[I]How hard is it to escape your dream,
When nothing is as real as it seems?
You want to open your eyes,
Leave behind the horror and cries.
But sadly you’ve got to wait,
Sometimes dreams are stronger than fate.
Luke, an ordinary kid, is having an extraordinary nightmare. He finds himself trapped in a strange factory, with armed guards at every exit. Inevitably, he manages to escape – but are there worse things lurking outside in the dark forest than factory guards?
What happens next? Join him in his nightmare to find out…
My name is Waqas and I have recently migrated to Blender from Autodesk 3ds Max. I do have lots of obvious reasons which I won’t be discussing here at the moment because I’m here to announce the launch of our animated short, called ‘Luke’s Escape’.
I have been working on this animated short for quite awhile now with a great team and I am really happy with the support they have given me. You can read more about them on http://www.lukesescape.com/team/ .
If you are a Blender Artist and you’d like to be part of this project. Please write us at: join (at) lukesescape.com
I’ve seen your webpage… very nice concept art, very stylish and artistic renders, main character seems to be a clever and brave boy and I like the mood of your movie very much.
I’m looking forward to see more. Good luck!
TheEmptyRoom, i made a little adjustments with gimp to Luke(tiny modeling changes)
can i upload an image comparison of him?
If you haven’t started rendering the movie maybe you will like the changes.
Feel free to upload them, the model is pretty much final except for minor tweaking. He is already textured and rigged so drastic changes are out of the question.
Thanks for the suggestion. I think you are on to something. I see what you mean. Maybe a little nip tuck will be coming his way. I will chat with the rest about it. I should get away with it without redoing the shape keys or anything else.
i saw in the Cycles thread that you used this method for compositing hair (and SSS?) from BI with Cycles passes. can i ask you for a detailed explanation about how you’re accomplishing that? the video’s interesting but brief, and not very thorough. i’ve done quite a bit of compositing BI hair with Cycles or Octane or Yafaray renders, etc, but it’s always required some tweaking of the hair pass. i can’t quite figure out which BI render pass settings to leave enabled or disable to get hair to still be occluded by un-rendered geometry (in BI) so that it composites seamlessly on top of the Cycles pass.
also, does the BI pass have to calculate all that geometry before starting to render just the hair or SSS, ON TOP OF the Cycles BVH construction time?
one last question - do you have dedicated lights in your BI scene just for lighting hair or faking indirect illumination or anything?
That link is really just about dealing with Cycles and BI together. I will make a detailed tutorial soonish.
SSS is not done in Blender internal. I did this with a fake sss setup that makes use of the ray length node. I am not entirely satisfied with the result but it will have to du as it may take some time before we get sss in cycles. I had it previously as a Blender Internal pass but but it complicated things and I also got a little bit of fringing due to AA issues. I think that could be solved.
As for the hair works quite well. I only tweeked the levels slightly in comp but what you see there is pretty much how the hair came out.
Well as long as you have the geometry there it does occlude the hair. I think if it is a cycles material and you render it in Blender internal it automatically renders as bg with 0 alpha. In other words occlude the hair where needed.
I only link geometry that will occlude the hair or occlude the light hitting the hair, ex. a wall very close(as in almost touching) to the hair. So no, you don’t need all the geometry in that scene.
Yes.
It is important to note that I use strand shading/rendering for the hair as it achieves the best results. It’s important to note that raytracing is no good for strand rendering due to no hair on hair occlusion. Hair on hair occlusion is very important. To achieve convincing looking hair.
For direct light.
I make empties and copy the locations of the direct lights and link em to the hair scene. I then create spotlight in the hair scene and set a track to constraint to the head of the rig. This is so that the character never moves outside of the spot light’s light, because it follow the head. I set the spot to fit just around the head. I use a deep shadow buffer as it works best with strand hair because it takes transparencies into account and raytracing is no good with strand hair.
For indirect light.
I would use Ambient Occlusion for this but Ambient Occlusion is raytracing and raytracing is no good with strand shading. So instead I create a light which will be dupli-ed to a geshpere’s(level 1) faces which will point them inward. This is linked to the head to follow it. Again I tweak the spots to fit snuggly around the hair. Then just set the colour and power of the lamp to suit the environment.
That is it. It sounds more complicated than it actually is. I will make a detailed tutorial.
