the right sound effects would make that clip come to life!! nice work, thanks for sharing the progress. Your toon shading is really looking good!

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

Thx PSD. So this is a very very flat look, no shadows. The characters aren't integrated into the scene's light environment. The thing this "look" has going for it is a kind of graphic clarity, like some forms of anime, I suppose.

On the other hand, to integrate them into the scene, I have alternately considered re-rendering this with the characters with a dramatic/sinister blue light from below (the level of the table FX).

Image-based lighting (IBL) is the only solution for crisp (sharp-edged) toon shadows in iClone 4. This would all entail more work. I would have to composite the FX in a separate step, which is irksome. Also we would lose the HDR artifact that currently smears the characters into columns of light.

Any comments about whether I ought to invest the effort to try this?

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when I get that blur / glare effect, that smudges the picture, i usually try to calm it with a combination of the "bloom scale" the "Glare Scale" and sometimes reduce the IBL and raise the brightness of the lighting. It all ends up with the same look, but a different approach. when I want more control, I usually set the scale to 1 , so i can bring out more of the bloom.

One approach you can possibly try is to film it once without any blooming effects, then import that video and try to get the glare effect on the video as opposed to the meshed characters.

another approach would be to film it once without an effect, film it a second time with an effect .....then make the first video slightly transparent and place the effected video behind that ....perhaps you can even make one of the videos with the blue ibl effect you want, and the next with the bloom effect you want ...then layer them. - there really are a ton of combinations you can use to achieve the end result you want.

I sometimes do that trick with music, I'll record one drum with a lot of bass, then record another drum with just a reverb and remove all the bass, as apposed to affecting the re verb with a bassy drum. then I layer them ....so the bassy kick, has a nice bright and light reverb over it. its the audio way of compositing. The concept would pretty much be the same with the video I'm guessing.

I personally like playing with all the combinations, because even though I wont use them all, I will take note of what each combination does so in the future it's less guess work when i want a certain look / sound.

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Actually, PSD, I was not complaining about the light smears on the characters--I thought it brought more to the effect than it takes away.

This clip shows rotoscoping of fluttering drapery and lightning fx. I must say that I am disappointed by the video quality, but it's not my fault. I suspect that iClone 4 does not have a professional-grade color engine, and this leads to loss of color and color banding. I am going to put in a feature request for much-needed improvements. I would hate to be forced to use After Effects to do compositing!

Fred Vaughan Awakened by the Storm from Mitch Gould on Vimeo.

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Pau, have you tried printing to uncompressed AVI first, then using an editor to do the conversion / compression ? I know that look and it doesn't look like the iclone uncompressed AVI quality, it looks more like the other formats that Iclone renders which never look the same. I always do the conversions in other software because of this.

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Thanks, dragon. For the sake of fairness to iClone, I started looking into your advice and I think it's premature to blame only the iClone renderer. I agree that I am getting some degradation from the output codec.

I am also getting a problem from the translucent violet gradient in the iClone Image Overlay. Gradients are very delicate, and very eager to break into ugly banding. I haven't ruled out that iClone is too clumsy with this aspect of it. I wish the iClone crew would adopt the following ideal goal: "No color errors, ever, as a result of using standard iClone features."

I also risk serious degradation every time I use a rotoscoping filter in Photoshop--because Photoshop suppresses most of the codecs on my system and only gives me a tiny selection, most of which are very lossy.

I think I am going to have to become a fanatic about video hygiene, and use big uncompressed files throughout a long pipeline.

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EDIT: Sorry, I tried to share a solution here in case anyone else encounters this issue, but I have found that I still can't get Photoshop to recognize the Lagarith codec.

EDIT2: In the faint hope of being of some use to someone, I believe found a way to preserve gradient quality in iClone. The problem may well be related to the way iClone ruins texture files when you Launch them for editing, a serious problem I have reported before in the context of character texturing. Here are two steps to preserve smooth color gradients:

1. Subject the gradient to a very substantial blur before importing it into iClone. This really helps keep things smooth.

2. Import the gradient file (or any other texture file for that matter) in a lossless format such as PNG rather than iClone's standard superlossy JPEG. Avoid accessing the texture with an iClone Launch; instead try to access the original texture file when editing.

I also want to repeat my feature request for a nondestructive texture Launch in iClone.

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I've had problems inside the application with banding on walls that were a uniform color. It looked like some interference occurred between the lights and the wall. In this case there was no actual texture (diffuse map). I was able to mediate the problem by adding a "noisy" texture; sand if I recall. Of course in your case that would do away with the flat shading you are after.

As to rendering, I use png sequences exclusively. Unfortunately, to share work you have to rely on YouTube or Vimeo, which may lead to further degradation.

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I've having a lot of trouble creating a "look" for the characters lit by lightning as they sit on the roof. It's a very extreme lighting condition. I get close to an answer and it seems to vanish like a mirage.

I think the reason it's so complicated is because I *also* want the characters lit by a streetlamp located below the roof.

Here is a result from the streetlamp concept. You can see that it's taking me far away from the toon look into something more realistic.

In any event, at least please give me some credit for achieving "a storytelling pose." That in itself is an accomplishment...



Here's the same concept with an evocative background.



General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
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Nice. I like the second one best, with the lightning. It looks pretty cool.





Doug

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