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Run for the hills!!!! The cast of Swan Lake has been roboticized and are attack dancing the town. AAAIIIEEEEEEE!!!!
My render worked.
What I want to do is have a hybrid photo-realish looking render.
I rendered a depth pass a glow pass a volume primitive pass (for the hair) and a volume effects pass (for the light cone).
I ended up not needing the pass for the hair.
One thing I do is copy and paste the original, untouched background layer a couple times, so that I edit them and not the original layer.
The glow pass used a Linear or a color dodge, but I didn't like it, so I switched to the normal blend mode and then used the magic want to select all the black and delete it. I then used Gaussian Blur set to 6 pixels on the layer and adjusted the brightness and contrast to make the colors pop. I then adjusted the fill to what I liked. The effect is a slight light bloom on the glowing objects in the scene.
I created a layer mask from one of the original layers I created from the background layer and copied and pasted the depth pass into it. I inverted the color and cranked up the brightness and contrast to create a dramatic difference between the foreground and background areas of the scene, while still trying to retain the gradient between the two,
I applied the Poster Edge filter to one of the copies of the background layer below the layer mask. The effect is the hybrid look that I wanted, with the astronaut skeleton and immediate environs looking more photographic and transitioning to more of a comic book feel the further away from the camera.
I lost the cool light cone effect in the process, so I decided to enhance the volume effect layer a bit by adjusting the brightness and contrast and using the effect above the layer mask.
Continued from above with the depth pass, and the layer mask.
Cool! If you wanted a little more glow on the glow layer, you could duplicate the layer and change it to either screen or hard light(?). The duplication will increase the glow look a bit. You can duplicate the second layer any number of times to increase the glow also.
Anyway, very nice effect and cool/creepy image. Love that skeleton!!
You posted while I was typing.
I take back what I said before. Not a cool image at all....That's a VERY cool image!! Outstanding!!
Continued from above, yet again... ;-)
This one has the volume effects pass, the layer mask and volume pass composited.
The final image composite should be the last image. This is the one that I will add the titles to.
I know I'm putting the cart before the horse with adding my postwork WIP first, so I'll try and get my lighting WIP together this weekend.
Thanks! I just have to decide what I want to do for the titles. You all have set the bar very high!
Thanks! I just have to decide what I want to do for the titles. You all have set the bar very high!
evilproducer I love it! Thanks for showing all the passes. Only thing I would suggest is maybe a little hint of light on the astronaut's face. Good luck this weekend with your show!
Oops! I missed this! This thread is screaming-fast!
For my part, I use the option to have them embedded in my PS file. I have never looked at tutorials for PS, just the manual and stuff that's been shared here, so for me, having Carrara figure out the "proper" blend mode saves me some time. I often change it if the effect isn't what I'm going for, an if I feel I need a separate file, there's always copying and pasting into a new document.
It's really just a matter of personal taste I suspect. Howevever, headwax, booksbydavid, Antara and Stezza all seem to be far more advanced in PS or an equivalent than I am, so I would attach more weight to their working habits than mine.
head wax Are they wearing your other cover?
evilproducer I love it! Thanks for showing all the passes. Only thing I would suggest is maybe a little hint of light on the astronaut's face. Good luck this weekend with your show!
Thanks SukyL!
I do agree about the face, but I'm probably done with this one. I'm running out of time, and I was getting frustrated with the wonky light behavior. On to titles! Well, first it's, on with the show!
head wax Are they wearing your other cover?
Sshhh! It's called repurposing! All the big media boys do it.
Then again, he could be going senile and forgot.... ;-P
In the image above, which was just a test, I combined two renders within Carrara. I rendered out a toon version (with prop hair) and a photoreal version (with dynamic hair) as separate images. The lighting was slightly dfferent than the pics with 4 detectives but otherwise the same. In a new file, I created a vertex grid the same size as the working box and made sure the uvmap was appropriate. I then used a multichannel mixer to create a shader that combined each image at 50%. Not saying that is what I would do for the final image, but it did give a quick test. To my eye, it resulted in something closer to the look I wanted, which is definitely not photoreal in this case - but neither is it full toon.
I have PS Elements 11, which unfortunately does not have the oil filter. I am even less versed in PS than I am in Carrara, but I do have various PS guides and tutorials.
Edit: And presumably I could use different render passes to assist using more of the dynamic hair portion from the photoreal image yet exclude the shadow at the back of the neck - in PS with masks and layers, or whatever program.
Edit Again: This was my attempt to learn from what EP had posted on the first page of the thread around post #14.
diomede Wow! That's a neat way to combine the two renders inside Carrara. I think the NPR and toon renders by themselves are too strong. The hybrid version does seem like the way to go. To make things easier, I was going to suggest you could render and save out the photoreal and toon versions at 100% each, then make them separate layers in PS Elements. You could mix them there by controlling their respective layer opacities. You could also copy the layers, apply filters, and vary the effect of those as well with the opacity. Using render passes such as depth and x, y, z might not work for masking since Elements doesn't support channels, but the other types of render passes involving light and volume effects that work as regular layers could be vaulable since you can also control their relative strength through the opacity setting.
I embed it all and save straight into photoshop, except for the layers like Coverage & Material Diffuse which cannot be embedded. And I render all passes, just in case. Even when I know they are going to be completely empty. The reason being that they save out with the proper blending modes for photoshop, so I can just paint on them later on, if I need to pretend something was there, and it will look natural as if I rendered it. Also, I noticed that adding them all, vs just a few of them, doesn't really have much impact on render times, so why not? :)
Embedding, however, reduced the layers like position, distance, etc. to black and white, as opposed to rendering them into separate images, which would be rendered in full color. But since I use them as masks anyway, and those are only meaningful in black and white, the loss of color information doesn't bother me.
As for individual passes, I just mess with them until I like the result, but there are a few standard things I do all the time:
--- Blurring glow and reflections. Not always, but when I need an aura around a glowing object, I'll just duplicate the glow and Gaussian blur it. Same with reflections - instead of waiting for them to render blurred (a major slow down for the render), I'd just blur them in post (but sometimes, if the blur is too wide, an object-index-based mask is needed to contain the blur within the reflective object)
--- Using Material Diffuse pass to fake SSS. Note: This actually requires 2 renders to work properly in Carrara 8.5, because in Carrara 8.5 the material diffuse pass is affected by lights somehow, while in 8.1 it just rendered out flat diffuse colors/maps. In order to get the same look in 8.5, I have to re-render my image with no lights (but, good news: such renders are really fast). But this pass is very useful to fake SSS in post: I just add it to the layers composing my image, somewhere between Shadow and transparency and set the material diffuse layer to "soft light" blending mode, then I add a mask to it, to only affect objects which need SSS, i.e skin = yes, metals = no. Then I reduce the intensity of the layer until it looks right to me, either through opacity settings for the whole layer, or through degrees of grey in the mask.
--- DOF: I just don't have the patience to wait forever to set it up and then wait forever for it to render. Therefore, I do it in post too. After I am done messing with all the other layers and I am happy with my image, I copy it with all the visible layers merged, and paste it into a new layer. Then I create a copy of the Distance pass and blur it slightly (just enough so I don't end up with blur edges which are too jarring), then I go to Lens Blur and use the new blurred Distance channel as my reference for the DOF lens blur. (There is also a way to do this in Gimp, but it requires more layers and a bit more complex mask manipulations, but if anyone needs it, I can share the method, so let me know.) I didn't do this step for this challenge, because I was going for more of a crisp-cover look, not photo-imitation.
For this challenge I had to fix the metal shader in post, because it came out too bland and flat looking. I solved the issue by duplicating the Reflections layer twice. Then I added masks to both, and on one the mask was copied from Position X and on the other, the mask was a copy of Position Z. I then edited the masks using Levels to massively increase the pure blacks and the pure whites. This amplified reflections only in certain areas of my reflective objects, not wholesale, and since these were upward facing areas or side-facing areas only (PositionZ=upward-facing and PositionX=side-facing), this added a sense of greater 3D definition to the objects.
I completely and utterly love the last image in this post!
booksbydavid, evilproducer, and Antara Thanks so much for the render pass information. Huge thanks Antara for the detailed description of your process.
And I am back with my choices.
So here are my 3 postworked versions. Camera 4 is the newest render, where I changed the pillows in hopes to have more realistic ones. I like the pillow on it's own, but the details in it make the area around the girl's head too busy for my liking, so for my earlier rendered images I am sticking with the less realistic simple pillows. I did test out Andrew's method for partial frame-blocking using a vertex plane, and it worked like a charm - thank you! I got to test out the new pillows in the old views and even though I ended up liking the old version better, it's was extremely helpful to be able to check things out without waiting for the full-frame render to finish. The new pillow looks best from Camera 4 POV, because it's far away enough not to cause too much distraction, so I decided to leave it there for now.
I changed the titles (story names, not overall fonts or layout) on all 3 images.
As always, I'd be very grateful if you can share with me your preferences and comments.
At this point I've been looking at this scene for so long and from so many different angles, that I just can't think straight about it anymore.
(if you need to know which image is which, hover your mouse of one of the images, it will tell you the original file title, and this way you can know which image is from which Camera, since I named them by camera number.)
They're all great, but I like the one on the top right the best. My second choice would be the bottom.
Of these three, I'd go with the last one. I like it. The colors are good and the pose and camera angle are good for me. :) If worst comes to worst you can just close your eyes and point. I don't think you've done a bad one yet. They're all good. :)
OK, seeing as Mr. Pennybags is only going to pay me for the work commissioned I changed the title.
If the 'Tales' series ever gets going, I hope old Pennybags keeps me in mind. :)
Really great! I think you captured the colors, poses and subject matter of those old pulps perfectly!
Really great! I think you captured the colors, poses and subject matter of those old pulps perfectly!
Thanks. :) I love those old stories. I still read them, Burroughs' Mars, Venus, Moon and Pelucidar books, Doc Savage, The Spider, The Shadow, and on and on. Great stuff. I actually have a few books on the art of the pulp era. Many of those covers are art all by themselves (some not so much. heh, heh).
Marvelous palette, very reminiscent of that era and the types of illustrations that were done. My favorite is the topmost left. The layout is well done, takes advantage of the space and integrates with the title quite well. Well done. :)
@Antara: Top right for me.
Antara,
I think my preference is for Camera 4 (top right image). I still feel like the cameras which are looking more from the left of the scene are a little distancing emotionally; I feel like I'm watching instead of being there. The camera tilt from that angle also still makes me feel like she's going to roll out of the bed - although the effect is much less in these versions than earlier. That might just be me though - I suffer from an occasional bit of vertigo in real life and sometimes tilted images trigger it.
Also - I like the new pillows, they are one of those little details you don't normally notice consciously that can really add to the realism of a scene.
Mark
Quick composition question for everyone...
I took a couple days off and am now looking at my image again and noticed that the robot's arm is running right through V4's head. That's normally the kind of compositional thing I'd avoid but I'm not sure if it's really detracting in this case. I want it clear that that arm, and by extension the robot, are a little further back in the scene than the human figures and I think I loose that if I raise the arm above her head, while lowering it removes some of the feeling of threat.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Mark
Looks fine to me.
The robot and the people look excellent to me. The only suggestion that I might offer would be to sharpen the contrast between the lettering in the lower right and the background so the viewer can more easily read the titles. I think you've done a great job of capturing the pulp spirit.
Off topic? Turner Classic Movies On Demand (if your service provider has that free on demand option) is showing the Danny Kaye version of Walter Mitty. His character works for a pulp publisher and they have a lot of fun gags with the covers, titles, and story elements.
Thank you. I added a little bit of a drop shadow to the story titles to make them pop a little bit - better?
I also re-rendered my image with Sparrowhawke3D's Edge Falloff shader in the glow channel on the glass to make the head/dome pop out of the background a little better.
Since there has been a lot of discussion about mutlipass renders, which can potentially create a lot of files if you choose the external option, I would like to share a RENDER ROOM tip. I imagine this is probably a well known feature by most. I'm almost ashamed to admit it :roll:, but even though I've used Carrara for years, I only just discovered this with my final render in last month's challenge. So, don't laugh, it might help someone like me...
You can save out files automatically after the render completes. In the RENDER ROOM>select the OUTPUT tab>go down to the FILE NAME section> choose NAMED FILE option> click SET FILE NAME button> A save window opens; type in a name for file and select the save location. When your render ends, all images will be automatically saved to the specified location with the prefix you created in addition to the auto-created render file description. I think it's pretty nifty especially if you need to leave a render going for hours and worry about it hanging out in the render room unsaved.
Almost forgot.... Here's the picture