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Top 5 Blending Operations used in my composting process and how they work:
Normal (Over)
This is the most common blending operation. A covers B except where it is transparent. (A+(B*(1-alpha)) = C)
This of course assumes that the alpha has been premultiplied. We can write the same formula differently where you can process one color channel at a time. (A*a)+((B*b)*(1-a))=C)
Stencil
This operation is similar to the Normal function where it uses A to cutout a spot in B (B*(1-a) = C) If the alpha is some other value than 1 or 0, it gets multiplied.
Add (plus)
This is most arguably the second most used operation. (A+B=C)
This gets used in places such as adding specular or reflection highlights. However, it should only be used when working in floating point values because the final pixel can exceed the normalized 1.0 threshold and create superwhites. If this operation is used in an 8 bit image, it can often get over-exposed and washed out, which is not desirable at all. To fix this there is another function called Screen.
Screen
Screen offers a solution to working in LDR images. The math is as follows ((A+B)-(A*B)=C It does not allow a pixel value to exceed 1
Multiply
Straight forward enough. (A*B) Multiply uses a conditional that tests for negative numbers and coverts them into zeroes which prevents C from becoming a negative value. It is most often used to composite dark elements against lighter backgrounds. Multiplying is often overused in compositing and can often lead to degradation of the final output. It best serves in the texturing phase.
Shoe Update
Progress on the shoe has been painfully slow, but my internship at Adidas is up at the end of the month, which means that I will no longer have a job which equals more time to work on the shoe. Here is an update of where I am at. So far I like how it’s coming along. It’s incredibly difficult not to get any lumpiness and to stick with a good edge flow without getting crazy dense in areas that have holes. The places where the laces go through the eyelits were by far the hardest to keep smooth, and I tried a couple different approaches, as you can see in the image, and eventually went with the high dense, not as pretty way that is nearest the toe of the shoe. It kept things perfectly smooth without any pinching or wobbliness, but I did take a hit on the poly count. *ouch* My tri count is at 144K right now and I haven’t hit the high detailed areas yet, nor have I added in the stitching :/
This detail shot of the shoe is maybe an inch across and 1/4 inch width and maybe a couple mm deep and is locate on the sole of the shoe.
Adidas Shoe SockLiner WIP
Finished the sock liner! Quite proud of this. 100% quads, every edge loop has a home, every edge loop serves a purpose. Tried to keep things as evenly spaced as possible. Everything smooths quite nicely with no visible wonkiness :-P No onto the other parts of the shoe! Hurray for no sleep!
Sphere Desktop Background
Continuing to tweak my lighting setup, I think I’m getting pretty close to something I like. It has multiple layers along with multiple render “passes” that has different render presets (I.E. Draft and production) so testing is painless and fast. The different layers include different lighting schemes and different backgrounds (strong lighting, even lighting, dramatic lighting, diffuse bckgrnd, ref. bckgrnd etc…) The below test came out pretty sweet so I saved out a 1920X1080 for a background image. I also have a 2560X1600 if anyone ones it. Cheers!
TheBeals has a job!
Finally, 6 months after graduamatation, I have a job. Err well technically a paid internship. Which sounds pretty decent, until you realize it is with Adidas then it’s more like :) –> :O. So crazy, I am so terribly excited. I start the 19th at their Headquarters in Portland. Best part? I get a little key card with my photo on it!-ok well maybe not the best part, but it’s still pretty sweet. Their campus is HUGE and so amazing. I highly suggest googling and even google map it (adidas headquarters, portland, or). So amazing.
As a result of this I’ve been brushing up on my skills because I am sure that the first they ask me to do will be the one thing I haven’t done in a long time. Here is a little comp. test that I worked on today. I wanted to make sure I still knew my way around After Effects. Either way, I did none of the 3D work, just composited it :-)
Ipod_test_Comp
Hrmm wonder how I can just insert the video straight here.
Also with this new adventure in my life I am also learning some new moves from fxPHD.com. Mainly more lighting/rendering theory taught by Master Zap. I’m taking another two lighting classes-maya and Renderman. Lasts 10 weeks or so. So it will be a fantastical 3 weeks-At the end of which I should have some pretty awesome new material to post and some more knowledge up in my noggin that I can share with all ya’ll!
HDD Failure!!!
Oh how computers hate me so. I am going through an HDD failure. Like a lot of failures, this one came without warning. Well technically, a few days prior I had sensed something wasn’t right, but figured it was because I had shut my computer off for a few weeks and had been running Maya/Zbrush/photoshop/Dreamweaver/After Effects constantly. IT finally gave me the blue screen of death when I tried to open AE while maya was open. It started going insanely slow and then WHAM stupid screen. Ran a dskchk and ended up having over 100,000 unreadable segments.
Luckily for me I had all past projects backed up on another drive along with all my music. I also had all present projects backed up on an external drive. Well… all except for the last 2 weeks prior of said failure which I estimated to be approximately 200 hours worth of work. In INSANE amount of work, but just south of the border in terms of what it would cost to have some one retrieve the data merely because base price is around 500$ and price goes up the more space you have and this beast happened to be a terrabyte. So with the much appreciated help from a couple good friends, I managed to get all my important files back while booting up through a linux cd.
Important being: 1.)Pirate chick 2.)Scrubs 3.)Tutorials 4.)Random collection of pictures 5.)TV shows. 6.)Movies
Talked to Seagate and they were very helpful and will be shipping me a replacement-recurtified(cheap punks) drive for 20 bucks and once I get it, I send them mine. So now I get to REINSTAL *every* program.
If this had to have happened, I wish it wold have happened a little later when Windows 7 came out.
If programs played a little nicer with Linux I would have never switched back to windows.
Needles to say, updates won’t happen for a bit, at least a week.
Speed Paint
Well, I don’t have anything to complain about right now, but I’ve realized i’m losing my touch not doing anything artsy in a while so I did a speed paint of a combat girl type figure.
Girl Speed Paint
Summer
Hey everybody, sorry for the lack of posts lately, things have gotten a little more hectic than originally planned. I went mining for a week and a half right after graduation, and the rest of my time has been spent looking for work and helping friends out. I’ll be posting more within the next couple weeks.
SSS and Final Gathering Flickering
I have recently come across the biggest headache that I’ve had for… well I guess it’s been less than a week since my last big issue-nevertheless this one was big. Sub Surface scattering used with Final Gathering produces crazy flickering problems. I’m fairly new to the sss. I’ve used it in a few projects, but that photoreal skin that so many people seem to be able to achieve has still eluded me.
I’ve been revamping an old elephant project of mine that I did a while ago for my soon to be released demo reel. I put sss on him, did my lighting, put in final gather for that sweet color bleeding, was able to get the sss on the ears to look *beautiful* and then I batch rendered. It took around 2 minutes a frame, so not bad at all. After it finished rendering I watched the .tga sequence and to my great dismay every part looked really good… except for the underbelly of the elephant. It looked like there was a concert going on there, spots of light were dancing all over. This was the only place it was noticeable to say an average viewer. There was some on the head, but it was tolerable. However the belly… that was a completely different monster. I tried everything. I upped the light map of the sss to a 2k map… that’s right 2 freaking k. I upped my final gather points to 1024, upped my density to a crazy 2, turned on and off radius control, messed with the flicker… fall off, nothing made a lick of difference. Frustrated is an understatement. I had no more time or patience to try anything else with final gather. My render times had skyrocketed to 10 minutes. I scrapped final gather and continued using straight lights. It’s much trickier to get believable color bleed with just using lights. However, I was able to get close to what the final gather was giving me. The only thing it lacked was the beautiful sss on the ears, its visible-just not as pretty, a big blow for sure, but nothing I can do. Render times went up extensively with each new light and each new shadow.
Render times per frame:
FG render times beginning: 2 minutes
FG render times end: 12 minutes
Lights Solo Beginning: 1 min. 30
Lights Solo End: 10 minutes
Ambient Occlusion: 2 minutes
Total man hours to figure out I can’t use Final Gather with SSS: ~20 hours
My website will soon be fully updated with all new images by June 19th. w00t