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I then made the text objects invisible, rendered the scene in Carrara and got render passes for both the fog and the volumetric spotlights, then rendered the octane plugin scene, and combined in post.
Here's the screengrab for the lighting setup in the assembly room, then the carrara render, followed by the fog pass and the volumetric pass, then the octane render, then the combined one.
And lastly the combined version for the submission. I'd like to do more, as it looks only slightly the way I envisioned it in my mind, but alas the month was too busy with other stuff and I shouldn't have left it to be finished at the last moment, so since time is short, this is what I'll go with :)
I do want to echo what others have said, I think this challenge has been incredibly fun, and I've really savored all the other ideas and entries, such great themes and scenes! Despite this being in service of 'low pulp' I seriously think some of you guys have achieved high art.
Not that I know a dang thing about art, so that's not for me to say :)
And I wish I knew more about how to do text and fonts, some of those other entries look like real life magazines for heaven's sake! :)
Congratulations on becoming a Brother in-law. May they have a long and fruitful life together! :)
I'm glad that you were able to get get your entry together! Nice Wips as well.
The disadvantage of the fog as compared to a volumetric cloud, is that the fog primitive doesn't really react to light. That doesn't mean it is bad, just more limited. The advantage is that it is much faster to render than a volumetric cloud. As long as you keep in mind the limitations of the fog primitive when you design your scene, there is no reason it can't be very effective.
Jonstark So glad you had a chance to submit something! Looks great!
If anyone needs a little more time, it looks like I'm going to close the submissions more like 12 MST (DAZ time). I need to go search for some past voting rules to steal. ;-)
Look how optimistic I am! My submission is still rendering, and I'm posting my rust shader. It will be done tonight! I'm not cheating because I didn't intend to make mine eligible for voting anyway. ;-P
Here is the setup for my rust shader. I was dreading doing this one, but after taking a look at others posted in the WIP, I found a pretty easy solution. I wanted to preserve the factory finish of the Haystack robot and introduce just a little rust mostly on the underside of the main body parts.
I loaded in Haystack (by The AntFarm) with his default textures and converted most metal shader domains to the anisotropic lighting model set at the lateral default. For each domain I wanted to rust, I created a multi channel mixer. In source 1, I added the rust texture in the color channel, which is a 512 x 512 sampling of RustMixed0077_S.jpg from CGTextures.com. Source 2 is the default Haystack texture. The blender is a grayscale texture map created in Photoshop, using various brushes from Ron's Nuts, Bolts & Holes and Ron's Extreme Grunge and following the original Haystack texture as a guide for where to place the rust. The same blender texture map was then copied to the bump channel in Source 1 (rust shader) and in the displacement channel in the case of the shins and feet where I wanted it to look like there had been a lot of corrosion due to the radioactive liquid in the base of the containment unit. [Edit I forgot to add: Source 1 (rust) has a more diffuse lower Highlight/Shininess % setting than Source 2 (default robot texture which has a higher Highlight/shine % to give the effect of a more rough/dull finish where it is rusted.]
I followed pretty much the same process for adding rust to the base of the containment unit, but used the Carrara default brushed metal shader as the base.
sukyL, great shader on the robot!
I think the vote counting convention states (or it has been so far) that a person cannot win the first prize twice in a row (?) - to prevent people from having to host consecutive challenges, so if you were going to exclude yourself on that basis, please don't!
Jonstark, great atmospheric effect and sneaking monster. Love how it's so huge, yet clearly moves unheard and unseen. It's hard to add an extra storytelling dimension to the single frame, beside the visual - like time (as in your previous challenge where every character had a clear story for at least a few seconds before and after the image), or, in this case, sound. But you've succeeded in doing so here (again).
Hi Antara, I'm definitely not excluding myself for fear of winning again. :) There are so many extremely good and deserving entries. I would feel bad if someone accidentally voted for mine and kept another from placing as a result. I've had a lot going on in addition to running the challenge, so I've been very happily working on mine when I can as an educational challenge.
Thanks so much for the multi-quote help and liking the rust shader!
sukyL that rusty metal shader is to die for! Incredible work, loving how it looks on the robot.
Antara, thank you, to be honest your 1st entry is one of the single greatest examples I've ever seen of telling a story simply by the posing and positioning I've ever seen. It's funny because I recall you mentioned being concerned that it might not be visible or obvious to the viewer that the robot was clasping the slain lady's hand, but honestly even if you couldn't actually see the hands clasping the attitude and posing of the robot makes the emotion of the moment quite apparent. I doubt anyone seeing it would assume the robot was thinking to itself "gotta cop one... last... feel.. " or "dang tight diamond ring, c'mon twist off the finger before anyone sees, daddy needs a new upgraded processor board." or anything else (sorry, couldn't help dreaming up ridiculous and inappropriate alternate interpretations no one would ever think of :) )
To me that scene reads as mourning so effortlessly and clearly that it actually makes me feel a little misty-eyed for the poor grieving robot, in a similar sense to when you see a picture of a loyal dog who comes daily to visit the gravesite of their owner. Just incredible work there, all in a single picture but you can feel the weight of the storytelling behind it.
Everyone has done such dazzling and impressive work with their magazine titles and text, it really is quite intimidating, you guys are awesome. The more I look at mine, the more I hate the text. It's not just not good, it's embarrassingly bad. Gah, I need a lot of work in this area... Oh well, this is how we learn, I guess :)
Thanks Evil! He really really picked a winner, I'm very happy for him and love her to pieces actually. He's the youngest and I'm the oldest of seven, so we're far enough apart in age that in many ways I helped raise him; I love all of my brothers and sisters but he is the one I'm closest to, so I'm very proud of him and while it has made things a little busy for me over the past week or so, I'm mostly just super happy right now for them both.
Here is my final setup.
I used a lot of different lighting. The main scene is illuminated by a single spot at an angle towards the back of the scene with a caustic map and a cone light effect. I didn't like the banding effect of the cone light with the caustic, so I opted to use 3D shadows with the cone. I definitely took a hit on render time, but the cone effect is much more subtle and realistic.
I took Antara's advice on the radiating radiation rings and set them up as the driver for an anything glows light. Additionally, the rings have a shader with a glow channel (see previous WIP for settings). I was having difficulty getting decent lighting on the robot, so I set the shape light ring to only light the robot with an eerie green glow.
Also on Antara's advice, I made the fog effect closer to the foreground by setting it in the scene tab to 30 feet start radius and a 250 foot extend radius.
The liquid in the robot's containment unit is actually the inner mesh of the model I created with the vertex modeler. It resulted when I added thickness. I deleted all but the bottom quarter of the mesh and closed the end. The mesh is set up with a glow channel, a bit of opacity, refraction index of a sugar solution, and water ripples in the bump channel (see below). A small bulb at the robot's feet also gives it a bit of brightness.
I created my first ever morphs in the vertex modeler to give the liquid a tilted appearance. Then, I made morphs with the Bend & Twist modifier for a couple of the struts supporting the glass dome and deformed the base so the radiation can leak out.
The seafloor consists of two sections, which were each created in the terrain editor and have the simple desert texture applied.
The scaffold-like structure are the two surface replicators -- tuna and sharks-- which I moved closer to the foreground for better visibility.
Rendering took a lot longer than I anticipated. I had to stop it a couple of times to scale back the lighting quality to fast, so I could finish it somewhat on time. Needless to say, no indirect light set on this image.
Here is my setup, shader for the liquid inside the tube, and pre-postwork image.
Once again, I am taking advantage of this fortuitous extra time granted for submission. I am the king of procastination, but the good thing is I finally had a thought on what to do and I've made the image, so here goes.
I used a mascot of mine, created with Genesis child, morphed to have a wizened face, I love the dude, playing around with him for a couple of experiments which I'll share on the forum soon. I took time out to tweak his skin texture a bit more for this challenge.
I needed a serpentine figure, so I went ahead and got the morph snake from Daz. Took it's head, jaws and eyes off and plugged in an Eye Drone instead (also from Daz). I went into the shader for the morph snake and simply used the texture wizard to change it's skin shader to the rust shader that ships with Carrara, then I increased the tiling a little bit to scale it better to the right size for the snake skin. I applied the same rust texture to the Eye Drone hull shader the same way.
So here's the rust shader applied. I tried out metaball modelling to create some rock formations on the ground plane for depth. I am a long way off from understanding or being able to use metaball modelling, but oh well, there it is. I applied another a different rush shader to my rock formations but unfortunately the final view selected for rendering does not show it off much. To light the scene, I created I started off with 3 point lighting using bulb lights but soon inserted an extra bulb light with glow and light sphere activated to highlight the Colo- ship I introduced to hover above the scene. I also gave place a spotlight in front of one of the Drone Serpents, pointing it at the poor kid for effect. The test shot of the final image shown here is a png rendered with alpha channel.
DADA_Universe and anyone else... Last call for entries!!! I'm about to hop in pimpy's transmogrification chamber and throw the switch to VOTING THREAD!!!
Text created in Carrara and final composition with no additional post work.
That looks very nice!
DADA_universe I jumped ahead of you in the submisisons thread, and took #18. Please change your entry to #19.
Thanks!
sukyL
Checking over dustrider's rules last month, there were 3 forum members who were asked to hold on voting until the end in case of tie(s). Is there anyone interested in volunteering for tie breaking duty? PM me (sukyL) if you are interested.
Thanks!
Thanks Evil! He really really picked a winner, I'm very happy for him and love her to pieces actually. He's the youngest and I'm the oldest of seven, so we're far enough apart in age that in many ways I helped raise him; I love all of my brothers and sisters but he is the one I'm closest to, so I'm very proud of him and while it has made things a little busy for me over the past week or so, I'm mostly just super happy right now for them both.
Ha! I'm the oldest of eight, all boys! So, seven brothers for me. Man, did I have some diaper changing and babysitter duty. Or would that be diaper changing doody?
I have an identical twin that was born four minutes after me (much to his chagrin) so he's the one I'm probably closest to. He's been the butt of many after-birth jokes over the years... Hahahaaa.... Good times.
;-)
He got that from me from the prior challenge. If you know anybody on the forum that has entered, you could PM them and ask them to be tiebreakers. Fortunately, I didn't need them. In the past some folks have used run-offs for the tied entries, but it extends the voting period.
Wow, this thread has been amazing. I fell asleep watching sports in my recliner, and I woke up to discover two more pages in the WIP thread and 4 more renders in the entry thread. Great job, Chickenman, SukyL, JonStark, and Dadauniverse. You each discussed some great solutions to last minute time pressures.
Chickenman, I apologize for bringing up the character. I think your scene looks great as is and I hope you didn't waste too much time trying to get the chickenman figure in Carrara. That render plane was a good idea, though. You can explore the .obj approach another time.
SukyL, I really like your solution to the rust shader and the wave effects for your underwater lights. I'm taking notes on the lightng.
JonStark. Wow, you were able to put some pretty complicated effects through Octane fairly quickly, if I followed your WIPs. I wish I had a chance to play with Octane. Regarding the way you created the grated flooring, clever solution. You could save a few steps by inserting a grid along the appropriate axis and setting the division level to what you want rather than starting with a cube, deleting sides, and tessellating, but whatever works.
Dada - anytime someone uses the metaball, I just have to tip my hat. And, this was just awesome...
I love it when people frankenmodel, although I guess kitbashing seems to be the preferred term.There are some great lessons in all of these late posts that I hope people take the time to look through. Well done, one and all.
I'd also like to recognize some great posts by SileneUK, Networthy, and Roygee who contributed to the WIP thread but didn't get a chance to submit their final renders. I'm sorry if I forgot anyone. This was an energetic WIP thread with lots of very practical and very creative information - as well as some good humor.
Good luck to all of the entrants.
I did not wast time on it I am still trying to get him in so I can use hime when ever I would like.
I did manage to get an OBJ of hiim to come in properly but with now textures so now trying to figure out what I did and how to correct it or to see if I can recreate them in the shader room.
This is just forciong me to ge better with the software which I think is needed as I am just starting out.
Also it ws not rigged so I woul not be able to change the pose if I wanted to so I will re look at that.
He is a combination of the 3D Universe Toon Chicken (http://www.daz3d.com/toon-animals-and-creatures/3d-universe-toon-chicken) and Micheal 6.
I may try to just get toon rooster in and then use M4 as the base as he works well in Carrara.
Hope fully I can get him to work for the next challenge as I really enjoy using him.
Latter I woul like to model my own version and maybe some of the differrent chicken breeds such as the silkie which I think the hair replicator would work wonderfully for.
Here is a picture of a Silkie which you can see what I am talking about.
Quick Hello. I was a zombie yesterday after all the submitting excitement and only 2 hours of sleep before going to work.
Evilproducer Love your new avatar!!! It's spoopy and creppy!
Jonstark Thanks for liking my rust shader. I can't believe how simple it was, but how cool it looks. I love Carrara!
Sileneuk Welcome back! I hope you had a great time in the US. Please show us your wooly mammoth cover when you get a chance!
Diomede64 Thanks for the kind words as well.
Oh crep! I'm going to be late.... Later!
Vote, vote, vote!!!
evilproducer, I, too, love the new avatar! Great animation and I loved the original character.
Chickenman, best of luck with the chickenman import into Carrara, if you find a good workaround, please share with us, as those compatibility issues are quite common. I didn't think of it at the time, but it just occurred to me that I recently had a similar issue. I had a scene in DS, which I prepared for use in Carrara, but when I tried to open the duf file in Carrara, it would just hang for hours (literally, I left it overnight and it was still at it in the morning), hogging all the memory my poor machine could provide. Turned out, I was using a poly-heavy item, conformed to G2F ( the hood from this set: http://www.daz3d.com/rawr-outfit ) and Carrara was getting preoccupied with projecting the conformed morphs onto it. I was able to get around the issue by importing the hood by itself (not fit to or conformed to anything) after I loaded the scene with my G2F without it. Then I saved the the G2F pose (just the pose, no morphs!) as a preset inside DS and applied it to the hood I imported in Carrara. I then parented the hood to my G2F figure and tweaked it a bit for a better fit. It was still slow to work with, but it's hardly a surprise, given that the hairs on the hood are actually polys and it uses no transparency maps (which is why I love it so much). So if you can import the items independently, maybe you will be able to combine them inside Carrara?
Jonstark, thank you so much for your kind words! And congratulations on your brother's marriage! Seven siblings - wow! And with all or most married and probably some with kids, it probably makes for very fun holidays? :). Best of happiness to your brother and all your family! I have the whitest of envies and the greatest of admirations for big families with good familial relationships.
DADA_universe, I was glad you had a chance to finish your entry in time. I loved what you did with the fonts in your entry and your price tag is, I think, the best looking one in the challenge. Which might just mean that your cover would have sold best :).
sukyL, Love your entry and the weathered page effects! Such a perfect stylization of the original titles.
I did not wast time on it I am still trying to get him in so I can use hime when ever I would like.
I did manage to get an OBJ of hiim to come in properly but with now textures so now trying to figure out what I did and how to correct it or to see if I can recreate them in the shader room.
This is just forciong me to ge better with the software which I think is needed as I am just starting out.
Also it ws not rigged so I woul not be able to change the pose if I wanted to so I will re look at that.
He is a combination of the 3D Universe Toon Chicken (http://www.daz3d.com/toon-animals-and-creatures/3d-universe-toon-chicken) and Micheal 6.
I may try to just get toon rooster in and then use M4 as the base as he works well in Carrara.
Hope fully I can get him to work for the next challenge as I really enjoy using him.
Latter I woul like to model my own version and maybe some of the differrent chicken breeds such as the silkie which I think the hair replicator would work wonderfully for.
Here is a picture of a Silkie which you can see what I am talking about.
Rigging can be simple, and a pain in the ass at the same time. :-) When I first bought Carrara 5 years ago, I also bought a program called Transposer which I could never get to work, though that may have been more my ignorance than the Software. Carrara 6 eliminated the need for Transposer, thank god, although I jumped from C5 to C7.2.
My workaround in C5 was to go into an extremely early version of Studio, and bring in a figure, clothe it and put it in a T-pose. I then exported as a .obj file. I believe I selected the Save Materials List option and maybe one to gather the texture maps into the same folder as the exported .obj file. When that was done, I opened it in Carrara, tweeked the crap out of the shaders, as the maps were brought in, but not always correctly, and then rigged the models with Carrara rigging.
This video uses Digital-I's T-rex model that I imported and rigged. I didn't understand morphs, so I don't know if they came across or not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taejI7yb2R0
BTW, is that a Polish derived Silkie? We had a Blue Polish rooster. The little guy would run around the yard like the Road Runner, doing drive-by screwings of the hens. He wasn't big enough to compete with the Cochin rooster or the Ameraucana/Black Australorp hybrid rooster, so had to resort to speed and stealth to get his rocks off. He must have been good at it, because sometimes he'd leave the hens in a panting stupor.
Antara Thanks so much! The pulp magazines are called "pulps" because they were printed on very cheap, high acid, wood pulp paper. If they were well loved or not stored properly they can look pretty rough around the edges after 60 or 70 years. That's the look I was going for. Special thanks to the publishers of Amazing Stories for having most of the letters needed for the title. ;-)
That's a gorgeous chicken! It's real and not some fantasy chicken morph?
SukyL- Yes silkies are a real chicken breed.
Silkies originated in China and are gernerally unrelated to Polish. although all chickens trace thier genetics back to the red or green jungle fowl. Silkies have black skin and bones, where as Polish have white skin and bones.
The feathers on a silkie the barbs on the feather does not attach each other so the feathers are soft and almost like fur which is why I though the hair replicator would work well for it.
There are a few hard feathers which are split.
They both have crests on thier heads but the silkie has feathered legs and feet unlike the polish which are clean legged.
We have about 150 Chickens, 50 ducks, Guinea Fowl, Red Golden Pheasants, Peafowl, and Pigeons.
We show our fowl at the local fairs and are looking at showing at the national pultry shows.
Here is a link to a site with lots of different poultry breeds.
http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/BRKPoultryPage.html
Here is a pictures of a polish hen and rooster we use to have.
It's always great how these threads evolve after the entry period is over. :)
Speaking of which, if you haven't voted, get over there and look at the pretty pictures and vote! :coolsmile:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/47729/
My younger granddaughter calls my pigeons chicken pigeons!!
Here are a couple of picks of chicks my daughter took yesterday :-)