Marty the Monkey + LW 11.6 nodes

Iaian7

Iaian7

Motion Design Lead
MartyTheMonkeySnow.jpg

Another character piece, this time for a project that launched recently: Kaiser Permanente's Monkey Business, an interactive experience that uses mini games to help health care practitioners with autism assessment.

MartyTheMonkey.jpg

I've written a post for the Vectorform blog walking through how the shaders were built, including nodes for a projected edge outline raytracing effect! More advanced than the original edge effect designed for the character, it's now built especially for Lightwave 11.6, with all of the ray tracing nodes packaged in a Compound node for much easy implementation. Download link is at the end of the blog post.

http://blog.vectorform.com/2013/07/24/behind-the-scenes-creating-marty-the-monkey/

Seriously, we've needed a [native/stable/64bit] compound node for years...I'm so very, very happy about this!

ProjectedEdgeOutline.jpg
 
Backgrounds were comped for the stills (tree assets also rendered in Lightwave, naturally!), but the shadow was a simple object with SSS piped into the transparency, and the character didn't require any compositing at all; production pipeline went directly from the raw Lightwave renders (EXR), through compression (down sampled PNG w/ Alpha), and into the game itself. This allowed me to automate much of the process. Once an animation was finished, I added it to the nightly render queue, and everything else was pretty much taken care of. Assets could be committed to SVN in the morning (or after the weekend :D), and the developer pulled them down in our NY office, ready for implementation.
 
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Wow, thanks! So glad you like it, Jim (original character designer) was great to work with, some fun, classic designs. :)
 
I spent the better part of my day going over your breakdown. I really need to get my head around nodes so I can fully understand what you did. Your Tron Legacy stuff looks great too.
 
Wow impressive stuff so fast! I am going to have to go through your nodal flows. It's always hard to go through someone elses node flows :)

and yes I fully agree, I have been waiting for compounds like forever, they are going to change a lot of things, because it will make it a lot quicker to store presets! Now all they need to do is make global nodes, and some context!:)
 
That looks gorgeous, thanks for sharing the shader setup!
I'm looking forward to trying to get my head around it when I get some spare time, nodes still bake my noodle.
 
Wow gorgeous!!
Thanks a lot for the breakdown... but I really can't reproduce it! Nodes are not my friends...
I have a project that could really use that kind of shader setup.... Would you mind sharing a simple scene so I could manage to understand it? Please?
Thx a lot !
 
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