Photorealistic Animation

RivermillStudios

If you get a sec today, please take a look at my my newly finished animation "50A, Roland Road", along with my new company website Rivermill Studios. Thanks:

http://www.rivermillstudios.com/video_roland.html

It was created in Maya and rendered in VRay, with post production and editing done in Adobe After Effects and Premiere respectively.

The animated short explores architectural visualisation, but in a less traditional sense; instead of aspirational and expensive, the location is generic and functional. Through lighting, composition and music, the attempt is to find beauty in the mundane.

DDuckworth

Link is broken for me bud

jordan.kocon

Same as DDuckworth, '404 not found'

Koochy

http://www.rivermillstudios.com/video_roland.html

The link was missing an 'l'. Unfortunately I can't view Vimeo at work... :<

Beazel

Just missing an L at the end of htm link.

Really nice stuff. Think the only part of the scene which gave away that it wasn't real was the water in the water filter.

Shame my room doesn't look like that. Pot noodle pots everywhere and just cans and cans of energy drinks rolling around :>.

Anyway loved the video. Watched the making of as well. Good stuff! How long did it take you guys to get from start to finish?

Makkon

That was really beautiful. I liked it a lot

MattLichy

Very cool stuff. I agree some shaders didn't quite hold up, mainly for me the couch felt off... the wrinkles and the material response to light I think... But otherwise it felt very nice overall.

mkandersson

Wow beautiful stuff there. If your goal was to find beauty in the mundane you succeeded.
Great choice of music in the video as well. What's the name of the song?

RivermillStudios

Cheers for the feedback guys - very much appreciated. I agree with the comments; don't think the sofa fabric quite works. It was modeled by hand (with an additional normal map) - really need to learn ZBrush! It was just me working on it - took around 3 months, mainly using downtime between projects (plus there was the learning curve for VRay as I'd not used it much before). But then it took 2 months to render (averaging around 20 mins a frame, but there's 4500 of them! Oh, and the music's from The Village OST. I put together a breakdown of some of the shots if you're interested:

http://www.rivermillstudios.com/video_roland_making.html

Cheers

Ben

DDuckworth

Hey now that i got to take a look, i've got a few things to say haha

first off most of it really did look photorealistic! the first thing I noticed that was really superb was the glass coffee table, the material is spot on perfect, i love that frosted glass with the holes of regular glass.

the music was lovely to listen to, i love hearing violins though so it's a personal preference haha.

Great selection on hot fuzz being in the dvd's - one of my fav films.

Now for the things that stuck out to me as not being real was the couch cusions on the back, they were too wrinkled, generally couch cusions are stretched fairly tight and even older ones aren't that severely wrinkled.

The only other thing was the really old wrinkled stickers on the washing machine - the problem is the machine and entire environment looked brand new and perfectly clean, so why was this one element disheveled and old looking?

Overall though it looked truly realistic, the wood textures are dead on and the material seperations are absolutely perfect.

My biggest curiosity with this sort of thing is how do you unwrap high poly assets for texturing? My best guess is you unwrap the non-turbosmoothed (or for me subdivided) model and then subd it?

Great work though!!