Carrara Challenge #24: “Under the Sea” or "Out of the Box" - WIP Thread

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  • wgdjohn said:

    Carrara Challenge #24: “Under the Sea” & "Out of the Box"

    Challenge #24 is going to be a 2/4 one. You can pick whichever theme you like and as usual participants may submit up to two renders; however your second render should not be under the same theme as your first render.

    Great ideas for the challenge. Ideas are churning in my tiny brain for both. I understand the theme must differ but before I start I've a few questions.
    1)  What do you mean by "a 2/4 one"?
    2)  Can I use "out of the box" content for an underwater theme? I imagine so... just want to make sure.

    Please pardon my questions but I'm a "babe in the woods" in contests... should have been here long ago when they started.

    Hi wgdjohn,

    The 2/4 one reference was just me trying to be clever with the challenge number. 2/4 one essentially means were getting 2 themes in one challenege. For the "Under the Sea" challenege you can use anything you wish to use. There are no restrictions on content for this theme.

    Good luck and I look forward to seeing your WIP! smiley

     

     

  • diomede said:

     

    Theme #1 Under the Sea

    Thought people might be interested in a Daz store product that could help with this theme.

    Dartanbeck's underwater realms   http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-environkit-underwater-realms

     

    Theme #2 Out of the Box

    Thouht people might be interested to know that PhilW actually demonstrates taking a house object from the old object browser and adjusting the shaders to make it look much more realistic.  He also rehabs a car model.

    PhilW Infinite Skills tutorials on realism   http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-realism-rendering-training-video

     

     

    Great call out diomede.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    Stringtheory9, I've sent you a PM regarding my sponsoring this month's challenge, if you're interested in such a thing ;)

  • Stringtheory9, I've sent you a PM regarding my sponsoring this month's challenge, if you're interested in such a thing ;)

    Hi Dartanbeck, thank you! That is very generous! I'd like to add your prize promo to the original challenge post but I'm away from home until Saturday and only have Internet access on my iPhone which doesn't play nice with the forums (I just crash when I try copy and paste into the post box). 

    So for all those reading this, there are some great prizes coming from Dartanbeck! Full details coming Saturday! 

    Thanks again Dartanbeck! 

     

     

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,144

    I think he just means "two for one", ie. two subjects in the one challenge.

    I think you can use any content you wish for the underwater theme, so out of the box, bought content, made content, whatever.

  • DUDUDUDU Posts: 1,945

    I'll try to do something this time.

    Here, I use Laura 3 and a clothe done in Marvellous Designer.

    Just a start...

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  • wgdjohnwgdjohn Posts: 2,634

    Thanks stringtherory and PhillW

    Can I post my render from challenge 23 to my gallery?    Now I'm off to get a start on this challenge..... .... ... .. .

  • wgdjohn said:

    Thanks stringtherory and PhillW

    Can I post my render from challenge 23 to my gallery?    Now I'm off to get a start on this challenge..... .... ... .. .

    Once the challenges are over I think you're free to use your renders any way you like. 

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    DUDU said:

    I'll try to do something this time.

    Here, I use Laura 3 and a clothe done in Marvellous Designer.

    Just a start...

    Nice!

  • DUDU said:

    I'll try to do something this time.

    Here, I use Laura 3 and a clothe done in Marvellous Designer.

    Just a start...

    Good start! 

  • MarkIsSleepyMarkIsSleepy Posts: 1,496
    edited April 2016

    Great theme!  There's some fun stuff in the included content.  I'm not sure if this is the direction I am going to go, it's just my first thought and I may change my mind when I have some time to browse the content a little more...

    I took a vertex circle, deleted one section, moved the points around a bit to make it a loop, drew a track profile with the polyline and then used sweep path to make a fully modeled vertex track loop.  With a little pushing and pulling of lines and some extruding I had a full-on Hotwheels track.  Add one of the cars from the native content, and I got this:

    Car render

     

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    04 SweepPathSomeAdjustingAndExtruding.JPG
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    05 HotWheels.jpg
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    Post edited by MarkIsSleepy on
  • MDO2010 said:

    Great theme!  There's some fun stuff in the included content.  I'm not sure if this is the direction I am going to go, it's just my first thought and I may change my mind when I have some time to browse the content a little more...

    I took a vertex circle, deleted one section, moved the points around a bit to make it a loop, drew a track profile with the polyline and then used sweep path to make a fully modeled vertex track loop.  With a little pushing and pulling of lines and some extruding I had a full-on Hotwheels track.  Add one of the cars from the native content, and I got this:

    Car render

     

    Cool concept! 

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326

    Yeah... very cool!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    edited April 2016

    I won't be competing, but here's a fun little dose of inspiration. Just be aware that more bubbles means slower renders! ;)

    I've crashed the Heavy Cruiser into the Ocean floor using "Depths 2" (Underwater Realms) 

    I listed it over to get the dishes laying along the floor with a bit of sedimentation, then I duplicated it and rotated it back and then some, to list it in the opposite direction. To me, the effect made it look like a crashed, broken Heavy Cruiser.

    I pulled most of the bubbles groups up to the ship. No calculations or anything, just let the little red dots (particle avatars) be my visual aid as I placed the emitters around.

    Then I duplicated the whole bundle of emitters a couple of times and placed those around. This really taxes the render time. It can also slow down the working view, so I turned them off in the working view. 

    <<  click image for larger view  >>

    Then I brought in Wavecutter, my triple master tall ship, and kept translating it away and up until I got it where I wanted it in view. After a few tests, I decided to get rid of the replicated ocean and just use the infinite plane water. So I selected the Wavecutter, then infinite plane, then aligned the plane to the ship (Ctrl K), deselected the ship and moved the plne to the appropriate level.

    I duplicated the infinite plane and rose the new one up a bit, so that I could use Refraction. Without the second plane, refraction would be really abstract. It needs that second mesh to give it an end to the distance or it'll just keep refracting indefinitely. I think that the distance I guessed at by sight worked out pretty well, but it's a little hard to tell due to my post work. But the refraction was used to make the ship look as if we were seeing it from below the water.

    I've also discovered that, at least for this shot, I was able to turn off reflections (in the render room) and only use refraction, which really gave the render speed a huge boost! 

    After bringing in petipet's "Lander2", I set up the shaders very quickly (as in, I didn't truly optimize them as I normally would) and saved it to my browser, then brought a couple more in. One is floating up by the tall ship, the other is parented to the film camera, while the first one is planted on the ground. The idea is that the rest of them are scattered - hopefully some of them made it to safety.

    I did a little monkeying around with the atmosphere and other settings. All-in-all... I'm kinda liking the image so far... I'll see if I still like it in the morning ;)

    Below is the Ambient Occlusion pass

    UWR_Cruiser Crash_AmbientOcclusion.jpg
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    Post edited by Dartanbeck on
  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,125
    edited April 2016

    Hotwheels were among my favorite toys.  Great idea and execution.

     

    Can anyone point me to a good tutorial on the particle system and streams of liquids?  I would have liked to have heard the conversation in the room when they were deciding what models to make and include in the native content.  Urinal?  Browser objects include urinal and man2 combined with caricuture head and cowboy hat.  Also three primitive cubes for floor and walls.  I only added the skeleton to the torso and arms because men often stand straight in front of the urinal.

     

     

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    Post edited by Diomede on
  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,125

    Very inspirational, Dart.  Thanks for your sponsorship announcement.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    diomede said:

    Very inspirational, Dart.  Thanks for your sponsorship announcement.

    My pleasure! These challenges have been really treating me with some valuable entertainment... might as well give something back, eh? :)

  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,125

    Great start.  I hope to check out Marvelous Designer someday soon.

     

    DUDU said:

    I'll try to do something this time.

    Here, I use Laura 3 and a clothe done in Marvellous Designer.

    Just a start...

     

  • stringtheory9stringtheory9 Posts: 411
    edited April 2016

    Awesome render Dart! And a nice mini tutorial to get people started on their underwater scenes! 

    Post edited by stringtheory9 on
  • stringtheory9stringtheory9 Posts: 411
    edited April 2016
    diomede said:

    I would have liked to have heard the conversation in the room when they were deciding what models to make and include in the native content.  Urinal?  Browser objects include urinal and man2 combined with caricuture head and cowboy hat. .

    Part of me wants to believe they anticipated their usefulness in this challenge smiley

    Post edited by stringtheory9 on
  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,964

    great render dart

  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,964
    edited April 2016

     

    here's a wip, big one no post, extensive use of dart's stuff . also caustic generator, i found one  trick was to make a lot of stuff semi transparent to fade it

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    Untitled-wip1.jpg
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    Post edited by Headwax on
  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,125
    edited April 2016

    I added an announcement in the Commons forum.

    http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/79156/carrara-challenge-24-either-under-the-sea-or-out-of-the-box#latest

    Surfing the web, thought this was cool.  Hope it inspires folks.

    Post edited by Diomede on
  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    head wax said:

    great render dart

    Not as great as yours! ;)

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,144

    HeadWax - that looks very impressive!

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    PhilW said:

    HeadWax - that looks very impressive!

    Wow... I just keep gazing into this piece! suddenly I want to order that new print head for my large-format printer and beg Andrew for permission to print it!

  • stringtheory9stringtheory9 Posts: 411
    edited April 2016
    head wax said:

    here's a wip, big one no post, extensive use of dart's stuff . also caustic generator, i found one  trick was to make a lot of stuff semi transparent to fade it

    head wax, that's a gorgeous image!

    Post edited by stringtheory9 on
  • DUDUDUDU Posts: 1,945

    Ok, it's the week-end and more... I'm ill, therefore I have a little time to play on this project.
    I wanted to use a distant fog (here it's a simple fog), but the light rays were to straight unlike with the simple fog, they have a distortion.
    I said "simple" fog but there are more parameters than the distant fog, and it's the first time I use it.Is somebody knows what are these parameters ?
    I must work also on the depth of field.
    The harpoon was made with the soldering iron from the native content, the handle only.
    I hope to have some feedbacks to evolve with this scene.
    Thanks in advance.

    Scène v21.jpg
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  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    DUDU said:

    Ok, it's the week-end and more... I'm ill, therefore I have a little time to play on this project.
    I wanted to use a distant fog (here it's a simple fog), but the light rays were to straight unlike with the simple fog, they have a distortion.
    I said "simple" fog but there are more parameters than the distant fog, and it's the first time I use it.Is somebody knows what are these parameters ?
    I must work also on the depth of field.
    The harpoon was made with the soldering iron from the native content, the handle only.
    I hope to have some feedbacks to evolve with this scene.
    Thanks in advance.

    Off the top of my head, herer goes:

    "Fog" is an animated effect that changes upwards over time. It isn't a huge 'favorite' for many people, especially animators, because it doesn't really change - per se - and it's very two-dimensional. I love it, though. I use it for many different effects all the time.

    That said:

    Upward Speed - controls how fast the effect changes.

    Chaos - controls how wispy and non-uniform the effect is. It makes the fog look a lot more like smoke as you turn it up, but turn it up too much and it evolves into something else, less smoke-like.

    Completion - controls the animation. 0 - 100. So we can either have it animating constantly or we can set it to stay at a certain number longer by adding keyframes - if we want. Like 0 at the beginning, 100 at 6 seconds will give a smooth effect but we can change that by going to the 3 second mark and changing it from 50 to, say, 20 or 80, which will make the effect speed up then slow down or the other way round.

    Quantity - controls how many different 'clouds' of fog are in the primitive. 1 give a uniform spread where 5 (max) makes five separated portions of fog. Kind of like the Patchiness parameter.

    Let's see... oh yeah:

    Quality - controls how accurate the computer works to make the effect. I'm not exactly sure what it does asside from the fact that higher quality also seems more dense, but also has a higher quality outcome, where lower quality settings may show some pixel glitches, but will also appear less dense. So if Higher quality settings becoemtoo dense, try turning the Density parameter down some.

    Density - controls how opaque the fog shows up.

    Swirls and Swirl Size - work together to alter the effect horizontally. I haven't really experimented to see the exact effect, but I do often add some swirl percentage, and then just guess at a size... and I've always pretty much liked the outcome... so never went back to actually discover the variants made by changing these sliders.

    Patchiness - will make the fog appear to be broken up throughout it's volume, which can add a good bit of realism to it, in my opinion, for a lot of typical fog needs - like on a city street, for example.

    Edge Falloff - controls how quickly or gradually the effect falls off before hitting the edge of the volume primitive that holds it.

    Did I miss any? Let me know.

    Like many things in Carrara, subtlety is your friend. Sometimes folks will try setting up fog in one or two ways, not like the outcome, and give up on it. Try to be patient with it and see what all effects you can create. Try making it really big and turning up the Patchiness and/or Quantity parameters. If the edges reside within the view of the camera, add some edge falloff to keep it from  making too abrupt of an end. Add some Chaos to turn it into a more smoke-like appearance, etc.,

    There are a few shapes to choose from for the fog's container, but I don't think I've tried them other than the default Cube.

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,326
    DUDU said:

    Ok, it's the week-end and more... I'm ill, therefore I have a little time to play on this project.
     

    Oh, and I forgot to mention - Cool image so far, DUDU!!! :)

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