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Ethin

!

Sven Dullah

Misselthwaite said:

Oh!  I just got 'Featured Gallery Spotlight' on the newsletter at Rendo for my Mad Cat :-)  Someone else must have liked him, too!

Gorgeous!!!  Hats off:)))

Sven Dullah

wsterdan said:

Sven Dullah said:

wsterdan said:

Sven Dullah said:

The Black Rose

Love it! The ”Black Rose” (or Thin LIzzy's version of “Róisín Dubh”) is the name of one of the starships I'm currently working on for some short animaitons.

Love the image, the petals came out nicely and the alien, top notch!

-- Walt Sterdan

 Tks a lot, Walt! 

Y'know, in rescent years I've become more and more interested in Celtic history and culture, probably partly because I can trace my ancesters back to around 685 AD on the Irish eastcoast. They ocasionally moved north and ended up near Birka, Sweden sometimes around 1100 AD. I've always felt..something.. when watching footage of those areas, including Scotland and Wales. And the music...

Off topic, kinda: I feel our history has been taken from us, hijacked if you will, by evil forces...

Would love to see some of your animations sometimes! Are you rendering in IRay, 3DL or something else?

I know how you feel about Celtic culture, I've felt much the same about Norse mythology and the people behind it, absorbing as much as I could since I was seven.

I finshed and posted a first episode of a all-ages cartoon last week; it's more of a test of DAZ's lip synching, as well as a test of what an be done -- for free -- with a low-end machine in a timely fashion, so I used mostly OpenGL for the rendering with some 3DL here and there, like the animaitons of the main ship, the Hrimfaxi (named after horse in Norse mythology who pulls Night across the sky. The whole first draft (seven minutes of animation -- this episode is the first half) was done on an Intel MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM. The whole first draft took roughly 95 hours or so (7 minutes of lip synching took just over 90 minutes) but part of the 95 hours was learning how to do most of it, and I actually rendered every clip two to four times for different camera angles, rendering each frame in about a second at 1080p. I rendered the second draft corrections using an M1 iMac where each frame was closer to half a second.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/8075931/#Comment_8075931

What's important, to me, is that I could make very slight changes to each scenes settings and render better quality final drafts using 3DL or iRay, if needed.

As well, I could substitute G3  or G8 charaters for my custom toons, as they all use the same DMC file. Any saved lip sync pose can be applied to any G3 or G8 figures without changing any other part of the character's posign or animation. You could have two characters walking side by side and apply the speech poses without affecting their walking as the poses I save are partial poses only for the head and head's parts.

For now, the OpenGL and my custom toons serve the purpose for testing and I think the overall look fits for the cartoon style.

--- Walt Sterdan

Tks, Walt, for sharing!! I think that looks amazing, considering the rendertimes, bloody well done, mate:)) And, just as it should be, I forgot about the looks of it and got absorbed by the story after a few secs:) I think you got the tempo just right.

Interesting...I'm not totally unfamiliar with Nordic mythology, after. all I'm living in a small part of Finland where we still speak the "root language"... I wish you the best of luck with your project!

wsterdan

Sven Dullah said:

wsterdan said:

Sven Dullah said:

wsterdan said:

Sven Dullah said:

The Black Rose

Love it! The ”Black Rose” (or Thin LIzzy's version of “Róisín Dubh”) is the name of one of the starships I'm currently working on for some short animaitons.

Love the image, the petals came out nicely and the alien, top notch!

-- Walt Sterdan

 Tks a lot, Walt! 

Y'know, in rescent years I've become more and more interested in Celtic history and culture, probably partly because I can trace my ancesters back to around 685 AD on the Irish eastcoast. They ocasionally moved north and ended up near Birka, Sweden sometimes around 1100 AD. I've always felt..something.. when watching footage of those areas, including Scotland and Wales. And the music...

Off topic, kinda: I feel our history has been taken from us, hijacked if you will, by evil forces...

Would love to see some of your animations sometimes! Are you rendering in IRay, 3DL or something else?

I know how you feel about Celtic culture, I've felt much the same about Norse mythology and the people behind it, absorbing as much as I could since I was seven.

I finshed and posted a first episode of a all-ages cartoon last week; it's more of a test of DAZ's lip synching, as well as a test of what an be done -- for free -- with a low-end machine in a timely fashion, so I used mostly OpenGL for the rendering with some 3DL here and there, like the animaitons of the main ship, the Hrimfaxi (named after horse in Norse mythology who pulls Night across the sky. The whole first draft (seven minutes of animation -- this episode is the first half) was done on an Intel MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM. The whole first draft took roughly 95 hours or so (7 minutes of lip synching took just over 90 minutes) but part of the 95 hours was learning how to do most of it, and I actually rendered every clip two to four times for different camera angles, rendering each frame in about a second at 1080p. I rendered the second draft corrections using an M1 iMac where each frame was closer to half a second.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/8075931/#Comment_8075931

What's important, to me, is that I could make very slight changes to each scenes settings and render better quality final drafts using 3DL or iRay, if needed.

As well, I could substitute G3  or G8 charaters for my custom toons, as they all use the same DMC file. Any saved lip sync pose can be applied to any G3 or G8 figures without changing any other part of the character's posign or animation. You could have two characters walking side by side and apply the speech poses without affecting their walking as the poses I save are partial poses only for the head and head's parts.

For now, the OpenGL and my custom toons serve the purpose for testing and I think the overall look fits for the cartoon style.

--- Walt Sterdan

Tks, Walt, for sharing!! I think that looks amazing, considering the rendertimes, bloody well done, mate:)) And, just as it should be, I forgot about the looks of it and got absorbed by the story after a few secs:) I think you got the tempo just right.

Interesting...I'm not totally unfamiliar with Nordic mythology, after. all I'm living in a small part of Finland where we still speak the "root language"... I wish you the best of luck with your project!

Thanks very, very much for the kind words. As mentioned, it's a proof-of-concept for setting up a small studio to do animation with a small budget. The only difference I found between using my custom toons and G3 or G8 characters is in the loading and saving times, render times were the same.

Due to the simple textures and lack of complex shaders, OpenGL and 3DL are very similar in qualtiy (though to be honest, I haven't spent much time in optimizing lights, something all of you artists here do which result in your far supeior quality)  so the OpenGL renders do a great job of being simple proofs before doing a higher-quality final render in 3DL. 

Quick example (I've dialed the characters' toon level down and the semi-realistic level up), no changes to lighting, rendering the same scene in OGL and 3DL. The OGL took 0.66 seconds while the 3DL took 1 minute 50 seconds. At 24 frames per second (1080p) therender time adds up. Click for full-size.

OGL:

3DL:

 

-- Walt Sterdan

wsterdan

Same basic crew, swapped out with Genesis 3 versions using a touch of 3DUniverse's Toon Generations 2 for a cartoon look. I had to add a distant light to brighten it up a bit. Rendered at 1080p with 3DL 2 minutes, 16 seconds per frame. Obviously I'd need help with lighting if I was doing this more seriously.

As mentioned, the lip sync partial poses can be applied to G3 and G8 without changing any of the characters pose or animation.

-- Walt Sterdan

Misselthwaite

I admire people who manage animation in Daz - I tried once, and realized it just wasn't something I had the mindset for, or 'the eye', I suppose... or the patience.  As a sidenote, the bridge would largely provide an ambient light, or a nice IBL sort of all-round illumination, but I have no idea what that would do to render times!

wsterdan

Misselthwaite said:

I admire people who manage animation in Daz - I tried once, and realized it just wasn't something I had the mindset for, or 'the eye', I suppose... or the patience.  As a sidenote, the bridge would largely provide an ambient light, or a nice IBL sort of all-round illumination, but I have no idea what that would do to render times!

Thanks for your reply; I think I'd need to use 3DL and some other lighting, which really cranks up the render times for my simple animation. I remember puttering briefly with similar lighting almost a decade ago, but since I was using a lot of PWToon at the time, I found that Uberenvironment worked best for me. I'm hoping to try out Filament with some HDRI products I have once DAZ Studio 5 comes out (I'm using Macs and while I've tested Filament a few times on my machines, it's awkward and when something doesn't appear to work, I can't be sure if it's the product's fault, my fault -- mostly likely -- or running Windows in a vertual machine). Theoretically, Filament should render as fast or faster than OGL once it's implemented and provide better transparency and lighting options than OGL. Hopefully it won't be much longer...

-- Walt Sterdan

Sven Dullah

wsterdan said:

Same basic crew, swapped out with Genesis 3 versions using a touch of 3DUniverse's Toon Generations 2 for a cartoon look. I had to add a distant light to brighten it up a bit. Rendered at 1080p with 3DL 2 minutes, 16 seconds per frame. Obviously I'd need help with lighting if I was doing this more seriously.

As mentioned, the lip sync partial poses can be applied to G3 and G8 without changing any of the characters pose or animation.

-- Walt Sterdan

I think you could get down to a few secs/frame if you use UE2 in ambient mode (try using mapped light colors for a more dynamic look) together with spotlights with no shadows, just vary intensity, light spread and light falloff to create the illusion of depth;) If you use maps for the UE2 light, you can play with those saturation/contrast sliders without adding much to render times. You've probably went through all this couple of times already, but I think light falloff can be a good thing to mention here. Set it to 2 for physical falloff (decay). You'll need to raise intensity scale accordingly;) But yeah, just plain UE2 is probably the fastest solution if you use 3DL...

PS Don't use HD morphs or SSS;)

wsterdan

Sven Dullah said:

wsterdan said:

Same basic crew, swapped out with Genesis 3 versions using a touch of 3DUniverse's Toon Generations 2 for a cartoon look. I had to add a distant light to brighten it up a bit. Rendered at 1080p with 3DL 2 minutes, 16 seconds per frame. Obviously I'd need help with lighting if I was doing this more seriously.

As mentioned, the lip sync partial poses can be applied to G3 and G8 without changing any of the characters pose or animation.

-- Walt Sterdan

I think you could get down to a few secs/frame if you use UE2 in ambient mode (try using mapped light colors for a more dynamic look) together with spotlights with no shadows, just vary intensity, light spread and light falloff to create the illusion of depth;) If you use maps for the UE2 light, you can play with those saturation/contrast sliders without adding much to render times. You've probably went through all this couple of times already, but I think light falloff can be a good thing to mention here. Set it to 2 for physical falloff (decay). You'll need to raise intensity scale accordingly;) But yeah, just plain UE2 is probably the fastest solution if you use 3DL...

PS Don't use HD morphs or SSS;)

Thanks very much for the suggestions, Sven (and you too, Misselthwaite), I'll definately look into lighting. I've tended to use right-out-of-the-box lighting solutions in the past, spending more time on customizing characters. The few times I tried to expand on my lighting mastery it seemed that everytimg I tried tended to look worse and take longer (not encouraging) and usually defaulted to UE2, but never experimented with its settings. I will now, as a few seconds a frame for 3DL would be well worth it.

-- Walt Sterdan

Sven Dullah

Quick test using dz default shader, raytrace depth 0, UE2 using ambient mode, full HD size non progressive: 6.41 sec

Adding a distant light with raytraced shadows (and reducing UE2 intensity): 11.31 sec

wsterdan

Sven Dullah said:

Quick test using dz default shader, raytrace depth 0, UE2 using ambient mode, full HD size non progressive: 6.41 sec

Adding a distant light with raytraced shadows (and reducing UE2 intensity): 11.31 sec

Thanks for taking the time to do these samples and give me a solid starting point, I'm sold!

-- Walt Sterdan

Sven Dullah

wsterdan said:

Thanks for taking the time to do these samples and give me a solid starting point, I'm sold!

-- Walt Sterdan

Hehe you're welcome, interesting topic;) 

One last test adding proper reflection/refraction to the water (trace depth 1, shading rate 0.2 8x8 pixel samples,  39.41 sec...

So yeah, raytracing costs time, but still inside my personal preference of "less than a minute/frame". But for toon-ish stuff I wouldn't bother;)

wsterdan

It's easy to see how even your toons eclipse the quality of my animation, yours comes across as so much more realisitc! Thanks again for sharing this info, it really does kick me ahead a few steps. I'll have to see how my low-end iMac compares to your new super-rig.

-- Walt Sterdan

wsterdan

Sven Dullah said:

wsterdan said:

Thanks for taking the time to do these samples and give me a solid starting point, I'm sold!

-- Walt Sterdan

Hehe you're welcome, interesting topic;)

I spent some time today testing a few of your suggestions. Overall, very helpful; as well, it solved an earlier mystery in this thread.

First: My original 3DL Full HD image, rendering time 1 minute 40 seconds.

Set UE2 to Ambient and we get an image that similar to one I got last year by accident (after a file was damaged) and now I know how to recreate it. It took 38 seconds to render.

I reduced the UE2's intensity and added a default distant light and got a nice render that only took 67 seconds to render, speeding up my 3DL nicely (thanks!). As well, your suggestions generated a much better 3DL render than I was getting, so a bonus, faster render and better image.

Finally, using the faster 3DL settings actually shaved a little bit of time off of my OGL rendering (0.65 seconds).

The 3DL renders are clearly better than my OGL, but even with the speed-up by switching to Ambient settings without ray tracing, they're still far too slow for my cartoon animations.

At 24 frames/second, I need to render 1440 frames to generate a minute of animation. With my single, simple M1 iMac an OGL-rendered minute of animation took 16 minutes and 42.19 seconds.I rendered 144 (one-tenth) of a minute of the same file in 3DL and it took 1 hour, 13 minutes and 42.19 seconds. Extrapolating that for a full minute of animation, a 3DL-minute of animation would take 12 hours, 17 minutes and 10 seconds.

I know that I can continue to render in OGL for now, and that if I need to up the quality at any time I can simply re-render the files either on a faster machine, do overnight renders or add an extra machine or two for rendering in the background.

Thanks so much for the speed-up tips, they did work well and the fact that they were even able to speed up the OGL a bit helps.

-- Walt Sterdan

 

Sven Dullah

Walt, I'm glad you found some of my rambling useful:) As I said eariler, I think OpenGL works just fine here, and nothing can beat that speed as of current. But I'm a bit puzzled by your rendertimes, considering you pressumably used a distant light with no shadows enabled?! Care to share your render settings, especially sampling, gamma and shading rate?

Here, the image that rendered in 6.5 secs for me, where I used only UE2 in ambient mode, I had added a graycolor gradient map in the UE2 light color slot, then gave it a light blue tint, just a simple .jpg with white on top and dark grey on bottom to kinda give a sense of light direction and occlusion. (That's not raytracing, the map will be wrapped around and multiplied with the diffuse color values of all objects in the scene that use diffuse strength.) You could give that a go and leave out the distant light to cut a few seconds? This should actually work better for indoor environments like yours, that don't require a lot of directional lights.

And let me repeat that I think your animating skills are top notch, I'm blown out by the lipsync and expressions!

 

 

Sven Dullah

Just for fun, played around with some more toon morphs and skins I've probably never used, and converted the lot to awe. Rendertimes are anything between 10 to 40 min. depending on qualitysettings, for a full HD size render. Didn't try turning off all SSS, would probably shave off a couple of minutes. Ah well..I think I prefer the OpenGL / UE2 look for toons

Sven Dullah

Recycling my "Black Rose" render;)

wsterdan

Ah, right, I missed the recycling at first but I see it in the sign now, cool.

Love the lighitng, were the headlights touched up in post or are the flares/stars rendered? The highlights on the ISS Patrol belt look good, as does the hightlights on the street, very nice.

-- Walt Sterdan

wsterdan

Sven Dullah said:

Walt, I'm glad you found some of my rambling useful:) As I said eariler, I think OpenGL works just fine here, and nothing can beat that speed as of current. But I'm a bit puzzled by your rendertimes, considering you pressumably used a distant light with no shadows enabled?! Care to share your render settings, especially sampling, gamma and shading rate?

Here, the image that rendered in 6.5 secs for me, where I used only UE2 in ambient mode, I had added a graycolor gradient map in the UE2 light color slot, then gave it a light blue tint, just a simple .jpg with white on top and dark grey on bottom to kinda give a sense of light direction and occlusion. (That's not raytracing, the map will be wrapped around and multiplied with the diffuse color values of all objects in the scene that use diffuse strength.) You could give that a go and leave out the distant light to cut a few seconds? This should actually work better for indoor environments like yours, that don't require a lot of directional lights.

And let me repeat that I think your animating skills are top notch, I'm blown out by the lipsync and expressions!

Thanks, but the lip sync is just DAZ Studio in action. The hardest thing about the lip synching is having a machine that can run the 32-bit version of DAZ Studio, after you've got that, you just load a figure, load the sound and text file for the speech and then the .dmc file and go. No talent required (if I can do it, anyone can). I'd gladly pay money for a 64-bit version of the Mimic-based lip sync in this version of DAZ Studio or -- even better -- DAZ Studio 5. Fingers crossed.

Thanks as well for the extra help with the 3DL lighting. I played with your suggestions and managed to get the render times down to under 14 seconds, a huge, huge improvement over a couple of days ago, so thanks.

Here's my settings for the UE2 light and my render settings, let me konw if there's anything else I can try but seriously, you've already helped so much that I'm a pretty happy camper at the moment. I've uploaded the 13.65 second render as well.

UberEnvironment2.1

Intensity: 100% (I tried 50% but it didn't affect the time significantly, but the preview was darker)
Intensity Scale: 1005
Colour (map, as suggested, with colour set slightly blue at 240/255/255)
Environment Mode: Ambient (No Ray Tracing)
Saturation: 100%
Contrast: 100%
Occlusion Strength : 0.0%
Indirect Lighting Strength; 100%
Occlusion Colour: Black (0/0/0)
Occlusion Samples: 0
Shadow Bias: 0.10
Shading Rate: 8.00
Max Error: 0.1
Maximum Trace Distance: 100.00

Rendering
Progressive: Off
Buckets: Horizontal, size: 64

Sampling:
Max RAy Trace Depth: 0;
Pixel Samples (X): 2
Pixel Samples (Y): 2
Shadow Samples: 1

Gain: 1

Gamma:
Gamma Correction: On
Gamma: 2.20

Shading Rate: 0.50

Filter:
Pixel Filter: Sinc
Pixel Filter Width X: 8.00
Pixel Filter Width Y: 8.00

-- Walt Sterdan

 

Sven Dullah

wsterdan said:

Ah, right, I missed the recycling at first but I see it in the sign now, cool.

Love the lighitng, were the headlights touched up in post or are the flares/stars rendered? The highlights on the ISS Patrol belt look good, as does the hightlights on the street, very nice.

-- Walt Sterdan

Tks! I added the flares in post, we could really use a dynamic lense flares product for 3DL;)  

Sven Dullah

wsterdan said:

Thanks, but the lip sync is just DAZ Studio in action. The hardest thing about the lip synching is having a machine that can run the 32-bit version of DAZ Studio, after you've got that, you just load a figure, load the sound and text file for the speech and then the .dmc file and go. No talent required (if I can do it, anyone can). I'd gladly pay money for a 64-bit version of the Mimic-based lip sync in this version of DAZ Studio or -- even better -- DAZ Studio 5. Fingers crossed.

Ah, I see, and agree! Well it seems to be working fine for you, I need to look into it...

Thanks as well for the extra help with the 3DL lighting. I played with your suggestions and managed to get the render times down to under 14 seconds, a huge, huge improvement over a couple of days ago, so thanks.

Here's my settings for the UE2 light and my render settings, let me konw if there's anything else I can try but seriously, you've already helped so much that I'm a pretty happy camper at the moment. I've uploaded the 13.65 second render as well.

UberEnvironment2.1

Intensity: 100% (I tried 50% but it didn't affect the time significantly, but the preview was darker)
Intensity Scale: 1005
Colour (map, as suggested, with colour set slightly blue at 240/255/255)
Environment Mode: Ambient (No Ray Tracing)
Saturation: 100%
Contrast: 100%
Occlusion Strength : 0.0%
Indirect Lighting Strength; 100%
Occlusion Colour: Black (0/0/0)
Occlusion Samples: 0
Shadow Bias: 0.10
Shading Rate: 8.00
Max Error: 0.1
Maximum Trace Distance: 100.00

Rendering
Progressive: Off
Buckets: Horizontal, size: 64

Sampling:
Max RAy Trace Depth: 0;
Pixel Samples (X): 2
Pixel Samples (Y): 2
Shadow Samples: 1

Gain: 1

Gamma:
Gamma Correction: On
Gamma: 2.20

Shading Rate: 0.50

Filter:
Pixel Filter: Sinc
Pixel Filter Width X: 8.00
Pixel Filter Width Y: 8.00

-- Walt Sterdan

 

That looks nice, there's more detail to everything now!  As for UE2 settings, in ambient mode you only need to worry about light color and intensity,( contrast and saturation if you use a map in the color sllot.) Say you use a skydome texture, you might want to reduce saturation. With a grey color map saturation won't obviously do much. Contrast you could think of as image gamma. 

Your rendersettings look reasonable, optimized for speed;) I've never gone as low as 2x2 PS but that seems to work for you, since you don't use DoF. I would usually recommend a minimum of 4x4. Shading rate: 0.5 means you upsample by a factor of 2. I wonder if 1 would be sufficient for you? If you don't get artifacts like "flickering" between frames etc, it should speed up things quite a bit. (I use 0.5 for animation because I use DoF along with  AoA lights and that requires 0.5 or preferrably less as a minimum, for a smooth shading.)  Your filtersettings also seem to work, but a word of warning: The sinc filter can start "ringing" if you increase the width further. Don't know if there's any time to be won here, you could try Catmull-Rom at 4x4 or 5x5 pixelwidth, that's what I use.

ETA:The box filter at 1x1 pfw, or basically no pixelfilter, should be the fastest option. Although it may look jaggy on stills, it might work for animation, and it could save you some additional seconds over 1000 frames;)

wsterdan

Sven Dullah said:

That looks nice, there's more detail to everything now!  As for UE2 settings, in ambient mode you only need to worry about light color and intensity,( contrast and saturation if you use a map in the color sllot.) Say you use a skydome texture, you might want to reduce saturation. With a grey color map saturation won't obviously do much. Contrast you could think of as image gamma. 

Your rendersettings look reasonable, optimized for speed;) I've never gone as low as 2x2 PS but that seems to work for you, since you don't use DoF. I would usually recommend a minimum of 4x4. Shading rate: 0.5 means you upsample by a factor of 2. I wonder if 1 would be sufficient for you? If you don't get artifacts like "flickering" between frames etc, it should speed up things quite a bit. (I use 0.5 for animation because I use DoF along with  AoA lights and that requires 0.5 or preferrably less as a minimum, for a smooth shading.)  Your filtersettings also seem to work, but a word of warning: The sinc filter can start "ringing" if you increase the width further. Don't know if there's any time to be won here, you could try Catmull-Rom at 4x4 or 5x5 pixelwidth, that's what I use.

ETA:The box filter at 1x1 pfw, or basically no pixelfilter, should be the fastest option. Although it may look jaggy on stills, it might work for animation, and it could save you some additional seconds over 1000 frames;)

Thanks for the extra info, I've updated the setting to take your suggestions into account and while they made very little difference to the render times, I feel safer going forward as I recognize that these are a little more "bulletproof" than what I used yesterday.

One major point that I forgot to mention is that the changes to the UE2 settings has an important bonus in that the OGL, 3DL and viewport all look very, very similar; the main viewport is now a more accurate representation as to what the final render will be, whether 3DL or OGL. In the past, I've found that the Viewport and OGL would match but I'd find the 3DL render wouldn't, usually coming out darker, requiring altering the lighting to get the 3DL to look correct at the expense of the Viewport and OGL looking different. Now, I can be confident that when I need to up the quality to a 3DL render it's just gogn going to work. That's worth a lot.

Thanks so much for the help with the lighting (probably my weakest skillset).

--Walt Sterdan

Sven Dullah

No worries Walt, you know I worked with a terribly slow machine for many years so learned a few tricks:)

Sven Dullah

Old Betsy

wsterdan

Great work as always, Sven. I especially like the terrain, the grass and ferns are excellent, the mossy rocks look perfect (I used to see them all the time back in my wilderness days) and the DOF looks spot on, just enough to see it without overdoing it.

I continue to be impressed at what you pull out of 3DL.

-- Walt Sterdan

Sven Dullah

Thanks Walt, I appreciate your feedback! What, that sounds appealling, you were a wilderness guide or something?

 

wsterdan

Sven Dullah said:

Thanks Walt, I appreciate your feedback! What, that sounds appealling, you were a wilderness guide or something?

 

In the late 70s I spent most weekends (and vacation weeks) canoeing and camping in the provincial parks around here in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter; in the first half of the 80s I worked around the North Pole at offshore oil exploration sites.

-- Walt Sterdan

Sven Dullah

wsterdan said:

Sven Dullah said:

Thanks Walt, I appreciate your feedback! What, that sounds appealling, you were a wilderness guide or something?

 

In the late 70s I spent most weekends (and vacation weeks) canoeing and camping in the provincial parks around here in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter; in the first half of the 80s I worked around the North Pole at offshore oil exploration sites.

-- Walt Sterdan

I figure you know a thing or two about the Northern lights then;) Ever since I grew up, I've hated skiing, snow in all shapes and the darkness:) So spent a lot of time at sea in the summertime as a youngster, sailing and whatnot...yeah I love the sea, luckily it's a only a few kilometers away from where i live. 

(Sorry, a bit offtopic)

wsterdan

Sven Dullah said:

wsterdan said:

Sven Dullah said:

Thanks Walt, I appreciate your feedback! What, that sounds appealling, you were a wilderness guide or something?

 

In the late 70s I spent most weekends (and vacation weeks) canoeing and camping in the provincial parks around here in the summer and cross-country skiing in the winter; in the first half of the 80s I worked around the North Pole at offshore oil exploration sites.

-- Walt Sterdan

I figure you know a thing or two about the Northern lights then;) Ever since I grew up, I've hated skiing, snow in all shapes and the darkness:) So spent a lot of time at sea in the summertime as a youngster, sailing and whatnot...yeah I love the sea, luckily it's a only a few kilometers away from where i live. 

(Sorry, a bit offtopic)

Actually, I almost never saw the northern lights in the "high arctic", we were too far north. The best ones I did see were when I was working for a different, offshore drilling company south of the arctic circle in the Beaufort Sea. That was the most time I spent on the ocean (at least when it wasn't frozen).

A bit more on topic, when I was setting up the opening title card for The Hrimfaxi Adventures, I did the Mars fly-by using 3DL. Here's one of my first tests where I needed to have the red-and-yellow Bussard collectors at the front of the nacelles spinning: 

https://sterdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Hrimfaxi_Slow_Flyby.mp4

That was actually the second attempt; after I'd rendered and converted it to a movie, I noticed that the ship was casting a shadow on the planet... a big one. 

And here it is after having a "Comic Book" filter applied in iMovie:

https://sterdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Hrimfaxi_Slow_Flyby_Comic_Basic.mp4

I'm not sure how to link to a non-Youtube movie and insert into the forum post with a preview, if anyone can help feel free to jump in!

-- Walt Sterdan

Sven Dullah

wsterdan said:

A bit more on topic, when I was setting up the opening title card for The Hrimfaxi Adventures, I did the Mars fly-by using 3DL. Here's one of my first tests where I needed to have the red-and-yellow Bussard collectors at the front of the nacelles spinning: 

https://sterdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Hrimfaxi_Slow_Flyby.mp4

That was actually the second attempt; after I'd rendered and converted it to a movie, I noticed that the ship was casting a shadow on the planet... a big one. 

Cool lookin ship, I like the decals on the back. You could use more ambient on the red-yellow spinning thingies if you want them to glow a bit. (The ambient strength limits can be turned off for a more "over the top" look.)  The OmUberSurface shader has a button to turn off "Accept shadows" if you need to fake some more fly-by:s, using lights with shadows enabled...

Hm, I find the scale of the planet and orbit diameter most fascinating, weird and cool at the same time. Did you consider scaling the ship up while closing in on the camera?