you should try sorenson squeeze. i have had some really great results with it and it has filters so if the end result is lacking something you can apply a darken filter and that has contrast settings, white restore, black restore, gamma, all kinds of stuff. really fixes any of the problems i have by just compressing it out of after effects or max.
Sorenson will always wash out your video. If size isn't as much of a concern, like if you're going to put this on a DVD or stream it from you site instead of forcing people to download it first, then use the Photo Jpeg codec. No color change and still pretty good compression, just not quite as good as Sorenson.
Excellent work Daz, as awesome as I had hoped for.
If you don't mind me asking, what lighting setup did you use? I really like the presentation of the flat shaded models, as well as the closeups of the busts with the wireframe laid on top.
In the past I've rendered out two passes, one of the nicely lit model, and one of the wires, and then composited the two together. Unfortunately, my result wasn't nearly as nice as the presentation you have.
I'll admit that I'm no expert when it comes to lighting and rendering outside of the realtime environment, so I appologize for the noob questions
That is the best character reel ever. Hopefully your health is fine, so you can keep sending out amazing work like this.
One thing I would love to see you do is a fat person. You got the ideal humans down, you got some good diverse subjects, but I'd love to see some fat man or woman, Daz style.
Thanks Pseudo. By far the best way to spit a wireframe render out of Maya is to use the vector renderer. I can provide more info If you need. Lighting techniques vary from char to char, but mostly I was very aware of render times so I had to do some serious cheating. I wanted fairly realistic lighting but couldn't afford to render FG and GI *and* hair in some of these. So it's all rendered in the Maya software renderer and not mental ray + bells and whistles. For the most part it's a standard fair 3 point spot setup. Then sometimes I've cheated and added a blue point above and a brownish point below to hint at outdoors, then sometimes I've *really* cheated by rendering out an ambient occlusion map of the head ( using the awesome 'dirtmap' mental ray shader ) and baked this into the texture map and rendered in software. Hope this helps.
Good call ebagg. It's all pretty standard fair well proportioned humanoids. I shall have to finish that model I started of Henry VIII sometime!
Ah, very nice looking results for maya software. I'll have to fiddle with the lighting settings and see if I can get comparable results.
I'll look into the vector wireframe rendering, thanks!
EDIT - If you could post the settings you used for the wireframe rendering I'd very much appreciate it.
Apply a white material to your object, and set your background colour to white. Select all the edges on your model and make them hard. In the vector render globals, use the defaults but also tick 'include edges', leave edge style set to 'outlines'. Should give you a nice quad wireframe that you can overlay on top of your shaded model in your compositor.
*EDIT* Correction: I should state by the way, that Mental Ray *without* FG and GI is actually a faster renderer than Maya software, and looking back, a lot of this was actually rendered in mental ray ( only without FG ). The only time I used software was alongside hair, since Shave just gets a long better with software than mray. It does work with mray, I just haven't fully figured it out yet.
I know it's probably too late to comment, and this might have been mentioned already, but one thing that bugged me slightly was the pan up the soldier's midsection. I wish it was 3D with some parallax rather than a track across a prerender, would have brought out the detail more I think. Also Cushing's render seemed a bit dark compared to everything else. Some weird aliasing on the turntable woman's hair in the full shot.
But hey, it's an awesome reel, just nitpicking. Very solid likenesses, and the inclusion of your past illustration work is a nice plus.
Replies
Anyway, here's the final version:
http://www.daz-art.com/dpattenden_reel.mov
Thanks again all! I can concentrate on the contest now
@Slum: This business card cdr won't work on some cd/dvds unfortunately, especially vertical ones and pioneer drives.
If you don't mind me asking, what lighting setup did you use? I really like the presentation of the flat shaded models, as well as the closeups of the busts with the wireframe laid on top.
In the past I've rendered out two passes, one of the nicely lit model, and one of the wires, and then composited the two together. Unfortunately, my result wasn't nearly as nice as the presentation you have.
I'll admit that I'm no expert when it comes to lighting and rendering outside of the realtime environment, so I appologize for the noob questions
One thing I would love to see you do is a fat person. You got the ideal humans down, you got some good diverse subjects, but I'd love to see some fat man or woman, Daz style.
Good call ebagg. It's all pretty standard fair well proportioned humanoids. I shall have to finish that model I started of Henry VIII sometime!
I'll look into the vector wireframe rendering, thanks!
EDIT - If you could post the settings you used for the wireframe rendering I'd very much appreciate it.
*EDIT* Correction: I should state by the way, that Mental Ray *without* FG and GI is actually a faster renderer than Maya software, and looking back, a lot of this was actually rendered in mental ray ( only without FG ). The only time I used software was alongside hair, since Shave just gets a long better with software than mray. It does work with mray, I just haven't fully figured it out yet.
I know it's probably too late to comment, and this might have been mentioned already, but one thing that bugged me slightly was the pan up the soldier's midsection. I wish it was 3D with some parallax rather than a track across a prerender, would have brought out the detail more I think. Also Cushing's render seemed a bit dark compared to everything else. Some weird aliasing on the turntable woman's hair in the full shot.
But hey, it's an awesome reel, just nitpicking. Very solid likenesses, and the inclusion of your past illustration work is a nice plus.