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Nice to know...at the moment I'm trying to focus on improving my skills on the programs I already have. I'm still trying to get my head around DS and Zbrush but I'll keep it in mind.
Well, I've got the last four shots redone, so now I just need to let the render run for a week or two. The best part is the knowledge that, even if I change nothing else about those shots, I'll still need to re-render them once I actually get a license for Arnold. Hopefully by then I'll have figured out how to successfully team render.
Playing around with Genesis 9, learning more about C4D's animation tools and experimenting with keeping more of my workflow inside C4D. The animation is a mixture of Mixamo animations instead of Cascadeur, the skirt was simulated with X-Particles instead of Marvelous Designer.
https://youtube.com/shorts/vFRlTJCwJdY
I'm so angry. I watched a tutorial about killing noise in Arnold renders, and it was basically a list of all the things I was doing wrong in my renders. I'm rendering out a new version of one of my shots, and with quite low settings, some things are noticably better than the render that took several days.
Couple quick portraits - quick in the sense that the posing and lighting are minimal, but I spent a lot of time on the materials and experimenting with making my own hair.
Starting to get the hang of it.
Some improvements.
Not sure why this shot looks worse than the other shots I'm re-rendering, but I'm working on it. Now that I see it at full speed, I think I may need to slow the water down.
Alright, worked out the problem with the last shot: I had one more light turned on than I needed, and one of the lights I did need was set too bright.
Before (as seen in the video):
After (more consistent with other shots, and also just looks better):
Now I just need to make whatever changes are needed to the water.
Because I have a shockingly high tolerance for tedium, I've been spending the last few days converting my KitBash3D sets to Arnold, and it occurred to me today that I should do some Stonemason sets as well. Here's a quick viewport render of Urban Future 5.
Just two more shots to re-render and edit before I have to start working on new shots. For contrast, here's the earlier version again:
Urban Future 7. I learned how to use the Mesh Light object because emissives apparently don't cast direct light and aren't seen by atmospheric volume, but I haven't figured out how to keep render times reasonable.
Well, I managed to get my render time down to a scant 57 minutes.
The tricky part about converting Stonemason sets is that most surfaces only have two or even just one texture map. That means that I have to make a full shader setting out of a diffuse map and maybe a bump or normal. I've had to make some interesting choices because of this limitation, but I think it's been working out reasonably well. He could also use some work on his naming conventions, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, here's Urban Future 4.
Still a few problems to solve, but I'm getting there.
Thought I'd give Octane another try. There are certain things I love about it, like how incredibly fast it renders, and the general ease of use, but I haven't figured out how to make it look especially good yet. I had the problem in Arnold where texture emission wasn't affected by atmosphere (for example, to create godrays), and Arnold has a way of turning mesh into a proper light source. Octane doesn't appear to have that same option, unless there's something I'm missing, which is quite likely due to the haphazard way I approach new things. So for now, here's a less atmospheric Urban Future 7:
I really ought to get back to the Avatar project, but converting all those Urban Future sets prompted me to start working on some of my Shadowrun characters. I'm going to some pretty extreme measures to not use Substance Painter, so all the clothing textures here are a combination of the curvature object, texture maps and noise generators.
Still haven't gotten back to Avatar, but I have done a lot more work on my Shadowrun characters and environments, and then I went and dove back into Houdini to learn crowd simulations, because I am a crazy person and don't recognize the concept of stretching myself too thin. It took me a while to get the hang of it (because Houdini), but I've finally got this far. For a while, the boy and girl were getting stretched out to the size of the adult G8 body that I used to export the animation. It took quite a lot of fiddling to get them to maintain their proper shape, but now I've got a workable rig. Now I just need more animations to plug in to vary up their movements, and learning about collisions and rigid bodies, and maybe how to texture and render in Houdini, and....
So of course I don't notice until after I upload and share it that two of the figures aren't moving.
edit:upon further examination, the problem isn't that the boy and girl aren't moving, but that their animations aren't cycling. I may have found the solution, but I'm currently busy celebrating my birthday, so that will have to wait.
Started a new project file to see if I could solve the problem of the boy and girl figures getting stretched out to the size of the adults. Spent a lot of time mucking around in it, not getting what I was missing. Then I opened the original project file and discovered that I had somehow already solved the problem and forgot about it, and the solution was much simpler than what I was trying to do.
Learning how to texture and render in Houdini, with a little hastily made Vellum hair. I will probably never be good at grooming hair, but at least I've mostly figured out how to make it look the way I want.
Still some wonkiness, like the tops of characters' heads disappearing, but I've got it up to four characters, eight animations, and no weird scaling or animations failing to loop. Next: physics, because some of these people are just walking straight through each other (not shown in this video).
I'm at the point in my Houdini journey where I'm starting to predict how to do new things. Only one character set up for ragdoll physics so far, but I've also worked out how to make characters avoid passing through each other.
Right now the "wrecking ball" acts more like a trigger for the ragdoll state than the collider that it should be, but I'm getting there. I don't even need to be doing this, but I do love me some learnin'.
Got the physics working for the ball. I haven't programmed the other walkers to avoid the casualties, but I do know how to do it.
I've been creating unique characters to populate a crowded street scene, and even with the fairly extensive library that I have, it's been quite an undertaking to create characters that look both distinct and that they belong in the same world, while simultaneously not getting too bogged down in developing them as characters.
Figured out how to re-apply materials to the agents after simulation, but it's not fully working yet and some materials are still missing. I also don't know why their animations keep glitching. Hopefully I'll get a better distribution of the agents once I've finished adding the male agents in; even more hopefully, there's a simple bit of VEX or Python that will ensure that only unique agents are added. I also just need to re-export the tall goth, because her boots are messed up. I haven't even started to tweak the behavior of the agents, which is why one of the goths is wandering into the street.
After dozens of hours of work, I was no closer to solving the problems I was having in the last render, until I discovered the single checkbox that fixes the animation glitches. Now I have to go through all 40 agents and make a few changes to get the animations fixed, re-export a few characters to fix base poses (women in heels exported with a flat-foot pose or vice versa), and see if I can get ALL materials working, rather than just some.
Solved some problems, haven't solved some others, and some new problems arose. C'est la vie.
I've actually made quite a bit of progress on the previous shot, but because I can't focus on one thing for very long, I've also started dabbling with particles and pyro in Houdini.
Now I just need to find the right mixture of settings to make the fire look good without completely wrecking my computer.