Spent part of Sunday and Monday (bank holidays ftw) figuring out C4D’s sculpting tools.
Taking a cue from a reddit user freda42, I made this fish who I’ve named Bop.
Tag Archive: Subsurface Scattering
Another Kinect scan, fractured and traveling space while being locked in time. In this case, it’s a scan of Sarah Goodreau where she’s made to look like a wax sculpture using SubSurface scattering.
Breakdown
I always forget that Vimeo’s encoding can get crunchy and/or messy when you’re dealing with thousands or millions of particles, so here’s some stills.
Sometimes things don’t go as planned.
What started out as a RealFlow test for viscous fluids quickly turned into a further exploration into SubSurface Scattering to get toy and rubber-like results. Also, an initial idea for a slightly disturbing image became a friendly render of the beloved Winnie The Pooh (I think it’d due to the toy-style factor).
The beehive was modeled using the Sculpting tools found in the new demo of R14 – which luckily enough has an OBJ export feature. The Sculpting is nice and easy to use – not as thorough as zBrush or MudBox, but something super nice to have in C4D.
The Pooh model was a freebie from TurboSquid, and the trees were from an old SuperHeroes project that never made it. Props go to Matt Whitewood for the trees. And finally Sarah was kind enough to draw me a bump map for the wings.
Sometimes you start doing a sketch or an animation test, and you don’t know where it’s going but you start seeing how it could make sense for a particular brand, idea, project, or in this case, a band. I was playing around with Trapcode Particular and the Auxiliary System settings and came out with these eel-looking shapes. All of the blueish eel-things are made with Trapcode Particular, while the actual title that spells the band name is modeled/animated in Cinema4D Using the Spline Wrap Deformer and shaded using a lot of Subsurface Scattering.
The end result was a mix of creepy, psychedelic, and a little on the birth/womb nature. I was happy with where this was going, and wanted to develop it a bit further – so I thought to make this work around the band The Flaming Lips.
The Flaming Lips are an amazing band to see live – when I saw them at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Monticello, NY a few years ago, they entered the stage through an LED screen/curtain that was projecting a woman with her legs spread. Naturally, they emerged from behind said screen from what appeared to be her whispering eye.
For context: Here’s a picture of basically the same thing I saw, but at another show. Photo by Kevin Harber.
In that sense maybe that’s why anything womb-like I instantly relate to The Flaming Lips, and why I thought this odd animation/stlye would fit right with them.
After a month+ long period of not posting, I’m back! Been busy with Superheroes stuff (which will get posted sooner than later), as well as things that pop up here and there.
So here’s some assorted renders that I’ve been able to work on during downtime – nothing really fleshed out, just trying out some different techniques or approaches to things.
And so it begins:
There’s a neat store around the corner from my apartment that has all sorts of furniture and decorations. They happened to have this little tin zeppelin toy that I really liked. I especially liked the texture of the actual tin, with slight scratches. The overall shape of the zeppelin was dead easy – the focus was on the material. Some bump + normal mapping and a few layers of specularity later, this was the result.
I did notice that the scale of the scratches made the zeppelin look fairly toy-like (which makes sense given the reference); I decided to try out some trees that were more or less realistic. I think the trees give it a nice sense of contrast in terms of scale, and they kind of look like the trees found on maquettes.
This gross little dude was the result of a little doodle at work. I’d post it, but it’s really a crap doodle.
For this one I wanted to play with two things: some subsurface scattering, as well as getting an eyeball to look good with texture in the actual iris. I’ve seen many renders where the eyes look sort of dead and flat; for this I really wanted to bring that stringy texture. I also went ahead and made the veins pop out some, just to fully bring out the specularity and fresnel reflection that’s in the eye membrane.
Here’s a closer shot of the eye:
And last, but not least, is another test with hair/fur.
Usually I’m not a big fan of renders that consist of just cubes and spheres. Originally I started playing around with the hair/fur for eyelids and eyebrows for the gross eggman/eyeman guy above. It actually made him look even more unpleasant – to the point that I scratched the idea.
However, thanks to those tests I ended up having a hair/fur material that not only looked good from afar, but you’d get really good detail when viewed up close.
Using geometry for the hair instead of the vector generated hairs gives you that flexibility, as well as really thorough customization for the hair. For example, you wouldn’t think it, but eyelashes have a lot more specularity than eyebrows for example.
Just your standard C4D cubes… until you zoom in.
These two renders are the same scene, same model, same material, and same geometry for the hairs. The only thing different is the camera placement and focal length.
So yeah, after a month+ of not posting, that’s a fistful of renders. More posts to come soon.
Here’s a style-frame and concept sketch of what will hopefully be a series of very short animations revolving around different Super Heroes. In this case, this Alien superhero is being nice enough to protect the Earth from an incoming asteroid.
At SuperHeroes we have a group of little super hero avatars that we use in our branding. If you visit the website, inspect our business cards you’ll be able to spot one or two of these – but in a 2D/vector style. I took the style and brought it into 3D, and incorporated the vibrance but gave it a bit of tactility (or at least tried to). Our intern Matt Whitewood took his first stab at modeling and made the spaceship – not too shabby.
Vector/reference icons:
To give it said tactility I used mostly the ChanLum shader, but one or two have SubSurface Scattering (SSS). I would’ve done all of them with SSS but I didn’t want to increase rendertimes exponentially, and tweaking C4D’s built-in SSS shader is not really intuitive nor that powerful – even with some great resources I found online (if someone thinks otherwise, I’d love to know your thoughts).
Here’s an example of the vast difference between SSS (left) and ChanLum (right). The SSS render is clearly the winner, and has a nice texture to it.
Rendered with Advanced Render.
While playing around with Sub-Polygon Displacement and noise shaders I got this interesting little… thing. One coworker calls it a Rock Monster Sperm, another one calls it something I’d rather not post. Regardless, it’s got a cool organic feel and the slight translucency as well as depth of field really give it a nice microscopic feel.
Lately I’ve been playing around a lot with 3D Motion Tracking, and instead of relying on footage that happened to be floating around, I decided to shoot my own background plate and have some fun. I also got a really cheap gazing ball that I wanted to use for some HDRI Spherical Panoramas. This is the result:
Process breakdown:
Shooting: Chose a nice sunny day with some good hard shadows, and brought the gazing ball and a grey ball out. Shot my background plate at a low ISO and high shutter speed (thus preventing blurring and artifacting). Immediately after I mounted (rather hastily) the gazing ball to where my CG object would be , and shot it in 5 bracketed exposures. Soon after, shot the grey ball.
Post: Processed the RAW photos of the gazing ball to 14-bit TIFS, imported into Photomatix to unwrap and make a 32-bit HDR file. Brought unwrapped HDR into Photoshop and Clone Masked myself and the base out, tried to fix any pinching and warping (I breezed through it knowing reflections weren’t going to be crucial). Once that was done, used Boujou for 3D Motion Tracking, and imported the track onto C4D.
CG: Imported footage as a background object. Then transferred a ground plane and a sphere primitive to the reference markers from Boujou to establish scene scale and orientation. Made a Sky element and loaded the HDR image, adjusted the orientation to match the background plate. Enabled GI and got decent, but soft results. Added a point light with some (but not much) falloff and positioned it around the scene, using the grey ball photograph as a reference for light diffusion. Then made a shader that used Subsurface Scattering to really push light absorption, and then a slightly blurred reflection to sell the object in the scene). Finally, simulated Soft Rigid Body Dynamics (but cheating for speediness sake, using the Clothilde – the Luxx way). Originally I wanted to simulate a rain of rubber duckies falling, but Mograph didn’t like 2000+ duckies and RealFlow simulation was taking more time than shooting and post combined!
In any case, that was some good old fashioned fun.
Gazing Ball, Grey Diffusion Ball, Unwrapped Gazing Ball (Spherical Panorama)
Extrapolated bars, no tone this time.
In this little test I used the Sound Effector in Mograph linked to the Z-Scale parameter for each bar. The song is an instrumental version of Metronomy’s Heartbreaker. I got the remix package of the song (every instrument as a separate track/file) and linked individual instruments/sounds to different bars (quite structured, compared to what I think is a semi-chaotic result).
The material on the bars is a mix of Subsurface Scattering, Ambient Occlusion, Mograph’s Multishader, and a hint of Reflection. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that Subsurface Scattering takes a long time to render.
After that, some curves adjustment in After Effects along with a vignette and scanlines for effect.
