Darth Liniia, Female Sith Lord

WIP close shot:


Long time ago I painted the concept for a female Sith Lord, Darth Liniia:


and thought it worth developing further, including an animated lightsaber sequence in her personal dojo:


Most modeling and lighting done, but a great deal of detailing yet to do in the textures and materials, plus a rhu-cat.

This is the character brief I drafted when I did the painting:

"Darth Liniia was an unsurpassed Master of Beast Control, and actually developed this Force capability into an offensive weapon for the first time. After years of study of the symbiotic relationship of the midichlorians and the hunter animals of Genraar, gaining great knowledge of the ways in which the Force could amplify the predatory nature of all living things, Darth Liniia rose to her ascendancy by having her mentor and his entire household torn to shreds by a pack of rhu-cats under her direct control. Liniia eventually embodied her knowledge in the extremely deadly lightsaber style known as jian’nis’rok (fang and claw)

“Always reaching for new ways to expand her own predatory nature, she became one of the first humanoids to successfully receive the transplanted eyes of an animal, giving her a range of vision far in excess of her species’ norm.”

Character basis: The Sith being the antithesis of the very ascetic Jedi, I figured my Liniia would be a supreme sybarite, selfish and self-indulgent, basking in sensual pleasures as readily as the pleasure of the kill.

cool scene. she looks totally evil.

Another impressive design Chipmasque! I Like the face design more in the 2d work though. her head is more oval and taper down to the chin, with flatter cheek bones. It feels more sinister to me that way. Not to go off topic but I was just looking at your rigging videos, and those solutions you have for the shoulders and hips are sick!!!

Thank you for the comments & crits! I agree the Liniia model needs work, Nat, it’s still in its basic stages, and I’ll keep your observations in mind.


Fully composited


Base plate rendering

Many changes since the previous imagery. Principally, I reduced the focal length of the camera lens, which helped unflatten the overall perspective and creates a better sense of space around the figure. But it also required a major re-working of the environment model, in particular the cityscape. I’m not 100% happy with the modeling of the buildings and may re-visit them, but wanted to establish the compositing pipeline first. As is, the cityscape is not parallax-friendly, which limits camera moves pretty severely. but I like the overall visual character.

I’m using a volume rendering to set the atmospheric perspective for the exterior. which prevents use of Ambient Occlusion for the interior, which in turn forced a slight reworking of the lighting in the dojo. Overall I like it much better as it gives the figure a more heavily-shadowed aspect that helps make her look more ominous.

The attack drone design is a nod to Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope, from the scene where Luke is first learning the ways of the Force.

The animation proceeds well, but even @ 720p rez, it takes 6-7 hours per frame to render the base plate, so I won’t be publishing any final animation any time soon (if at all!), but I will be using it to provide the stills, and will likely do an OpenGL sequence once it’s finished up.

Shame you can’t render it at 720p, on my machine a simple turnaround can take 9 hours so I feel your pain. Seeing the attack drone reminded me of Alia from the Dune books. Maybe give her a few more Drones to deal with?

Spent a day optimizing the lighting for noise reduction/render time, with good effect:


Before


After

I’m using many Emission shaders in this scene and not all need to be sampled as principal light sources, so for those I disabled the Multiple Importance Sample option in the Material Settings (Examples: the wall-mounted lighting fixtures and the cityscape building lights). I also replaced a very large planar emission shader used for the exterior with a Sun Lamp, more efficient and less noise, plays better with the volumetric effect as well.

I’ve advanced the animation some as well and with the fast moves, I wanted to test the Motion Blur option. This required some minor revision to the compositing setup, but otherwise works well at a shutter setting of 1.2 frames.


This isn’t a full 720p frame (testing that with an overnight render) but the tests show a better than 50% improvement in rendering times after noise reduction/optimization – a definite recommendation if you are running into extraordinarily long rendering times in complex lighting situations.

Also, I do plan a series of attackers for the sequence, Nat, but I’ll be putting those in after the main figure animation is wrapped. For now I’m just using proxies, other than the small spherical drone already shown. BTW the Alia “workout” sequence was definitely an inspiration! :smiley:


One of Liniia’s sparring partners, “The Lurcher”


An action shot featuring a revised skin shader for Liniia, though much small detail is lost at this image scale. I’ll be posting a better shot of her later on – takes forever to render these frames!

I would say add some definition to her muscles at least once you’ve finished posing her.

Good call, Misadventure, and a sculpt of the figure for normal mapping is on my to-do list. I also plan to adjust the underlying muscle layer for more bulk in some areas.

Other to-dos that got done:


Flying drone on the attack


5 frames later it’s toast! This oversized render was both to test the destruction FX and to show off the skin shader in more detail. Unfortunately the motion blur kind of smears that detail a bit.


Also in the mix are a couple of quadrupedal spider droids with turret-mounted blasters. This is a frame from the cutaway scene where it makes its debut.

You’ve created some cool characters along with the environment Chipmasque. I was curious on post #6 you show some of the optimizations you made and posted a 1000 sample full composite. Did you ever end up doing a 720p test at those settings, I was just wondering what your render times ended up being?

Whatever optimizations you made worked very well. I never realized that you can benefit from turning off MIS on certain lamps like you mentioned.

Thanks, harleynut97, I appreciate the kind comments. The images at the bottoms of posts #7 & #9 were both rendered at full 720p, though reduced to fit the forum’s 1024 max dimension. Render times @ 1000 samples run from 4 to 7 hours depending on total scene content, but keep in mind I have a really underpowered machine for the current Blender versions (these were done in 2.71). A capable quad core with ample RAM & a ripped GPU would no doubt cut those times by a huge margin – hey, my birthday’s comin’ up! (hint, hint :wink: ). I could run the composite elements no problems, most of those take only a few minutes per frame, but the base plates would have to be run on a render farm, which at the moment is not in my budget.

Substantial progress on a number of fronts:


Final skin shader + normal map from hi-rez sculpt (below). This image is a detail from the render size of 720p.


Just under a million tris for this sculpt. I concentrated on the exposed portion of her figure (thighs & arms), and exaggerated the definition so I’d have options in the normal mapping.


The full 720p frame reduced for the forum. A few more doo-dads added to the interior design, small lighting & camera adjustments. I had to up the samples to 1500, so now I’m looking at a 7-hour render on my slow-as-molasses comp.

I’ve also done some more animation but haven’t rendered out the OpenGL frames yet.

This is looking good so far! Any reason why you have not given her a red lightsaber?

Thanks, Peter! The blade color is a design choice, the red would clash I think. In my understanding of light saber tech, a red color crystal doesn’t designate a dark-side user, it’s just a matter of preference. In the movies it was a psychological/emotional issue but really has no other significance.

A real struggle to reduce sample count and rendering time has paid off – main layer render time cut better than 1/2 and less noise overall, though it requires rather unusual use of render layers and the Compositor. The following three images are sequential frames from the “drone attack” segment, showing the blaster and light saber blocking effects I cooked up:






The main layer (includes the dojo interior and Liniia figure, plus any attackers) now takes around 3 hours to render @ 500 samples, down from 1500 samples and 7 hours when rendering all layers together. The background cityscape is now a separately-rendered layer that takes around 30 minutes for 250 samples. Effects layers like the light saber blade, blaster shots and sparks add about another half-hour of rendering/composite time, though that should lessen some when rendering the layers out as image sequences for final compositing. Right now I’m still exploring efficiencies in the process.

Rendering efficiencies: I removed the animated cat hologram effect because it contributed a great deal to noise & sampling requirements, replacing it with a statue created from the same source file (my panther from an earlier project). This made a large difference in overall noise and rendering time, mainly due to the elimination of a light source. In a similar vein I limited the interactive lighting from the light saber blade to Glossy only, so there is some reaction from the armor and the glossy component of the skin shader. This made the figure render acceptably in around 500 samples instead of over 1000.

But the statue in the corner continued to present a problem because its dedicated lighting has to bounce around so much in that corner – even at 1500 samples it was still quite noisy when rendering the entire main layer. So I turned once again to the Compositor for a workaround. By using the Border option in the Dimensions section I was able to isolate that corner and render it out as a separate image sequence with built-in matting – at 1500 samples I got a much cleaner result I was able to patch over the rest of the scene using the Compositor. The patch frames were around 45 minutes each. In the end my all-at-once rendering time of approx 8 hours was reduced to about 4 hours total using layering and differential samples counts. That’s still a lot per frame but quite a savings nonetheless.

Re-opened at OP request.

Finally got it rendered, composited and edited!

Light saber blade, sparks and molten metal FX were rendered separately and composited in the Video Sequence Editor, principally using the Add option for the FX tracks.

Thanks much to Fweeb for freeing my old locked up thread! :wink: