I’m still freelancing for now, and thought a 13 second ID is cakewalk! Well, not quite, but was doable. Can’t speak of specifics yet, but a 1 person do-all faces lots of issues I thought were easy.

Transparent mapped polygons and shadows have lots of issues.
Set shader shadow attenuation=OFF. Shadows (ray) cast are affected by angle of surface normals, so it must be off for any objects like architectural people boards.
Reflections are easy with useBackground, but shadows were a pain. I’m sure there’s a better method, but my shading experience is limited now.
useBackground for a groundplane doesn’t work, because this shader doesn’t have the common shadowAttenuation. So I get weird clipped out shadows and the ugly poly shadows. A makeshift method is use a normal shader instead, but colored. Key the color out later. It’s not great because the ground borders shouldn’t be visible in shot (curved up corners like a greenscreen set), and real uniform light for the plane is needed, since ambient/incandecence and other tricks of uniform color washes out shadows completely.

So far it’s all raytraced shadows, and soft shadows work but slooow. Although I should give mentalray a try, I need to hack my way in a short time and a test render shows mr shadows with the exact problem maya has.

A last issue I couldn’t fix with uping reflection limit or any other settings is when transparent mapped planes intersect, the shadow cast from that region is gone. So we get nice shadows with odd poly shapes cut out.

I’ve also defined an asset for “ambient occlusion” between these transparent planes. It’s really just final gather. But the boards were background elements so raytraced shadows sufficed. There are actually two ways for transparent AO (mentalray AO only supports plain geometry). One is normal FG, very easy and no special shaders. The other is the mr shader network you’d find if you google it. The FG shader seems more predictable, but I haven’t tested enough to compare their quality. I just find the simple FG has more varying shades (noise?). Theoretically AO is a white environment subset of FG, but getting FG to have clean results for sharp edge shading on white needs quite some tweaking.

Do I like freelancing? Well, it’s fun, sometimes. And exhausting, always. Don’t think of earning, because after you’ve done a few months, you’d be glad to earn a fraction of a month’s rent. I “landed” two official jobs recently, stable pay, insurance and all, but too bad this country’s foreign worker regulations make it impossible. What a shame. It’s a pretty island. If it doesn’t work out…well then it’s Singapore, Canada, EU, Hong Kong!

Website! Yay cleaned up the homepage, mostly CSS details, and clean graphics (gophercg). I still prefer the minimalist feel (maybe major turn-off by making a text console style LOL), but now it’s all pleasant and tidy. As for the grid in galleries I know how to use divs/spans for the presentation, but so far my site is fine in firefox and IE, so before I decide on a pure flash site, I’m keeping em tables! Image galleries are converted to Flickr sets too.

Improved from cloth fracture 01, where the tearing was dynamic by the houdini cloth solver. In 02 I fixed the pre-fracture designs, by help of a houdini developer removing hidden fuse nodes. He filed this as bug 36556.

There is no tear/pull btw patches, but notice the left side are smaller pieces, while the right has longer strips. And I made the edge more jagged, which can’t occur if auto tearing does the breakage. It’d be nice however if I can pipe custom designs into the tear solve.

Also learned that packaged/defined nodes can be opened and allow editing (this is different from node lock). Basically change the default cloth object type.

dailies for Tuesday…
dabble in smoke. 1 clip rendered. I’ll post both when the 2nd render’s done.
There was a default volume material with no texture settings (1st clip), so I searched for a 3d texture that works like maya’s texturing in fluid.
It’s billowy smoke. I suppose it can be changed to perlin noise or others but I like the tweaked shadows+lighting now.

edit:
03 fixed motion, shadow, still a bit jittery:

02 good volumetric shadow, shading, “laughing intestine” is kinda disturbing:

01 flat aweful shading, too random:

For now I’m moving to web development. Maybe I could learn speed modeling to keep some dailies up, since every vfx takes longer timeframes to learn and develop.

particle concepts & fun with ink. MOV files below.

waving cloth structure

First time using HDRI. Don’t laugh. Was reading HDRI tutorials before 2003, but when needed, I usually found IBL from normal images (like “LDRI”) sufficient and easy to design my own. For realistic soft environment lighting and GI-like shadows IBL has been great. But HDRI gives more definition to highlights and smoothness.

UPDATE: 2nd revision. I removed the odd flickering (due to mentalray sampling), but left some extra “sparkle” at one point for a starry sky feel. The DOF by floating point control was hard to use, but there’s still some rack focus I hope it’s effective. The “DESIGN” text is clearer now, with new frame compositions for the primary marks.

morphing sphere

You’ll find a 2 petal and 3 petal pattern. weird?

lots of pastelly balls

I tried the renderers to find a speedup, since we couldn’t use the shot because of the render times.
hw 45″, mr 3:45″, sw 4″
Yes 4 seconds for Maya software, sw wins again! And for 10k balls, raytraced shadows made more sense since each ball could receive shadows.

Chinese ink

first try at an ink shot.
I’m gathering some references, and there’s a wide variety, some with apparent methods (like that must be from so and so software + plugin…). Also it’s important not to overthink the movements. Some truly good ink splashes in 3Dare photographed and comped well.