Frozen Animation

[lwanmtr]

More Arendelle.....

Finished the outer ramparts and towers and courtyard. I still need to make the chapel, finish the bridge and then I can start on some of the finer details. Next, though I may jump into zbrush and begin making the island the whole thing sits on.

And now....some polyporn....

[JohnMarchant]

nuArchitect is very good indeed, just a PITA to install again every time there is an update. Wish Kanuso would come up with a better installation process or tell me a better way to install it.

[raymondtrace]

nuArchitect is very good indeed, just a PITA to install again every time there is an update. Wish Kanuso would come up with a better installation process or tell me a better way to install it.

I just went through this. It is not too painful.

If you did the standard nuSoft installation, copy this file and two folders from your old Lightwave installation to the updated LightWave installation:

[LightWave_Program_Installation_Directory]\bin\Lib\site-packages\guiedit.py
[LightWave_Program_Installation_Directory]\bin\Lib\site-packages\nuSoft
[LightWave_Program_Installation_Directory]\support\plugins\scripts\Python\nuSoft

Finally, import the nuSoft menu CFG file in Modeler.

[JohnMarchant]

Thanks Raymond i will try this.

[lwanmtr]

Some more progress.....

First off, a preview of Elsa's Snow Queen dress. Working out my technique to lay all the scales and crystals on the dress in Zbrush. I created a custom IMM with several size and shapes of tiles and gems.



Next up, worked on the rocks and land surrounding Arendelle castle. Again I used Zbrush to sculpt all the rocks around the imported castle model.

[erikals]

Nice dress modeling.

[lwanmtr]

Thanks. Took a while to work out how I was going to do it. Would love to see how they made it originally.

[lwanmtr]

Onward and Upward....

I worked on getting to know Unreal Engine a little more. Learned how to import camera motion from Lightwave into Unreal, and how to render a sequence out from Unreal.
Not quite as straight forward as I'd hoped, but its pretty easy.

I'll be doing more in Unreal (yaay tutorials)..need to figure out lighting (why my scenes turn black when I build)...materials (snow, ice, etc). Hair is still a pain. But I may end up compositing parts between LW and Unreal.

And now....the video....

https://youtu.be/eJJf4fB3xvs

Yeah, not an exciting shot...but it was jsut to see...hehe

[lardbros]

The hair stuff in Unreal has had a massive upgrade, basically taking Joe Alter's hair plugin for Maya and dumping all the cool tech into UE4.
I've not used it yet, but it should be great!

[lwanmtr]

Getting my hair from LW into unreal is the issue. The last time I tried it, going through blender, the hair in Unreal looked more 2d.

[lwanmtr]

Aaannnd..we're back..again...

I've been off on a kind of side track...rendering.... I've done my calculations and unless LW get GOU rendering and FFX gets a major speed increase..and I manage to get more cores, my render time is going to be extremely high, given that I'm still shooting for 4k...soooooo....

I've decided to use LW to generate my scenes, animations..but will be focused on rendering Elsa..which will be comped into footage rendered in Unreal Engine..Of course, if I can get hair to work in Unreal the way I want, then I may render all there.

Been diving into unreal learning lighting, materials and all that stuff.....definitely a bit of a learning curve because it doesnt work at all the same as LW..and the bridge doesnt quite send a 1:1 scene, you still have to tweak alot to get the looks to match.

So in order to kinda force me to really get lighting, environments and materials down in unreal, I've given myself a short project, with a deadline and everything...A short sequence that flies through the 4 major settings we find in Frozen and Frozen-2.. Starting and Ahtohollan, through the Enchanted Forest, North Mountain and ending in Arendelle (which leads into another project in my head).

It will be a good one because It will allow me to focus on assets I need, deal with foliage and other aspects within Unreal.

So, onto the videos....

This first video is the quick cut of the project, extremely rough camera work and rough timing. It has some LW previews and Unreal renders (10 points to whoever guesses which took longer to render out)...



One issue I've been having with geometry imported from LW is strange dark areas (you can see them at the beginning of the forest segment on the beach).
If anyone has some insight, i'd love to know..hehe.

This next video I made after reworking the terrain a bit and splitting uv's so I could have higher res maps. A couple hours of adjusting lighting and other environment effects in Unreal..and then a 6 hour build time this is what I got

https://youtu.be/VGapIFhCJ4E

And lastly...tonight I worked a bit on the North Mountain setting. Still work to do and figuring out how to elimiate some strange rendering artifacts (see above)

This shot ties directly into my Let It Go animation, it will be where I do alot of work on the lighting.



Stay tuned....more to come

[vaskagama]

I'm animating the camera around the object. I save in AVI format (full frames without compression)
I have 1000 frames of animation, the video output is obtained in jerks. Is there a way to remove them?

[lwanmtr]

For me, avi output of the previews is kinda hit and miss,,sometimes they play well, sometimes they get choppy or really bad artifacts. Really I have a feeling the output modules from preview havent been updated since they were added..lol. I do miss being able to export a quicktime, but ahh well.

Usually I have to run the avi's through Premiere or After Effects, Davinci Resolve doesnt like LW avi's at all that Ive found.

[lwanmtr]

Made some progress in Unreal with environments...and then 4.26 dropped which meant I get to do more things...lol

This next video is the Arendelle segment worked out in UE, background made in Zbrush..the palace and other buildings havent been finished yet. The camera was animated in UE, which doesnt have the same feeling of control of a LW camera and the graph editor is a little clunky to me and alot harder to soom in on a segment of keys.



Should have Arendelle done this weekend and be able to finish up the others quckly.

[lwanmtr]

Posted the semi-final render of the short sequence I was working on between LW and Unreal...



I had to output at 1080p because once sequence kept bombing when I rendered to 4k. As soon as I can either figure out how to get my 2070super to do it, or can get my hands on a rtx3090 I'll be posting a 4k version.

I'm also starting to get familiar with Renderman as a possible renderer. The pxrSurface is awesome to work with, its like the original LW Surface setup on steroids, since you have easy options for artistic or realistic materials..or mixed. It also seems a little bit faster. I'll post some quick renders from that as I go.

Of course, if LW 2021 comes and is the upgrade we all want, I may not need to go to these other platforms (yeah, I know....we can all dream, right?)