Stargate Effects
- Thread starter David_CGC
- Start date
prometheus
REBORN
How to attract ladies and how totreat them? or the stargate portal?
By all means ..I urge you to do some, would be nice to see you at it again, though you have retired from work and perhaps chasing ladies.
I would think you still would have a lot to contribute to concept art for the future Mars mission though, it´s still a long way to go.
By all means ..I urge you to do some, would be nice to see you at it again, though you have retired from work and perhaps chasing ladies.
I would think you still would have a lot to contribute to concept art for the future Mars mission though, it´s still a long way to go.
David_CGC
Member
I decided to start some much-belated animated renders of the model to put into my reel. I decided I needed to gussy it up a bit and started building some accessaries, including the SG-1/Atlantis version of the puddle.
I was hoping to do it entirely in-camera, but I don't think that's possible in modern Lightwave. The cheat I came up with before (ramping up the reflectivity up to something like 10,000% as it approached the center of the disc) doesn't work in the physically-based renderer, and any other tricks I've tried also haven't worked (the fake shimmers I used on the movie version are too solid and harsh to match the softer TV look). What I'm leaning towards is doing a pre-render of the highlights and general reflections from a fractal turbulence noise map, and applying that to an object that has a low-spec, high-roughness version of the surface, so the puddle can have some change in lighting depending on its environment. I'll have to do some experiments to dial that in. Right now, the fresnel effect is driving me crazy, if you're looking at the puddle edge-on, no matter what I do to the settings, it almost always turns into a near-perfect mirror. I just want a little bit of a subtle color tint, the kind of thing a compositor would do on the show to help set the element into the filmed scene, not something as reflective as the movie version.
Though if I am pre-rendering it, I think I'm going to take one more try at shining the light through a transparent version, of having it show up as a reflection.
Anyway, I think I've gotten the basic elements more-or-less down in terms of color, proportion, and timing. This video compares my current version (on the left) to a render used on the shows for their "practical" puddle effect (right), which was projected on to a screen mounted inside the stargate setpiece. I'm trying to match a slightly later version of the effect, from the first episode of Stargate Universe, so that's why I've got smaller ripples and it's a bit darker towards the edges.
I'm also not super-satisfied with the shape and movement of the ripples overall, but Lightwave's "Ripples" procedural only has so many options (I'm actually using five levels of it to help break up the pattern further). I tried the water wave textures from Denis Pontonnier's Renderman shader ports, but those were totally off. I do wish someone had ever talked about the nuts-and-bolts of how the puddle was done for the shows. The main vendor the shows used seemed to have it nailed down by season 3 of SG-1 (you could always tell when another VFX house had to do the effect for an episode), but I don't think I've ever even seen someone say what program was used, never mind any kind of detailed description of the settings.
I was hoping to do it entirely in-camera, but I don't think that's possible in modern Lightwave. The cheat I came up with before (ramping up the reflectivity up to something like 10,000% as it approached the center of the disc) doesn't work in the physically-based renderer, and any other tricks I've tried also haven't worked (the fake shimmers I used on the movie version are too solid and harsh to match the softer TV look). What I'm leaning towards is doing a pre-render of the highlights and general reflections from a fractal turbulence noise map, and applying that to an object that has a low-spec, high-roughness version of the surface, so the puddle can have some change in lighting depending on its environment. I'll have to do some experiments to dial that in. Right now, the fresnel effect is driving me crazy, if you're looking at the puddle edge-on, no matter what I do to the settings, it almost always turns into a near-perfect mirror. I just want a little bit of a subtle color tint, the kind of thing a compositor would do on the show to help set the element into the filmed scene, not something as reflective as the movie version.
Though if I am pre-rendering it, I think I'm going to take one more try at shining the light through a transparent version, of having it show up as a reflection.
Anyway, I think I've gotten the basic elements more-or-less down in terms of color, proportion, and timing. This video compares my current version (on the left) to a render used on the shows for their "practical" puddle effect (right), which was projected on to a screen mounted inside the stargate setpiece. I'm trying to match a slightly later version of the effect, from the first episode of Stargate Universe, so that's why I've got smaller ripples and it's a bit darker towards the edges.
I'm also not super-satisfied with the shape and movement of the ripples overall, but Lightwave's "Ripples" procedural only has so many options (I'm actually using five levels of it to help break up the pattern further). I tried the water wave textures from Denis Pontonnier's Renderman shader ports, but those were totally off. I do wish someone had ever talked about the nuts-and-bolts of how the puddle was done for the shows. The main vendor the shows used seemed to have it nailed down by season 3 of SG-1 (you could always tell when another VFX house had to do the effect for an episode), but I don't think I've ever even seen someone say what program was used, never mind any kind of detailed description of the settings.
lardbros
Not so newbie member
Does look cool, I've attempted these things in the past, but never got it looking as nice as yours.
Some guys I know who use LW in VFX, tended to swear by the crumple procedural texture for sea waves, but I'm not sure if it would suffice for Stargate ripples.
The VFX shot above looks like a turbulence texture, moving in/out, rather than a ripple, but I'd need to revisit my old scenes and see what I had.
Looking very cool though, and do enjoy you sharing your progress
Some guys I know who use LW in VFX, tended to swear by the crumple procedural texture for sea waves, but I'm not sure if it would suffice for Stargate ripples.
The VFX shot above looks like a turbulence texture, moving in/out, rather than a ripple, but I'd need to revisit my old scenes and see what I had.
Looking very cool though, and do enjoy you sharing your progress
David_CGC
Member
The old-style fractal Turbulance node was too "pitty" and not smooth enough (or, if I dialed down the detail, too square and not swirly enough). The newer noise textures (I saw another fan-artist who had a very successful version of the Puddle in Unreal, and he told me it was a Perlin noise base) all have weird flat spots. Now that I've got the general look down maybe I'll do another round of experiments swapping in different procedural nodes and see if anything looks better. There is a benefit to using Ripples, though, since the animation loops cleanly and it's easy to figure out when, which will be important since I seem to have to pre-render it to get the correct look without the highlights skewing all around depending on camera angle.
lardbros
Not so newbie member
I've noticed the weird flat areas too, where the algorithms sort of "bottom-out".
I wonder if there's a way to treat those areas, using a function, or gradient, to soften them out a bit?
Absolutely, the ripples procedural is neat with its looping, definitely helps. I do think yours looks great, only notice the difference when you put them side-by-side and the original one definitely has less resolution/definition, so think it makes it easier to spot any flaws in an HD remake.
Still looks brilliant though
I wonder if there's a way to treat those areas, using a function, or gradient, to soften them out a bit?
Absolutely, the ripples procedural is neat with its looping, definitely helps. I do think yours looks great, only notice the difference when you put them side-by-side and the original one definitely has less resolution/definition, so think it makes it easier to spot any flaws in an HD remake.
Still looks brilliant though
prometheus
REBORN
Looking very close to the original, I however prefer the more cyanblue tone in the original, but it´s a matter of taste I suppose and maybe you intentionally wanted it more towards the magenta tone.
The ripples in your sequence is however moving to fast, I would suggest to slow it down since waves and the feeling of weight needs to be a bit more slower, you can easy adjust ripple speed in the ripple textures.
I think the shape otherwise and the movement is pretty close...if you aren´t pleased with the shapes..not sure why though, what I could think of is that you use some function filter nodes, roung, clamp, gain etc to fill/boost the inside shape of the ripples to get it even more closer to the original, but you need to learn how to use those.
The ripples in your sequence is however moving to fast, I would suggest to slow it down since waves and the feeling of weight needs to be a bit more slower, you can easy adjust ripple speed in the ripple textures.
I think the shape otherwise and the movement is pretty close...if you aren´t pleased with the shapes..not sure why though, what I could think of is that you use some function filter nodes, roung, clamp, gain etc to fill/boost the inside shape of the ripples to get it even more closer to the original, but you need to learn how to use those.
David_CGC
Member
I think the "magenta" color is just an optical illusion from being right next to the slightly more cyan version. I actually set the edges to something like 10/10/30 to get it a little darker and bluer. The actual color tinting of the dark edge more towards red or green will end up being a product of the scene.
I nailed down the split between which parts to prerender and which parts to have as part of the main object's texturing; the white highlights and reflective ripples are all going to be done in advance, while the soft central glow and a small amount of diffuse color will be in the scene object; it gets a little over-the-top in direct sunlight, but it's normally a very subtle influence from the environment's colors. I ran off a test render, but I forgot to check the compression settings when outputting an animation directly, so it's pretty crunchy. It's enough to give you an idea of how the puddle texture interacts with the lighting environment, both on the opaque front and the translucent back.
I'm also prerendering the caustics in Lightwave 2015 on a spare computer, just like I had to do for the movie version. I have an idea I wanted to try out; I wasn't able to get quite as much scene interaction in the puddle as I wanted while still preserving the SG-1 "look," because it always got too reflective looking at the puddle edge-on (thanks for nothing, Augustin-Jean Fresnel), but I did want to also add a subtle prismatic effect on the highlights. I don't think that kind of effect is built in to Lightwave 2020, but I think I can fake it by having three lights (or three image notes in the texture) splitting out the red, green, and blue channels, and having them at slightly different spotlight angles (or sizes), similar to how I'd fake chromatic aberration in After Effects. I'll give that a try, see if it looks good or its better to just have the puddle highlights and the spotlight coming out of it as a plain blue.
EDIT: And here's a test of the prismatic effect. It's more successful with the light being projected on the wall than it is on the actual puddle, where it would only be visible on the edge, and it's clearly red, green, blue and not a full rainbow. The projection mixes more smoothly, and the individual colors appear in spots throughout the projection. One weird thing though was having the spotlight with a projection image cratered my render times, much more so than it did on the movie version of the model. I'll have to take a closer look, see what I might be missing.
I nailed down the split between which parts to prerender and which parts to have as part of the main object's texturing; the white highlights and reflective ripples are all going to be done in advance, while the soft central glow and a small amount of diffuse color will be in the scene object; it gets a little over-the-top in direct sunlight, but it's normally a very subtle influence from the environment's colors. I ran off a test render, but I forgot to check the compression settings when outputting an animation directly, so it's pretty crunchy. It's enough to give you an idea of how the puddle texture interacts with the lighting environment, both on the opaque front and the translucent back.
I'm also prerendering the caustics in Lightwave 2015 on a spare computer, just like I had to do for the movie version. I have an idea I wanted to try out; I wasn't able to get quite as much scene interaction in the puddle as I wanted while still preserving the SG-1 "look," because it always got too reflective looking at the puddle edge-on (thanks for nothing, Augustin-Jean Fresnel), but I did want to also add a subtle prismatic effect on the highlights. I don't think that kind of effect is built in to Lightwave 2020, but I think I can fake it by having three lights (or three image notes in the texture) splitting out the red, green, and blue channels, and having them at slightly different spotlight angles (or sizes), similar to how I'd fake chromatic aberration in After Effects. I'll give that a try, see if it looks good or its better to just have the puddle highlights and the spotlight coming out of it as a plain blue.
EDIT: And here's a test of the prismatic effect. It's more successful with the light being projected on the wall than it is on the actual puddle, where it would only be visible on the edge, and it's clearly red, green, blue and not a full rainbow. The projection mixes more smoothly, and the individual colors appear in spots throughout the projection. One weird thing though was having the spotlight with a projection image cratered my render times, much more so than it did on the movie version of the model. I'll have to take a closer look, see what I might be missing.
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