water works

Time to move on said someone, this time I`m experimenting with animated water.
Rocks were made/textured in less than 30 minutes, what I took most time were caustics, so to say invisible in this resolution (I scaled up clip from 360p to 720p to preserve subpixel detail, most of it). Water is made with animated noise based displacement. Water pattern requires few fixes but for a 100% still camera does not look bad to me.
As usual, I exagerated with optics distortion, dof, chromatic aberration and overall image destructive processes.



Tip of the Day:
Learn difference between different aa filters, some for instance, do sharpen image at comparable to 32bit precision (vs usual 8bit ps/ae sharpen)

Website of the Day:
www.procedural.com

Today, just the video. Isn`t final unfortunetely, I still have to rework the camera, that`s one. Two foreground is messy, requires more attention, and what is behind the beetle... well that too.
The way it looks now, is poorely composed (but still, is 14 renderlayers mixed into respectively 35 layers with 35 effects packed into 8 compositions).
As for now, assuming that I won`t find a way to render it faster (currently is via brute force GI with vray dof), it`ll take about 50 minutes per frame in 720p. Why so much? I have to launch 8 consecutive renders to get this thing working. More on this, in making of/breakdown, when I finally finish this scene.



Tip of the day:
Before launching your animation render make sure there are no unnecessary objects, that you`re using best GI setup for your scene, and that textures resolution isn`t exagerated.

Website of the day:
http://www.rebusfarm.com/

Animatic in works

It happend that I`m reworking my animatic. Doing it now is far better than doing it later. I must focus on bringing additional expression into key scenes, improving sequence timing and check the storytelling. No images on today unfortunately.

Tip of the day:
Press shift+ctrl+alt EARLY while photoshop is loading to reset its preferences.

Website of the day.
www.wacom.com

Technical: Tron Chromatic Aberration

I recently watched Tron and what impressed me most were distortion flares and chromatic aberration.
Watching film trailer You can realize it`s no regular aberration. And at first glance there`s no easy way of achieving this in layer based compositing software like AE, node based thing like nuke is necessary. Looks like it may involve object normals and different phase of motion vectors for each color channel.

I guess it would look best if it was possible to renderout a single frame for different color channels in microframe timephase based on fading of vignette like gradient, but I`m not sure.

Tip of the day:
Expressions are very important. Learn to use them, improve quality of your work.

Website of the day:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_aberration

Fixes part III

Welcome back. I`m currently working on complex foreground, I`ve added many of features I mentioned but even now I`m nowhere near finish line of this groundbraking scene. Well, to tell the truth, in past days I`ve been fine tuning every single aspect of the scene, starting with dynamics, new camera animation, new animated light setup and many subtle changes.

I`ve found ways of achieving some of the effects I desired at a reasonable price. Well, rendertime doubled and now it`s about 15 minutes per frame, but it`s still like ok considering I`m not making dof/motionblur in post.

Tip of the day:
Sometime to achieve superior quality what You need is a few day brake.

Website of the day:
http://pawlack.blogspot.com/