Face tests
on October 12th, 2009, by soenkeThe last week I’ve basically been doing test renders and bug-hunting, eg. some very not exciting AAO test renders which resulted in me getting mad at Blender.
A time consuming part is the hair and make it look attached to skin. I have no idea how the BBB crew stayed sane with all that fur.
Here are also some wip images including the moment I found the linear workflow button. When you want to look further into linear workflow, which hides behind the little button called Colour Management, which can be found in the render settings, check out this link:
So long and have a nice week, but stay tuned for more.
-Soenke
October 12th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Wow, looks really great. Is that our first-time view of the main character?
October 12th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
(The main character shouldn’t have been modelled to such a state, yet.)
It really feels like you’re hacking away one leaf at a time through these tests! It’s an exciting feeling. I personally love that shininess in the hair; I could almost imagine it has a smell.
Great work, Soenke! I can’t wait to hear more.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
A very important topic and I am glad you brought it up at the outset… Puts things in perspective for the expert and the n00b.
Cheers to Team Durian. 🙂
– Satish.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Is nice to see so many updates.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Note for Matt Ebb: Last I tested Linear Workflow it didn’t work for animation rendering (e.g. AVI JPEG) although it appears to be corrected in the render window. I had to render as individual PNGs and import in VSC and export again as a video.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
estoy enamorada de blender,
October 12th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Go kick brecht and tell him to get the Kajiya-Kay hair shader from the patch tracker working. He just need to figure out which normal gets inverted by turning on strand ‘use tangent shading’ in the ‘Links and Pipeline’ panel and compensate. Take him like two minutes.
Cause, ya know, hair is different than whatever shader model you’re using for your tests.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:51 am
i understad this is just testing but i want to see more update. keep up the good work and i hope to see more updates.
October 13th, 2009 at 7:31 am
Thats looks very very nice!! 😀
October 13th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Is that linear workflow doing the right thing :-), on my side of things out of the all the renders the linear workflow one is without doubt the worst one. Its washed out and greyed.
I hope you can entertain a few questions from a compositing noob.
I assume all the texture painting is taking place in GIMP if you are bring in 8 bit per channel textures images isn’t it wrong to be applying gamma correction to 8 bit images?
Is what comes out of the renderer is still linear even with the color management? As far as I have read compositing should only be done on images that are in a linear color space so I would assume it is.
October 13th, 2009 at 9:22 am
It sounds like you’re looking at a gamma uncorrected output from blender.
Practially all 8-bit/channel images for input are already gamma corrected, and so must be inversed before processing in blender.
Blender should be processing the image in linear RGB but be outputting gamma recorrected 8-bit during animation render and image editor render result view.
Those are my guesses. 🙂
October 13th, 2009 at 9:48 am
“I have no idea how the BBB crew stayed sane with all that fur.”
…. maybe they didn’t 😉
October 13th, 2009 at 10:06 am
@D woops bad mistake on my part, sloppy use of terms and all, I meant that isn’t it bad to apply an inverse gamma to an 8bit per channel image to linearise it.
I read your statement a few times and am still a little lost. When I read those notes on colour management I had the impression that you render output will be gamma corrected automatically if you save it to 8 bit per channel image format like jpeg.
so is what is happening to the greyed/washed out image something like this?
inputs(textures, shaders etc) -> inverse gamma to linearise them ->
rendering and shading in linear space -> linear output ready for compositing.
October 13th, 2009 at 10:33 am
I’m hoping someone will step in to give you the answers, because your guess should be better than mine given that I’ve not used 2.5 yet.
For now, maybe try looking around for a button that might rectify this, or maybe save in a different format…
October 13th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Wait a minute, a blown out grayish image is indicative of an image that has had its gamma set too high… Okay, I’m confused now. 😀
In the meantime, you can probably fix your renders with a composite node that sets the gamma to 0.4545
October 13th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Hi! Yeah! It is difficult to make the hair belonging to the head 🙂 The trick is in painting the scalp correctly and in the shading…
After allot of testing I’ve reached the conclusion that it’s better to make poly hair then the particle one. Modeling with ploys theres no restrictions in style, renders faster and moves better…
Take a look here, it helped me allot:
http://www.cortinadigital.com/
It’s the website of Francisco Cortina, the guy that made the Final Fantasy S.W. and Animatrix FFoO characters 😉
I Know this is just a test… but even so… there’s no easy way to put this, but I was expecting… more.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
The issue there with the weird looking colour managed image above is that as the name suggests, ‘linear workflow’ is something that’s best done start to finish, not just something you can easily tack on at the end. In blender 2.5 it’s automatic, so if you start from scratch with colour management on, and work with that, you’ll get the best results.
However if you make something ‘look good’ without colour management on, and then switch it on, it’ll look strange, because you’ve already been unconsciously trying to compensate for the incorrect tones, by doing things like brightening lights, adding extra fills, using non-inverse-square falloff, etc. So in that case (in the image above) it will take some tweaking of lamps etc to bring it back to normal.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Sorry, somethings in the previews post, that last line sure was not necessary…
I’m talking about hair but I still can’t do it correctly, so I shouldn’t be writing nonsense 😉 My bad!
October 13th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Ah, yeah, if you’re doing what the great Matt said, tyrant monkey, then you probably need to redo you lights and even shader settings: If you want to render with linear workflow, you’d best actually ‘work’ in linear workflow. 😀
Also, it isn’t “bad” to inverse gamma the 8-bit/channel image to get the linear colors because that’s exactly what you have to do to get it linear. There should be no loss in information, either, because the converted values are in a higher bit floating point.
October 13th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
“I have no idea how the BBB crew stayed sane with all that fur.”
“…. maybe they didn’t ;)”
Have you guys even seen Nathan lately…???
See here – /news/simple-biped-rig-in-blender-25/
😉
October 13th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Hi Durian!
What resolution has the texture on the face?! Must be 8K or so!
Great progress anyway, it’s quite interesting to see what a pro can do in a week…
Keep going!
October 13th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
@D i don’t know why you get the impression its my renders am talking about. Its the above picture I was refering to posted by Soenke. An image created with the correct linear workflow should not give you washed out grey renders.
Thanks for the explaination matt.
October 13th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
You confused me when you said “on my side of things”. 😐 But you’re right, linear workflow should give more realistic renders when used correctly.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Thanks for all the comments and sorry I didn’t reply earlier.
>rogper
Thank you for your tip and the link.
Keep kicking us, that way we will be more motivated to create better stuff. The more you kick us now the lesser you have to kick us after Durian 😀
>Camaxtll
All skin textures are 4k.
>tyrant,D
It’s just like Matt said. Using it should be from the start and not somewhere in the middle. I learned it the hard way, I guess :p
This is just intended as a test. No relation to our story.
October 18th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
it looks very great!!!!!!! good job.