Ernest Burden III Posted May 31, 2003 Share Posted May 31, 2003 The great out-doors come indoors, and gold-leafed. The 'fat' treetrunk covers a column. But I still have to get the view of NYC out the windows, do final chairs. Unfortunately my client has changed his mind and asked me to get people into the renderings. Nothing harder than people in a restaurant. They must be sized and posed just right, and fit their chairs perfectly, etc. They need place-settings, etc. I think I will be drawing them and compositing in Photoshop. In the end that is likely to be faster than finding photos that will work, be posed right, dressed right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigcahunak Posted May 31, 2003 Share Posted May 31, 2003 Man, this is going to be hard. People, food, drinks... lots of work think about taking pictures of ppl with blue screen and PS them in. LS? Good luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted May 31, 2003 Author Share Posted May 31, 2003 Man, this is going to be hard. People, food, drinks... lots of work think about taking pictures of ppl with blue screen and PS them in.LS?Uh--by Wednesday? Actually it won't be that hard to draw/paint. I suppose I could be a good little digital artist and draw/paint in Photoshop, but paper, pencil and paint may be just the ticket. I was hoping to avoid putting in food. But then its weird--people, plates--no food? But if food on plates, shouldn't waiters be bringing some to diners? This is how I talked the client out of people in the first place. But minds changed... Yes, this is Lightscape. The images are looking darker in the browser than they do in Photoshop when I save them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jefferson Grigsby Posted May 31, 2003 Share Posted May 31, 2003 My advice is the negotiate with the client and provide a place setting on the tables and a few formal standing people. Tell them that you think the image would be more powerful if you portrayed the space empty. In doing this you would be creating a sense of anticipation that would generate more excitment that a cluttred image full of seated people. Most importantly do good work, but never back yourself into a corner with regard to the client's expectations. Always discuss these issues before agreeing to a fee and a deadline. Assuming they don't buy that, and you have the money available, I have used the Seated RPC people in the past. They can be inserted in photoshop with a free plugin, you just have to buy the library at about 219$ www.rpcnet.com Send me a PM if you would like help with this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted May 31, 2003 Author Share Posted May 31, 2003 Tell them that you think the image would be more powerful if you portrayed the space empty.That worked up to the point that they kept seeing my WIPs with the space empty. The first space was a bar/lounge (my WIP from a month or so ago) and it looked pretty good empty--but this one is harder to take (see above). I have used the Seated RPC people in the past. They can be inserted in photoshop with a free plugin, you just have to buy the library at about 219$That was the first thing I did--look at the RPC content. It is actually about $400, which is OK, if it works. But only one person is eating and she has a banana--odd choice, that. A man is drinking, and all the others are reading or talking on cellphones--not something that I can show in a restaurant. Which brings me back to where I started--a restaurant rendering is probably the single hardest situation to put figures into. The only other rival would be a view looking down a mall court at various levels, so the perspective would be unique to just about every figure. You'ld really want to charge extra for that. Thank you for the suggestions! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ingo Posted June 1, 2003 Share Posted June 1, 2003 Just curious, why didn't you simply take your paparazzi camera and take photos of people in a restaurant, preferable not Burger King or similar ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted June 1, 2003 Author Share Posted June 1, 2003 Just curious, why didn't you simply take your paparazzi camera and take photos of people in a restaurant? The requirement to include people just came up. I don't think it is legal to photo people indoors in the US for commercial use without their permission. Of course, who would know? But then in the US people will sue over just about anything. Then I still have to match the figure to the chair--removing the actual chair for my CG chair. I think drawing is going to be the easiest way to handle this. I will post an image in 'finished' with the results, which will be useful for comparison of methods. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kid Posted June 1, 2003 Share Posted June 1, 2003 You might wanna talk the client into taking all that sh!t off the ceiling too...just joking Is all that growy stuff modelled specifically, or did you lop off a normal tree model to use in the scene? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted June 1, 2003 Author Share Posted June 1, 2003 Is all that growy stuff modelled specifically, or did you lop off a normal tree model to use in the scene? Ah, let me share the pain. The trees are being custom built out of textured metal. I modeled them from the original designers elevation and plan of how to construct the brancehes and leaves. Done. Good. But then I was handed photos of the prototype that was built--the guy took enough licence with the design that my models didn't match well enough, so I was back in there modifying them.. They got more 'natural' looking, more curvey. So I took my original fairly straight branches and applied a sub-divide to them so I could bend 'em around. Well that ballooned the poly count, so I had all sorts of trouble using poly-reduction to get the counts back to reasonable. I got the branches from about 80,000 polys per tree to about 13,000 without too much visible deterioration, but there are some holes that opened up. You don't notice them, but they are there. That was a bad way to get a model done. Lightscape would crash when initializing the 'solution' stage, so I had to break off the trees and init them seperately via command line, then merge the .ls files to get them into one file. I think this illustrates the limitations of PC based visualization. This model is still low-poly in terms of the quality of the meshes, yet it hits 200-300MB and causes trouble working in a GUI. Fortunately it still works in command-line, yet the whole mess is nothing compared to a Hollywood model. I am beginning to see why the film industry laughs at PC much of the time. Models of architecture can be done with relatively few polygons and rendered fast. But when you start adding the little extras things can get out-of-hand very quickly. You can add stuff in Photoshop but then you lose the advantage of easy multi-views of the space. If you are going to get nailed down to one view, why not just draw it? It can be very fast. I guess what I am saying is that while I am trying to push the limitations of CG, the fact remains that there ARE limitations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christian Miranda Posted June 2, 2003 Share Posted June 2, 2003 Hi Ernest, I understand your problems with high polycounts on a PC. In the long run, I would suggest one thing though, you could keep you unique style intact and be able to work with much higher polycounts by using a GI renderer instead of LS, of course it would take a lot of time to addapt your workflow to another kind of renderer, but that would save you time...in the long run. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted June 2, 2003 Author Share Posted June 2, 2003 you could keep you unique style intact and be able to work with much higher polycounts by using a GI renderer instead of LSI am interested in why you say that. Can you explain? I am, in fact, going to be buying Cinema4D in the very near future. Maybe next week, or fairly soon about. I actually have too much work to do now to have the time to install it and learn anything. Lightscape does have a very fast raytracer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ingo Posted June 3, 2003 Share Posted June 3, 2003 Huh, i think he wants to say that with a software like Lightwave or C4D you have more oportunities, you dont even have to use a Gi or raydiosity renderer to get your work done. And of course these programs can easily handle higher polygon counts than crappy old Lightscape, and no need to work in command line mode. And specially multipass rendering will help you a lot, i guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christian Miranda Posted June 3, 2003 Share Posted June 3, 2003 Hi, I meant you would not have to worry about high polycounts as a GI renderer would give you the kind of images that you need to work on with your NPR techniques without Lightscape´s constraints and pickyness regarding geometry. I know that LS´s raytracer is fast but I also know that LS radiosity engine can´t handle really complex interior renderings. As far as raytracing goes, a renderer like Vray is much faster that LS´s raytracer and the antialiasing quality is by far better. I can´t talk about Cinema 4d because I dont´t use it. I think you will agree that a renderer is just a tool like a coloured pencil (ok it´s a bit more sophisticated) and the ideal tool would have free an artist as much as possible. Just think LS is limitting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted June 3, 2003 Author Share Posted June 3, 2003 I meant you would not have to worry about high polycounts as a GI renderer would give you the kind of images that you need to work on with your NPR techniques without Lightscape´s constraints and pickyness regarding geometry. I know that LS´s raytracer is fast but I also know that LS radiosity engine can´t handle really complex interior renderings.The radiosity is calculating on another computer for the WIP at the top of this thread. LS commandline because the file crashes the GUI. Gee, I hope it looks good...the info lists it at 2.3 million mesh elements and near 1G memory usage, and it's going very slowly. I really hope it looks good... My client actually expects me to be done with two renderings plus figures tomorrow. I learned this last evening. This is a problem, as another client also emailed me that he urgently needs several other interiors tomorrow. Someone, or several someones, will be pretty pissed at me tomorrow. It's good to be a freelancer and be your own boss, set your own hours... I suspect I will have lots of free time after they all fire my ass! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris_A Posted June 3, 2003 Share Posted June 3, 2003 To spin a comment a senior Architect kept asking me in my life as a designer...usually after he changed something significant and asked me to have it in the morning. 'So you wanted to be a [CG] Architect, eh??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ingo Posted June 4, 2003 Share Posted June 4, 2003 Originally posted by Ernest Burden: ....It's good to be a freelancer and be your own boss, set your own hours... I begin to like your sarcasm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted June 6, 2003 Author Share Posted June 6, 2003 final rendering Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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