Character/ENvironment: German Soldier, Ruins.

[zogthedoomed]

My wife was a bit unhappy that I scrapped this after neglecting her and my son while I did it so I've promised to show whats left. This was done to learn about compositing and a bit more about LW to improve my employability. LOL.

Rendered in Lightwave, comped in AE. Only the character, tank and the exhaust is rendered 'properly'. The rest are sky boxes and plates. No radiosity, HDRI or fancy shaders. All shadowmapped spotlights. I tried some SSS shaders for the skin but rendering was too long on what was then a P2 300. Multiple layers for the comping to allow for the backgrounds to be animated, recoloured and whatever. Lots of errors and problems and I wouldn't do it the same way again.

Taken from a 3 minute animation for which I also started to record the music.

[zogthedoomed]

some more.

[zogthedoomed]

Another

[zogthedoomed]

A T34 tank. All the background is a plate. Smoke and flames animated.

[zogthedoomed]

I told a fib. The room interior was also rendered. Although you don't see much of it here.

[zogthedoomed]

from the other window. Stupidly the knocked down tree was also a plate and caused me too many head aches.

[zogthedoomed]

The background was about 4 renderes blended together. I couldn't decided what I wanted so did a load and fudged it in AE.

[riki]

Nice work man, did you finish the animation? My only crit, his skin looks too platsic and eyes too blue.

[zogthedoomed]

Riki,

Yes you're right about the skin. He was supposed to be oily and sweaty but it didn't work quite right. He was also supposed to have a layer of dirt and grime but it wasn't finished. Technically I suppose it should be in work in progress.

As for his eyes they're actually the same colour as mine but the renders were recoloured in AE and the blue's stronger than it originally was.

No, the animation was the middle one of a set of three that I'd planned. This stuff doesn't pay the bills and doesn't help with my day job so became a waste of time. Plus I do game characters during the day and going home and doing more stuff did my head in and didn't do my family any favours.

[jarrodlott]

I was looking at your renders. Very nice. I'm currently in the planning stages of a project that requires such a demolished landscape but I can't seem to get my head into modeling it. How did you go about it? Any advice?

[pauland]

Stunning stuff.

Paul

[Rei]

wow really nice work, that guy looks like he has been through a lot! lovin those background plates mmm destruction.

[riki]

hey zog, yeah I agree nice stuff, but you need to find time for your work.

[-EsHrA-]

awesome work...!!!

I kinda agree with the plastic skin look although it doesnt bother me when looking at the close-up picture....looks rather nice there..
Has its own kinda look.

Maybe try lower the specularity on your character when further away from camera...

but...this said....I really like all the other stuff, good compositions, nice colors, cool lightning.....ahwell u get the idea...

try to send the final sequence to newtek animation gallery, so maybe that section of the gallery can be filled up afterall :)

good work! keep it up!


Cheers,

-EsH-

[zogthedoomed]

Jarrodlott,

Well after a few test renders using sky boxes/background plates was the best option I had. Rendering times and lack of detail wheren't to my liking.

The buildings in the main square are very simple. Start off with a wall poly, subdivide it a couple of times. In another layer draw your windows. Stencil these out of your wall poly. In another layer sketch all the broken parts of the wall etc. This only needs to be rough. You can also jitter this a little bit. Then use this to cut away from the wall. Then simply extrude this. You don't need massive amounts of details as this can be done with the textures and in photoshop to the final render. Build half a dozen of these and you've got you're own building kit.

Buildings outside of the main square are simply cubes and flat polys, shaped with clip maps and given a number of fairly random wall/concrete textures. Most of the detail was painted in.

The ground is simply a displaced mesh. Nothing fancy. Multiple layers of textures defined sometimes by UV's other times by weight maps.The water is just created with an alpha mask. I used the same alpha to define the reflectivity and flatten the geometry.

The sky is two skyboxes. One with the smoke on, one with the clouds, green screeed and merged in After Effects.

If I can find them I'll post some sample After Effects layers.

One piece of advice would be not to do it the way I did. Don't use a skybox for the buildings and ground as it can cause problems with parallax if you try to dolly or zoom. Break your background up into different plates for different building and the ground and have them arranged to mimic the original positions of the buildings. Its alot more work but worth it.

[pauland]

Patrick, I rate this as some of the best LW stuff I've seen. Why not do a tutorial on the buildings/scene design. You could perhaps do it for 3D world and get a bit of money too!

Thanks for posting this. It's been one of the most interesting threads on the forums.

Paul

[zogthedoomed]

Ok guys heres an interesting one. The pictures you see above had their levels and colour adjusted by me in work jst before I posted them because they looked awful. I, assuming my work monitor was correct, altered them to try to reflect what I see at home.

So .. the picture below is an original from home. All I've done is convert from the original tga to jpg.

Obviously all your monitors are going to be different but can some of you give some kind judgement? Especially if you've deliberately set your monitor up in a particular way your opinion will be especially valuable.

Cheers.

[Rei]

well it has quite a strong blue highlight all over it, but i think that looks good. this is on my TFT.

[zogthedoomed]

Guys I'm a bit concerned because I got carried away and posted these pics to two forums. So in order to avoid going over the top can I suggest you also look at

http://forum.simplylightwave.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=6886#post6886

theres at least one extra pic there that shows some of the layers from AE.

Cheers and thanks for your comments.

[mrxd]

Really inspiring renders. I like the look of the burned out city and the T-34. The soldier looks so beat up and scared in that second photo that he is almost comical. The cracked lips and black eye are great. I think the others are right in saying that the specularity is a little too much.

However, I still think what you have put out is some of the best stuff in the forum so far. Please post more if you make something new or make any changes.

[chrisisbacky2k]

wow nice work!!

some of this is definite gallery material me thinks!! :D

[zogthedoomed]

Again this one is also straight from home without me tweaking it for my works monitor.

Thanks for the comments guys.