Hello,

Following the thread regarding Multi-Passes Rendering I'm experimenting with iClone, I'm opening this thread to keep track the work I'm doing on my attempt for the Sci-Fi contest event.

I'm not sure to complete the movie in time for the deadline due to the amount of work involved though, but no big deal, I'll post it anyway when it will be finished.

This thread will help me remember the issues I'll encounter, the workaround I'll find, etc.. and perhaps you will find it usefull too.

It's a very short movie, 4/5 minutes long, and it has 4 sequences plus ending title. 3 of them are outdoor the last one plus ending title are indoor.

The all movie will be rendered with the multi-passes approach I'm experimenting to break the limits of iClone rendering.

This approach involve the preparation of assets to be usable with multi-passes rendering and this is what I'm doing now. I've one set and two characters ready ( the ones you can see in the other thread ). I've another set half completed ( I need 3 in all ).





( the action in the test shot with the two characters has nothing to do with this movie btw )

I'll post updates along the way.

I hope you'll find this thread interresting.

Cheers,
Guy.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

looking forward to seeing this progress, looks amazing.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL

I am also looking forward to following your progress on this project. Thanks so much for sharing this with us!

Cathy:hehe:

Just click on the graphic to go there.

I await with envy :D

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Score Variations

Capemedia UK Limited's Website

Aye, I had to do the old-school "multi-passes" renderings too when it comes to some of my Battlestar Galactica stuff. Basically, create a virtual bluescreen background for my smaller ships which I can then superimpose onto other backgrounds that involve more memory intensive ships (like battlestars and basestars). I'll shoot the passes in iClone, and then chroma-key them together in Magix Movie Edit Pro 15 (the program where I discovered iClone).

Always glad to meet another old-schooler in terms of visual FX. :) BTW, that background looked stunning! :)



"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

Martok,
what Guy is doing is not multi layering, is multi pass. he is actually braking the image up in shader properties and reassembling them later in a compositing program, not only that but before rendering the passes he had to retexture geometry in different stages as well as to preprocess them, using another 3d software to get the Ambient occlusion and remap it to the geometry.
It is old school because this technique was created to have faster control using a compositing software since images took hours and hours to render using software based renderers. What he is actually doing is rendering the texture pass without lighting influence, then the lighting without textures to get the proper shading and multi lighting setups on the same image, then the specular pass, then the reflection pass, then the ambient occlusion pass, then the depth pass using fog on solid dark geometry, then an ambient pass, and i don't know how many more he did. What he is doing is a completely different beast than what you are talking about and as you can see way more advanced. Almost to the point that i don't know if you can actually call it an iclone render anymore but more of a composite render. It is more of a pipeline in which iclone plays a part on it. IMHO, this is defeating the purpose of what Iclone is all about. But... I understand what Guy is trying to achieve and at the moment there is no other way to get it in order to achieve the look he wants. Can iclone create professional looking images, yes. can it do the look that he wants, not at this time. That is why he needs to use multiple software to achieve it. Hope this clarify things. That being said, the backgrounds do look fantastic.

Cheers,

Stuckon3d



Product Specialist

My iClone 7 gallery

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I too await with envy. This is pro work.

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I LIVE to anymate, irritate and machinamate. Not necessarily in that order.

Ah. Ok. Thanks for clarifying that. :)

Still, don't get me wrong. iClone is an extremely versatile 3D animation tool, and even if there are limitations, if you know old school techniques, you can squeeze a lot more out of iClone than some might think possible.

Thanks again for the clarification. :)

Cheers,
Martok2112





"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

This looks amazing. Great work

Hello,

Well I guess Stuckon3d summarized pretty well what I'm doing.

Regarding this approach defeating the purpose of what iClone is all about, I tend to agree but, like you said, this is because iClone does not offer me yet the features needed to achieve the look I want.

But there are two things to considere:

First, iClone can render in realtime up to a point. When you have a scene with nearly 2 millions of polygons and 4k textures, iClone wont render the scene in realtime but more like 0.5 fps in my case. So, 'realtime rendering' in this case is all relative. In this case, either you render directly or use the multi-passes approach is not relevant, because in any way, you can't do realtime rendering.

Second, what I'm doing could be achieved in realtime ( scene size aside ) with the proper features. If you take a look at the UDK ( the Unreal Engine ), this engine is able to do post effects, color grading, etc.. in realtime. You set up a compositing/effect tree then the process is done at render time and in realtime. But UDK use linear workflow and G-Buffers. iClone does not.

What I'm saying is that iClone, despite all its qualities, is far from beeing a 'state-of-the-art' realtime renderer engine yet ( compared to AAA game engines ), and there is a lot of room for improvements.

Mainwhile, I think it's ok to use workarounds to be able to achive the look we want.

Ultimately, a Director ( isn't what we all want to be ? ) shouldn't be a slave of the tools he uses. Machinima or not. A Director should pushes his tools as far as he can, and like martok2112 said, this way we can squeeze a lot more out of iClone than what it is suposed to be possible.

And in fact, it is very exciting to try to create near production quality rendering out of a $200 tool. ;)

Cheers,
Guy.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.