a little tribute to War Witch...

The_Augur · 05-31-2005 01:52 PM

I agree with essentially everything heliumphoenix has said (though I've actually had pretty good success doing subtle veins with procedurals, but if you need prominent veins that need to lie in a particular spot, image maps are clearly the way to go). I would say that a fully realistic 3D character would need a combination of both for different aspects of the surface, and the 2 are certainly not exclusive of each other. For other objects, I think that the tendancy of most people is to think "well, I need a rock, so I'll start drawing (or photographing) rocks and apply those images to my model" while it's generally more advisable to instead try to mathematically derive what makes a rock look like a rock and then recreate that with procedurals. Other than not having a set resolution, procedural textures also don't stretch when applied to irregular geometry. If I create a nice rock procedural texture that doesn't use any image maps, I can apply it to ANY rock of any shape any time I need one. Rather than creating an object, I've instead created a fully 3D volumetric material that I now have the power to apply to any shape.

The only thing that phoenix says that I'd disagree with is that NOT everyone would consider photography an art. Many painters and sculpters tend to look down on photographers (my uncle, who is a fine artist and sculptor, often refers to them as "image-thieves"). For the most part, though, I don't agree with this point of view, particularly after spending time talking to friends who are photographers and hanging out in the dark room with them while they try to get a print exposed the way they want it. While it might not be as arduous a task as painting a masterpiece, there is still a LOT of room, both in composition and developing, for both creativity and error.

I think the big distinction, though, is that painting is a more purely creative process, whereas photography has a strong editorial component as well.

I enjoy computer graphics because it combines all the creative aspects of painting and sculpture with almost everything that goes into photography/cinematography as well, and I think both fields can learn from each other (for instance, why the hell aren't there any HDRI video cameras! Surely there's a way to build one)

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The_Augur · 05-31-2005 02:02 PM

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Kboc2... It may not be directly your fault, but I hate you. I just put over $300 dollars into software....

[/ QUOTE ]

You got off easy, then. Lightwave is $1,700. The full version of Maya is $7,000

This, of course, is another reason that Poser is so prevalant. As far as modeling goes, though, I've heard nothing but good things about Wings3D, which, as kboc pointed out, is free.

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kboc2 · 05-31-2005 02:07 PM

[ QUOTE ]
The only thing that phoenix says that I'd disagree with is that NOT everyone would consider photography an art. Many painters and sculpters tend to look down on photographers (my uncle, who is a fine artist and sculptor, often refers to them as "image-thieves").

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd tell your uncle painting is not even close to 3D in the way of creative processes (talking about the guys that build everything from scratch now, or the teams of people who do)... They're sculptors, painters, photographers, light engineers and a whole lot more... So phoey to the opinion that Photographers aren't artists.

Anyway, I know both y'all are on CGTalk... I'm KBOC there too [ QUOTE ]
If I create a nice rock procedural texture that doesn't use any image maps, I can apply it to ANY rock of any shape any time I need one. Rather than creating an object, I've instead created a fully 3D volumetric material that I now have the power to apply to any shape.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, but for a rock, that's great because it can be pretty uniform in the way it looks, depending on the rock, of course. It's why Bryce and Vue are so powerful for creating "natural" lookiing scenery. If you have a rock that's not uniform, you don't need to worry about doing anything but mixing shader nodes or maybe going so far as to set up material groups.

For things like human skin, which bends, flexes and has no consistency over its surface, you absolutely need to make good use of UV if you want it to be at all realistic.

Take a pair of worn jeans. No consistency at all. You have light and dark patches. Now, you can get away with a procedural colour, but you're going to have at least a diffuse map to keep it from looking completely uniform. An old leather jacket is going to be smooth in worn spots, and rougher in unworn spots. Not only are you going to have to have good specular mapping, but also good bump mapping applied to UV.

Anyway, you guys are both competent artists and I look forward to seeing more of your work.

Darkjedi · 05-31-2005 05:04 PM

/interrupt on

This whole line of discussion about procedurals on 200 figures in one scene cracked me up. I've done film and video-game work, and there's no way I'd use procedurals on a scene with 200 dudes in it! I'd probably slap a 1024x1024 on the guys and click render.

Unless it's a really specialized scene with an extreme closeup, you can get away with low-rez textures. And even if there was a single closeup, then toss procedurals on that one guy. But anything more than that will be lost anyways.

/interrupt off. Continue the great discussion

kboc2 · 05-31-2005 05:42 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Continue the great discussion

[/ QUOTE ]

Last time I checked you were a pretty important part of it...

Working on a texture template for APEX... I think I have the body down... not sure how to make his cowell may have to model the durn thing

Darkjedi · 05-31-2005 06:23 PM

You could handle his face cover (neatly avoiding the word cowel (sp?)) through texturing. Or, if you're brave, you could photoshop it in. I tend to rely on photoshop when I can't get the model quite right.

But I'm all about the final image and not so much into the strict modelling ethic.

kboc2 · 05-31-2005 06:31 PM

I always keep animation in the back of my mind though... if it's not usable as an animatable piece, it's not worth it for me to do IMHO...

The problem isn't the face so much as the ears... I'll see what I can come up with... but if you like, I'll send you the jpeg of the body alpha channel... see what you think.

It's Mike3 (unimesh)

Darkjedi · 05-31-2005 06:35 PM

The next suggestion I'd make is to make his cowel a morph that comes right out of his face, then texture the head to fit the morph. It should be great for animation that way, and fairly quick to contruct. That also avoids the need to make an entirely new model with new bones... you can rely on the ones you already have.

kboc2 · 05-31-2005 06:37 PM

It's not the bones that worry me... those are easy.. it's those bloody jaw morphs... trying to duplicate all those phenome actions with magnets is a bear...

SagittaryGold · 05-31-2005 09:30 PM

Cowl. Cowl is a head thingie (like what Batman wears). Cowell/Cowel is the judge of American Idol (or other country Idol of choice). But lots of cool stuff being discrussed even if I don't know most of it.

kboc2 · 05-31-2005 11:45 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Cowl. Cowl is a head thingie (like what Batman wears). Cowell/Cowel is the judge of American Idol (or other country Idol of choice). But lots of cool stuff being discrussed even if I don't know most of it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Didn't they name the headgear after that guy because he's always wearing something on his head that makes him look so mean?

Hehe... I just thought of something... some genious over at CGTalk is gonna model his head someday soon and wow everyone with his ability to create ghastly images...

The_Augur · 06-01-2005 11:58 AM

My uncle very fully respects 3D computer graphics, and in fact we worked together on an animation last year that brings ideas he had to motion. Actually, throughout much of his career, his art has ventured into the realm of computer graphics, even before computers were capable of graphics, and his art (in addition to more traditional painting and sculpture) has very often consisted of layering of repeating color patterns. In addition, he's also a very skilled craftsman, and many of his sculptures are machines consisting of moving blocks of wood and hand-cranked conveyer belts or moving pieces of refractive glass and whatnot that allow user input and customization to create animated color patterns. So coming from this type of creative background, he jumped at the opportunity to use computers to both save time (the nature of many of his projects were such that I could recreate a weeks worth of hand-work on a computer in under an hour), and to be free of technical limmitations when adding motion to his work. He just has a bit of a disdain for photographers...

Also, procedurals work fine for objects that need to deform. Generally (at least the default settings in Lightwave), a procedural is applied to a surface before deformations are. So if you use morphs and bones to move an object, the procedural layers stick to the surface. Also, when you layer procedurals creatively, particularly when using procedural layers as alpha channels and as gradient channel inputs (this specific terminology might only apply to lightwave), they can be used to achieve the effects mentioned. Again, it depends on the level of specificity needed for the individual layer in question, though in many cases, image maps can also be avoided by using weight maps stored in the geometry. For instance, if you need the leather jacket to be more specular on either side of the zipper, where it would likely be rubbed more often, you could select the strip of points on either side of the zipper, give them a high value in a weight map you create for that purpose, then use that weight map as an input for a gradient layer that ramps up the specularity based on that weight map. If you then want to make that strip of specularity less regular, you can use a procedural layer as an alpha channel (or displacement channel) for the previous layer, and so on. This can produce really fantastic results that don't rely on image maps, therefore creating more easily contained objects (that you don't have to worry about having images that need to go along with them, which is a huge help when working with other people across multiple computers), which can be viewed at a greater range of scales.

Of course, as was mentioned earlier in the thread, stacking a lot of procedural layers increases render time (though, on the flipside, requires less RAM, so, depending on the shots and your hardware, sometimes will render faster). Though Lightwave also offers the option to bake a texture onto a surface (at a resolution you specify). This will take all the layers and shading for a surface and bake them into a single image map. This process usually takes a long time, but once it's done, the object will render very fast from then on, even though the texture was originally created by using procedurals.

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kboc2 · 06-01-2005 04:50 PM

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Though Lightwave also offers the option to bake a texture onto a surface (at a resolution you specify).

[/ QUOTE ]

yet another feature I drool over

What I had intended to do was to pick up Messiah and eventually upgrade to C4Dxl9. Unfortunately, Messiah doesn't plug into xl9 (yet, hopefully someday).

I may just go with Messiah Studio and just keep the modellers I currently have, which are just fine. Neither Rhino nor xl6 doesn't do NGons, which is okay by me since NGONS can cause issues in subdivision even in packages that support them. Rhino models usually don't need subdivision if I mesh them correctly.

I don't know a whole lot about the Arnold render engine. One of the reasons I wanted to hook Messiah up with xl9 is that it produces high quality radiosity renders at high speed.

XL9 doesn't have texture baking, unfortunately, but interestingly enough it was designed specifically to bring Lightwave models in seamlessly, materials and all. So whatever is produced in LW will translate over to C4D usually without need to re-build materials.

I didn't mean to slander your uncle, btw I know a couple of colourblined Photographers who do amazing work. George Georgiou is one of them. He does more than a few Playmate and Cybergirl pictorials for Playboy. Very neat guy, and I think quite an artist.

heliumphoenix · 06-02-2005 10:03 AM

*LOL*

Of course the whole 200 procedurally textured characters scenario was extreme. But so is just slapping one low-res texture on them. Neither is really a good choice for production work. Especially for film content. Film resolution (if you are talking big-screen or IMAX) is very high, and very small details can be noticed even on background elements. This is why feature film CG animation is specialized and pricey.....

Obviously, a better solution to the '200 characters' scene is to use a low-res image map as your base texturing, with a few procedurals to break up the uniformity.....

The closest good example in modern cinema I can think of are some scenes from "I, Robot"....though those are actually easier since each robot looks identical. Imagine if each robot had to be different slightly. Procedurals can make it happen without outrageous memory costs.....

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heliumphoenix · 06-02-2005 10:21 AM

Kboc, Evidently I was misreading your intent in your "ALL" statement to be that ALL of the texturing was UV maps and nothing else. And, after your clarification, that wasn't your intent.

Procedurals excel in producting texture/deformation/geometry that can CHANGE during rendering based on the scene itself. Image maps are static.

Simple truth is that anything that can be done with UV maps can be done with procedurals. It may take ages to find just the right mathematical models to do it, and they may be torturously CPU intensive, and geometry may have to be horrifically complicated to utilize it, but it CAN be done.

However, UV maps CANNOT do everything procedurals can. They can do a lot, though. They are fast, simple, and can be shared amongst models. They can apply to multiple channels and create a huge range of effects. But they are still static, and therefore cannot alter from frame to frame (or based on scene information).

For a still frame, UV maps and Procedurals are interchangable (though UV maps are usually much simpler to utilize.) For animation, however.....the power of procedural texturing becomes a bigger advantage, since the texture can change based on camera distance, incidence angle, specular function, frame #, object position or orientation, or virtually any other accessible set of numbers in the render pipe. This is the great power of procedurals.

Is one inherently better than the other? No. But each has its strengths and weaknesses.

Now that that is out of the way.....

If you haven't checked it out, take a look at MODO, a very interesting modelling program. It shares some interesting common ground with several major packages, and some very powerful features as well. Too bad it doesn't have a free trial.....I'm sure industry people can find someone who's got a copy to borrow and evaluate, though. Student discount can go as low as $99 USD, though, so it isn't too pricey. Its JUST a modeller, though, AFAIK. But a very good subdivision surface modeller. LW owners can get a 'friends & family' discount as well, supposedly.

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The_Augur · 06-02-2005 12:25 PM

Yeah, I think Modo was made by the same people that made Lightwave's modeler, so is somewhat similar. I've never actually seen it in person, though.

Also, in regards to n-gons: Lightwave certainly uses them (in fact, update 8.3, I think, upped the side-limit for polygons from 1024 to something really rediculous (forget what, but I think it was 2 to the 16th or something). However, it can't subdivide polys with more than 4 sides. This bothered me at first, until I realized that other programs that can (such as Maya) essentially are just splitting the N-gon into quads and tris and then subdividing, and, at least in Maya, the result of using subdiv surfaces with polys with too many sides is really ugly. Quads are my friends (I love subdiv and poly modeling, and I hate NURBS and splines).

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heliumphoenix · 06-02-2005 02:09 PM

Actually, having looked closer (it isn't obvious or easy to locate) there IS an evaluation download version of Modo. Modo Production Evaluation copy link is where you can register and try it.

n-gons, while having a few useful situations, rarely perform well in modern rendering engines once they go beyond a certain number of sides. I personally found that (while they would flat-shade better) they had shading issues in most production situations, and would have to be broken down to proper quad/tri meshes.

Older renderers used n-gons more since they allowed geometry to be stored more compactly (and memory was more at a premium then) but modern rendering engines are highly optimized around quad and triangle intersection tests. N-gon rendering is mostly accomplished by then engine internally subdividing the n-gon itself and creating the resulting tri/quad lists to feed on through the pipe.....

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kboc2 · 06-02-2005 04:37 PM

NURBS and Subdiv are two aspects of 3D Modelling that are very similar. If you take a mesh surface with 9 polygons, z-trans the middle polygon then subdiv the object, youll get basically the same shape in NURBS if you take a nurbs patch with the same number of points as the control mesh surface has in verts and put them all in the same place. The nurbs patch will look like the sudbived mesh if not exactly the same shape (I've found I get exactly the same shape in most instances).

Modeller for you guys to check out:

http://www.nevercenter.com/silo/

Check this vid:

http://www.nevercenter.com/videos/in...lter%20Behrnes

The_Augur · 06-03-2005 04:02 PM

They might look similar, but from my understanding (admittedly, I know much more about the math behind subdivs than nurbs), they are derived very differently, and have different strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, NURBS are not very good for creating localized complexity without adding unwanted geometry to other areas of the model, because they're based on a UV grid, as opposed to subdivs, which can be based on a normal polygonal mesh. By my understanding, subdivs were created to incorporate the strengths of polygons and nurbs into a unified system.

Also, Modo can't be found on Shareaza.... And by "can't", I mean "maybe it can, if you're inclined to try" and I'm just trying to not blatantly say it. I'll also go so far as to say that I "didn't" download it yesterday and install it with barely any trouble for the purposes of trying it out.

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kboc2 · 06-05-2005 09:50 PM

You're right they're not at all the same structurally. But the spline curves that generate the shape will be almost identical if not identical.

[ QUOTE ]
NURBS are not very good for creating localized complexity without adding unwanted geometry to other areas of the model

[/ QUOTE ]

I've never had this problem.

I didn't even bother to try modo. I can't afford it.

The_Augur · 06-07-2005 09:28 AM

shareaza is a free file sharing program, which I don't suggest using and searching for "modo" and downloading it and trying it out, because I don't endorse pirating software for the purposes of learning said software.

But you could if you wanted to, I suppose...

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kboc2 · 06-07-2005 12:25 PM

I don't do piracy ever Got burned by it myself.

I'm very happy with Silo. It's not got all the features of the more expensive modellers, but it's great for its simplicity of function.

UberGuy · 06-08-2005 04:51 AM

I dabble in this stuff, and found you guys' discussion quite interesting. The linkage to some of the products is really useful.

Maybe one of you could point me in a direction for a tool/preceedure for something I'm trying to do. I have two open meshes, and I'd like to essentially morph one to "fit" the other - taking the existing verticies and mapping them to the second object's contour, as though the second one were a mold.

The reason I'm thinking of that approach is that it would let me get the 1st object in the shape I'm looking for but (hopefully) preserve the base object's edges (already set up to join with another mating object) and not lose its existing UV maps and morph targets (it's an OBJ format object for use in a Poser scene). Many of the things I've tried end up re-ordering the verticies, which loses the morph delta assignments.

Thought I'd throw that out there in case there's a simpler alternative to what I'm thinking.

Thanks, and good stuff.

Blue
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Red
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kboc2 · 06-08-2005 06:44 AM

There's a program called "The Tailor" which essentially shrink wraps one mesh onto another... I dunno how well, if at all, it would work with the toolset you have.

http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=ite...s&item=677

UberGuy · 06-08-2005 08:29 AM

Yeah, I'd considered The Tailor. It's not clear it does exactly what I was thinking, but it's obviously close.

It dawns on me I may actually have bought it a while back and stuffed the download somewhere. I guess I'll have to go check when I get home.

Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA