Terragen tests.

lol too much clouds.

done?

added some rocks on the foreground

(maybe a bit too much)

Soooooo....I was thinking of making matte paintings using this procedural-generated images in Terragen....btw I used a free version for this test.

(but yea now I have a crack version to work on....no longer restricted to this tiny resolution)

Only problem...how am I gonna export that and render in Maya using Vray x___x

I have to research more for that

Oh and I was also gonna use Vue, but cgpeers was down...and I was just playing around with Terragen, and realized tpb also has a crack for that program.

(Also many ppl say Terragen is better for terrains...and Vue is more for ecosystems)

...

the plugins I need to use to export my color/heightmap files are so old, I don't think it's working for the current version (Terragen 2.4)

:(

I'll try Vue when I get my hands on it.

ship textures done!

(direct screenshot from Mari)

yipeeeeeee!!!!

..had trouble making bump/normals for the plate seams...sooo whatever. lol

now I can test my renders

maya vray render

Benefits of packing UV's tightly

this is done by hand, and scaled larger after automatic-layout(by world size)

close-up shot result. (4k map used)

for the same meshes, now I tried that automatic-layout again and just left it there

without fixing anything.

same camera shot + same 4k map result:

blurry! 

look how much UV space I wasted for this one!

lesson learned.

for close-up shots, pack 'em up with your hands.

(for extreme close-ups, you might need to go for 8k textures...but

I don't need to go that far with my thesis)

Ship's UV layout fixed

I divided it into 4 parts: white, gray, black and red.

White is more like (white)painted metal for the outer plates..

gray is just metal, black is more of a heat-resistant? metal

I don't know how each part of a plane/ship is made of, so I just call all of them metal lol

Red is not UV'ed, it's just shaded in red and I'll apply material ID on it when I render

so I can make them glow when I composite...

(this had the most polygons; also I had to scale up some parts because I'm gonna have detailed textures on those parts. then I tried packing them up...and oh god.....)

(this one doesn't have to packed that tightly anyways, but I did pack them tight, scaled them and arranged

some of them so it doesn't look too messy around the main meshes)

Separate UV layouts for 3 different materials.

it took hours to pack all of these tightly in space (so I can scale them larger

and use more space....I'M NOT USING 8K TEXTURES, 

it's too big....I'd rather spend time packing these UV's and scaling them up

so I can use more UV space....instead of wasting all that space

and ending up with twice the render time)

4K texture! yea!

POSTER

^low-res composite (w/o text) 

the high-res version for submission is 16bit, 360 dpi, 8956x5040 pixels

 stupid photoshop refused to add filters and layers for exr 32bit format so I had to

down-res it. I think 16bit is still good enough though.

alternate versions with titles.

ONE BIG MISTAKE I MADE BEFORE FINISHING:

1. I set my render file format to exr(multichannel). Thanks to that, I had to

go searching all over the internet for a way to separate the single exr file to separate passes.

I also downloaded a free trial version of ProEXR which lets me read multichannel exr file

in photoshop (with separate passes for each layer).

I also tried separating them in Nuke and then re-exporting it. 

Nope. It didn't work. Photoshop has trouble opening image files made in Nuke.

(I was just hoping...)

I guess it didn't matter after all because all I had to do was change my bit depth mode to

lower than 32bit float. (it won't let me add layers, apply filters, matte out stuff, NOTHING,

it just sits there)

Also I had some problem using my black and white mattes in photoshop

so I had to fake my DOF with blur filters.

Oh and 8956x5040 is HUGE. it took 5-6 hours just rendering out that thing.

I had to re-render all over again thanks to the "multichannel exr" (and my confusion).

there was another mistake I made during this 3day period of chaos...I temporarily forgot what it was.

my head is chaotic right now

oh, and just for shits and giggles,

this image below is one of my earliest test renders....

yea. overexposed and stuff.

simple compositing workflow (since I forgot how to use multiple b/w mattes in photoshop):

hdr image from maya

GI+SSS+TotalLight+Reflection+Specular with b/w matte

extra lights, fine tuning (dodge and burn)

fake depth of field using blur filter
(I DID have a zdepth pass!! it looked too retarded I had to fake it..
(the range was too short, so even if I add a little bit of lens blur it blurs out most of the stuff))

color balance adjustment layer

title

FINISHED!

+I wanted to add smokes/mists and lens flare.....but I couldn't use more than one matte..T.T 

Very first test render w/ textures

(didn't even start texturing the ship yet)

I still have to add additional mountains in the background and stuff.

(Also some smoky clouds/mists around the area)

this is just a Vray test render straight out from Maya.

random set-up. not part of thesis.

I'm very excited to composite these stuff in Photoshop later!

GI+Vray Physical Cam+HDR's+two dome lights+Vray Sun+extra Rec light for dark spots

yea. slow render. :((((((

Alien re-render again.

added an SSS map, and it looks so much better (except that the texture looks bit dark)

I also moved around some lights

hmm, I don't think the textures will be visible/or it'll look extremely dark 

in a night/dusk scene....I'll try that out later.

Alien w/ texture re-render

fixed colors by adding gamma to the file texture

also I changed the normal map to the less detailed version, since it was too noisy

(detailed normals may be used for close-ups)

I still don't like how there's not enough contrast between colors..

it's ok when I set the diffuse to 1.0 but that'll make SSS pointless.

so I set it to 0.95, but it's still so dull... 

(I also tried reducing scatter radius down to half)