What the hell is Gordig doing now?

Saphirewild

I think you are doing some amaing things @Gordig!!

Loved the animations for sure!!

Gordig

Thanks! Here's another:

I started experimenting with Cascadeur, which can hopefully replace MotionBuilder since I unfortunately lost access to right as I was about to start trying to animate in earnest again. It's certainly not a great animation, but I think it turned out well considering I've barely even attempted character animation before.

Gordig

I was watching a compilation of Katara water bending to study her motions, and even that was making me choke up. That show is SO GOD DAMN GOOD. 

Gordig

More Cascadeur, made because someone requested poses/animation of the Charleston. I thought I fixed the elbow going through the body, but I'm far from done with it, so it's not a huge deal that that one detail is off.

Gordig

Took a while to figure out how to pivot on the ball of the foot without the whole foot moving around.

Gordig

Really starting to get my Houdini brain working.

Gordig

I am well and truly invested in finally making this Avatar fan film I've been working on in fits and starts for a couple years. I redid my Zuko model, because as much as I liked Daeshim's look, he was just a bit too cartoony:

He's now a blend of Yong and Cato. His lower lip does stick out a bit in the middle in an unnatural way, so that's a little tweak to make, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with his look. He's now a blend of KWAN and Cato. I forgot that I changed the morphs at the end of the timeline to fix the lip issue, but didn't change them at the beginning of the timeline. I've also remade his outfit in Marvelous Designer, which is an improvement over the ones I made in C4D a couple years ago, plus I can use MD for simulations. MD is frustrating as hell in some ways, especially with its broken-ass Alembic export, but it definitely gets results. I need to remake his armor, but I've learned enough about modeling that I could do it better now, and hopefully figure out the appropriate rigging.

I also remade Katara's outfit. I might need to further refine it, because at least when I was figuring out cloth simulations in Houdini, her boobs kept popping out during the animation. That might have been more a product of not getting my simulation settings right, but I could also give her the outfit where she was wearing an undershirt that tucked into her arm wraps.

Now I just need to figure out how to remake her impossible first-season hair, but I think I can pull it off better now.

I've got one animation of Katara attacking, which I posted earlier in the thread, but now I've also got two separate animations of Zuko dodging and counterattacking, which was maybe unwise to combine them into one. For Katara's counter to Zuko's second attack, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to animate the water the way I want to.

I'm also doing my typical thing of making everything unnecessarily difficult for myself. I don't have to use Katara's first-season hair, and I don't have to give Zuko an outfit with armor, but that's simultaneously one of my greatest strengths and weaknesses: I'm practically incapable of recognizing when I'm in over my head, so I just soldier on, and usually I figure out how to make things work.

I'm also definitely keeping my Octane subscription even though I don't think I'll use it to render, because I get a free KitBash3D kit every month, and this month's was Shangri-La, which is a perfect fit for Avatar, though it might be a bit more Earth Kingdom than anything else, which wasn't necessarily what I had in mind.

Gordig

Hoo boy. Still lots to do on this one, from small fixes to the animation to finishing his outfit to working out what happened to the fire in its first few frames to filling out the environment to learning how to effectively use DOF and motion blur in Cycles 4D to....

Gordig

I've been away from DS for a while, but I fired it up to do something for Llola Lane's monthly render challenge....and mostly ended up doing this instead.

Doe Eyed

I thought my wife was going to pass out when I showed this to her. She loves this couple, and she loves when I render babies, so I went in for the kill.

WinterMoon

Aww, that's adorable!  A bebbi faun. 

Gordig

Could I Trouble You For Some Water?

WinterMoon

And some aloe vera on the house? 

Gordig

Reverse Panto

Gordig

Picked up the terracotta warrior bundle because I thought I could use it for Earth Nation soldier outfits (and I also just wanted it for its own sake). Unsurprisingly, it's not set up with the kind of material zones that make it usable as a regular outfit, but the topology is laid out well enough that it's not too much of a challenge to assign new zones. Here's where I'm at so far:

Gordig

Somewhat surprisingly, the tunic takes dForce perfectly, so here's a finished (for now) version.

Gordig

サラリー馬ン

Another Japanese pun that doesn't actually work in Japanese: in this case, I have inserted "uma", the Japanese word for horse, into the word "salaryman", making "salaryuman", in which the final N has no semantic purpose.

Gordig

Ocean Madness

Gordig

Don't know why so many of my renders are of people fleeing in terror.

Gordig

I was starting to figure out how to make Cycles look good when it became unusable for me, so now I'm back to square one with Octane.

Gordig

When you've copied the same material to multiple surfaces, but haven't changed the maps yet.

Gordig

Gordig said:

All I can say for this one is "oof". I started putting this together for Llola's thread, and really fell victim to my own Scottishness. The first mistake I made was the lesson that I will apparently never learn, where I try to put a lot into the scene and struggle with getting everything I want into the frame all at once. Then, when I finally had it set up more or less to my satisfaction, I tried rendering it, and it would consistently crash DS. I tried rendering smaller and smaller parts of the scene at once, and it hit that weird bug where it would render up to about 100 iterations, then reset to 1. Finally I had to render just the environment, then two or three characters at a time, until the sheriff and groom, where it started doing the reset bug again. Finally it's finished, and there are no shadows, eyelines don't work, there are lot of little posing details that aren't good, but whatever. It's as good as it's going to get. So enjoy it, even though it sucks.

Shotgun

 

I thought I'd try rendering this again, to see if my new A5000 was up to the task. It turns out that even 24GB of VRAM and 128GB of RAM are no match for this scene, as my computer seems to have gone into a sort of panic mode. Things are definitely still happening, but my computer doesn't know what to do with itself. 

WinterMoon

Gordig said:

Don't know why so many of my renders are of people fleeing in terror.

Because it's funny, and we're absolutely not sociopaths for finding their distress amusing? 

Gordig said:

When you've copied the same material to multiple surfaces, but haven't changed the maps yet.

Hey, that same thing happened to me the other day. (Or rather, to the character I was working on, but that's semantics.) I was trying to substitute the torso texture with one I had slightly altered, and the guy ended up with a giant nose on his chest. For some reason, Studio was pasting on this face texture, instead of the file I know I had the right path for. It's a mystery!

Gordig

I felt like I'd been working on this for three or four months, but it turns out that it's only been about two, so I don't have to feel quite so bad about only having six seconds of footage to show for it.

Gordig

I started experimenting with a new render engine. See if you can guess which one!

Gordig

A comparison of the three render engines I've been experimenting with in C4D. I am very far from an expert in rendering or texturing, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.

Shot 1: Cycles 4D
This was my original engine, and I've had to move on because it's become unusable on my system for reasons that are as yet unclear. Because I couldn't use it to render beyond a certain point, it's also a less developed version of the shot with fewer kinks worked out.
Pros: Great at procedural textures and most flexible in terms of displacement because displacement isn't directly tied to mesh density. The road definitely looks best in this version, and to reach this level of detail with Octane or Arnold would have required a very dense mesh, where I could use a completely undivided mesh in Cycles. It's good for skins, and it's also by far the easiest to use with X-Particles because it can shade the particle simulations directly, rather than requiring the simulations to be cached as VDBs. Insydium also provides a wealth of shader presets with the Fused subscription, so you have a lot of pre-made shaders to use. Cycles has the most flexible options for altering the colors of texture maps, where I struggled a bit with Octane and Arnold to accomplish the same things I was able to do easily using Cycles.
Cons: Some of the presets are built in ways that are a bit too complex for my tastes, and I felt like I didn't have as much control over, for example, the fire as I would have wanted because it was hard to identify which part of the complex node system would make the change I was after. It also colors any object with missing texture maps or incompatible shaders an obnoxious bright pink, which I can understand from the perspective of identifying things that need to be fixed, but is still annoying.

Shot 2: Octane
Pros: Probably the easiest to use, and a good all-around renderer. Even if I never rendered in Octane again, I'd definitely keep my subscription if only for the free monthly KitBash3D set (most of the architecture in this shot comes from the Shangri-La set).
Cons: I had the most trouble getting displacement to work well at all, and it seems to pretty ill-equipped to make procedural textures. I'm not in love with the way a lot of the operators worked, and even in the node editor, you seem pretty limited on what you can actually do. I watched a few tutorials on how to make good skin in Octane, and even the makers of those tutorials seemed to think that Octane wasn't the best option for skin, and I agree with that. I had a shockingly hard time figuring out how to make transparent materials work, and it seems like that should be one of the simplest things to do. Octane's out-of-core rendering system seems like a great feature until you really try to use it, and on a complex scene like this, I would reach points where it just wouldn't render any more. I did eventually figure out how to increase out-of-core memory, but it's an annoying limitation, especially considering that Cycles and Arnold don't require a GPU at all.

Shot 3: Arnold
Pros: Very good for skins, incredible for hair (though this shot doesn't show it off very well). For my money, Arnold is the most realistic of the three renderers being compared, and also the most cinematic looking. Very flexible, comparable to Cycles in that respect.
Cons: I don't know what the experience of using Arnold in 3DS Max or Maya is like, but the integration into C4D is pretty bad. There's absolutely no ability to use texture maps that are already in the scene, so EVERY SINGLE IMAGE must be loaded through file explorer. If, like me, you like to use absolute paths for textures instead of saving them with the scene, that means that converting shaders to Arnold requires a whole lot of digging through directories to get everything moved over. I definitely would have preferred Autodesk develop their own GUI for Arnold rather than using a modified version of XPresso. The Arnold volume object refused to work properly in this scene, so I couldn't really affect the size, position or orientation of the simulation. This definitely isn't a limitation of the object itself, because it worked as expected in a new scene; it just refused to work in this scene for unclear reasons, so I had to use C4D's native volume loader. Fewer options are available for controlling samples for different render elements when rendering with GPU versus CPU, which makes absolutely no sense to me. The Arnold Parameters tag adds a lot of useful functionality, but it's becoming apparent that you need to apply it to almost everything, so I wonder if more of the functionality could have been incorporated into the shading system instead.

Gordig

Thought I'd do a little texturing and lighting practice, so here's a portrait of Aniyah.

Gordig

I also gave Corona renderer a shot last night, and I hate it, so definitely don't expect a detailed breakdown like I gave the others.

Sven Dullah

So whattabout 3Delight 13? Should be free but limited to 12 cores?

Gordig

I suppose I could give it a try, but I'm definitely more interested in PBR renderers, even if I don't yet have the skills to get truly photorealistic looks. 

Sven Dullah

Gordig said:

I suppose I could give it a try, but I'm definitely more interested in PBR renderers, even if I don't yet have the skills to get truly photorealistic looks. 

No worries, just being curious;)