These are things you can quite easily add yourself to scattertools but it would still take some work to do so.

At first, my idea was to just use Forester to roughly block out things and then do the rest with my customized scattertools and customized geometry but in the end what you see above is 100% forester.

And there is plenty of room for improvement and additions but already very, very nice.

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 05 May 2014, 22:16
by druitre
grendizer wrote:I'm more and more found of it! It really has a fairy tale feel! The quality is second to none. Wow. I want to learn all your secrets!! How did you do it!
So first questions:
- Why is it grainy?
- Is the scatering of the grass still with the scatter tool or forester?
- Trees are procedural? You mean you didn't model them? They were generated?
- You said you didn't texture enough the tree's trunks, but they look well textured to me! Is it simple displacement, or bump?
More questions will come :)
Thanks, grendizer!

The grain is because I put my max samples at 32 adaptive, which you can mainly see in the bokeh. I'm still more concerned with setting everything properly up, so that's why I'm a bit sloppy about high rendersettings.

Grass is forester strands. The low stuff, the cloverleafpatches, is forester geometry grass that I tweaked.

Yes, trees are procedural. And there's actually just two trees in the scene, scattered around. Look at the forester site to see how it works, it's all done inside an ICEtopologycompound

The texture is just an image on the bump. I want to add the same type of stuff I did on the tree in the first scene, foamlook etc.

Cheers,
Jasper

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 05 May 2014, 22:19
by druitre
milanvasek wrote:nice style! and great to see WIP like this here... looking forward to see how it goes
Thanks, Milan! As you can guess I like your scattertools a lot!

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 26 May 2014, 09:34
by sant0s
very beautiful work, can hear the blues that man is singing!
more... pls :)

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 28 May 2014, 15:09
by Bullit
Great work. Hoe many polygons? and how Softimage copes with animated trees?

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 29 May 2014, 21:59
by druitre
Next week I'll be back, working on a commercial project now. Till then,
Cheers!

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 27 Nov 2014, 17:31
by druitre
Hey (blandly ignoring it's been kind of a longish 'week') folks! I've been doing my characters. Perhaps it isn't something very special, but I found out some tricks along the way that may help someone, and I think it's nice to continue the thread after all this time, so I'll do a detailed walkthrough of my workflow.

Just to recap, all of this was originally planned as a stopmotion short and designed and executed in clay by my friend and colleague HC Smulders. It looked like this (this is clay, foam and kittylitter, colors and daguerrolook added in photoshop):

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To convert this into a digital version, I started with a Species rig that I adjusted

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I decided to try and use a CAV instead of a more detailed UVmap. Actually just because I don't like UVs and wanted to texture everything procedurally. Warning: no nudity!

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The head required most work, it's quite stylized. I first blocked it out from the lopoly Species head

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and then added some subdivisions to model in details

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I added a few deformers to the rig for facial deforms and combined that with blendshapes for his face expressions. It's something where I'm not so sure how much I will eventually need so for now I kept it very basic - happy face, angry face.

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Finally (well, not finally, but just to round up this post) I added his beard, as storywise he's an outdoors type that tends to forget about personal hygiene. I just used standard SI hair as it works well if you don't need dynamics -

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Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 27 Nov 2014, 17:39
by druitre
Continued:

As in the story we see the man from his early twenties as a newlywed and in the end as an embittered and unkempt middle-aged man I added some blendshapes that, together with his beard, reflect this age progress.

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All of that with shading, procedural textures and displacements renders out as this

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Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 27 Nov 2014, 18:07
by druitre
I'm animating the guy with a duplicate of my bodymesh that I reduced to very low polycount and that I added some clothes (a shirt, workpants) onto.

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Of course, these don't deform the way clothes should so here is my dynamics workflow:

I'm using Syflex for both the dynamics and the modeling. I was looking at the Marvelous site and I figured what is shown there real-time would be possible with Syflex too. Not real-time of course, but still fast enough. I ended up with taking a basic plane, deleting the polys at the center where the head could fit through, and setting up a very simple syflex clothsim. All it needs is the body as a colissionmesh, then gravity does the rest.

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Then stitching or bridging at the sides, extruding edges to create sleeves and trunks. Adding syflex again, with the inflate-compound set to a negative value to tighten up the sleeves.

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In the end I symmetrized and then shrinkwrapped the whole to the body and relaxed the mesh. Syflex works best with very even geo and that's what you get with this method. Upped the subdivisions one time for more detail.

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and added a new syflex clothsim. Because the mesh is so light it simulates very fast, I'm getting about 10fps, and it's easy to do iterations seeking for good settings. These are the ones I ended up with:

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and the result after running through the animation

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Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 27 Nov 2014, 18:30
by druitre
Step two for the clothes is setting up the hires renderstuff. First I cache the simulation and add it to a duplicate of the simulated mesh. I add some smoothing and pushing there to fix problematic areas. Then I make another duplicate and use that as a starting point for modeling a detailed pants and shirt.

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details like buttons are a separate mesh, clusterconstrained to where I want them

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I then use hulldeform in ICE to get my clothes to follow the cached simulation. I figured I could get sneaky here and use just the one sim on the fullbodycovering pajamas for both the pants, the shoulderstraps and the shirt. It may not be the most realistic way to do it, but this way I know I'm never going to have intersections between all of them.

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And everything together, with the banjo he's playing (and that also is included in the simulation because his clothes tend to colide with it)

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And in render

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That's it for now, I'll come back with the female character soon and also show some animations of the both of them.

Cheers!
Jasper

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 27 Nov 2014, 18:51
by FXDude
Wow that's very original and all very refined work!

The clothing, the transmission of emotion (and everything) and the 'moodyness' is just amazing!!

Congrats! (and can't wait to see more! :o] )

Re: Landscape and forest

Posted: 27 Nov 2014, 19:47
by Draise
Wow, thanks for sharing the workflow with SI and Syflex!!!!! (Sharing like this will prolong SI for some time! ;) ) Beautiful results, really really great design and result - really refreshing. I get tired of the typical disney/pixar style.