IanHubert
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Ride the Ox
🕑 Added 2020-11-05 12:20:45 +0000 UTC
The last few days have been pretty wild here in the US, so I kind of intentionally let myself check out to greeble city for a bit (between checking twitter every few minutes).
Oldton (and Waterworks Market) are separated from the rest of the city by some industrial areas, so most folks take the train, but I wanted a more touristy method, so there's THE OX, a leisurely paddlewheel boat that makes the twice-daily trip down the coast from a northern neighborhood.
I figured it was mostly an old barge that folks had built a steamboat-esque superstructure on top of. I was going to add a huge gaudy neon sign on the very top (I still probably should have), so I was modeling the supports, but I figured I'd gone far enough down the rabbit hole, and I liked the idea that the same thing happened in-world, and either they'd dismantled some old sign, or never raised enough money to get a proper one.
I was trying to hit an aesthetic mix somewhere between a Hong Kong Junk ship and a Mississippi Steamboat, and I sort of got it? I like a lot of the pieces, but the whole boat looks a bit more incongruous than I would have liked (there's no real big bold shapes/asymmetry, which was something I really wanted). That said, I do enjoy that you can't even get a sense of the shape of the ship, because there's so much sticking off of it. I kind of which I'd done even MORE banners, and played it up with the physics sim. I want to incorporate more cloth into some designs, if possible.
This was the initial render of the shot. And I'm not mad at it, but it's the same issue I had with the blender splash screen, where I have both bright areas and dark areas on the ship, with a really convoluted silhouette, so it's really hard to immediately get a sense of what's going on.
I loaded in a few HDRIs from HDRI haven, and I found one that worked better as a starting point, and I liked the shot a lot better.
I ended up raiding a bunch of old scenes to finish this shot, which I really try not to do, since stuff starts feeling homogenous really quick, but since I'd already modeled the boat I figured that was enough for one shot.
The final shot is still convoluted, but that's kind of what I want as an intro to the market scene; just a bit too much happening everywhere. That said, I had a pretty aggressive camera move going, and the parallax helps convey the layout really well.
Here's the shot, if you want to see (the brick wall at the end will be darker)
The parallax also is going to help me blend this shot into the rest of the scene. I've been redoing a couple of the early Waterworks shots, and I'm trying to set them all up as if they're being seen from a moving vehicle- a trolly or a bus/train thing as it moves through the city. I just want to see if I can capture that feeling of looking out the window of a moving bus in an unknown city (actually- there's a lot of that in this episode, come to think of it). Ideally this shot feels filmed out of a car window, instead of the camera just randomly flying around.
For a different shot, I actually added the bus window with stickers and all that on there. Mostly I was trying to hide the fact that nobody was animated, but it's still pretty obvious, so I might give it some love. 
A few things I like:
The "flickering neon" trick is continuing to delight me (the chasing bulbs on the signs are a bit fast, but I still think it adds a lot). It's been really useful for giving the shot a bit of a buzzing/living feeling.
I was able to use the waterfall textures for the boat's wake. Honestly I could have spent a bunch more time on that (I think it'd be great to really try to capture that boat wake feeling some day), but I think it works alright.
I used the steam textures mapped onto a plane as the mix factor between a transparent and a translucent shader, and that made some volumetric looking steam, but any shadows falling on it immediately gave it away (shadows should be a volumetric effect passing through the steam, but instead it was very obviously a flat plane), so I turned to the opacity and stacked a bunch of the planes together to form a cloud/sandwich, which worked okay (still falls apart a little if you look too close). I want to see if I could offset each texture by a little bit, and maybe the opacity, and create an actual 3d cloud based off of video textures, but my guess is that might become real RAM intensive real quick?? And also take forever to render... but it could be a lifesaver in certain scenarios.
I'm definitely pushing the limits of acceptable usage for my photoscanned folks (both in how often I'm re-using the same people, and in how few I can get away with animating (I think 13 out of the hundred folks are animated?)).
SO! I've been pushing the limits recently of how far I can just kind of jump from thing to thing without any particular gameplan, and I think I really do want to focus on wrapping up some stuff. 1.) HyperBole: it's so close to done. I should just Done it. 2.) Robot Theater: I've done all the set-up, now I just need to actually finish designing it and cut it out. 3.) Robot Arm tutorial: lost in the weeds a little on that one. I keep recording cast-steel modeling tutorials, but not really digging the final results. I'll figure it out. 4.) Dynamo Dream!
Gonna sleep now!
Comments
maxfleischer
To be honest, I don't think it is that great. It's very fast of course, but in comparison to photogrammetry it is pretty low res. https://youtu.be/qrP_P5nqmas - this is a little comparison if you are interested.
Luka Ibanez
Yeah had the same thoughts. Sounds too good to be true!
Aleksandar Hardi
Hey Ian, do you have any thoughts on the iPhone 12 lidar scanner, there is a demo on YouTube of people 3D scanning large objects and it seems to be working pretty well and can export obj. Is this something you might use?
martin åberg
Awesome stuff as usual, you are quite the inspiration Ian! Quick question, have you tried HardOps/boxcutter-addon? Im curious about your thoughts, maybe it doesnt blend well with your workflow?
Dont sweat the small stuff Ian, this is after us replaying this shot so many times that we all see these things. When in an episode playing in realtime, nobody is going to notice it. If it floats, its a boat! :D
Kai Christensen
I would totally be willing to spend multiple hours learning how to photoscan for a chance to be in Dynamo.
Kai Christensen
Out of curiosity, what render settings and hardware are you running?
Gotta love that Dutch cream! Lol, sorry linked an ad instead. It's working now.
Ian Hubert
I had to google that, and I got an image search result page of 100% corndogs?? non-image search clarified, haha- yeah! I can see it!
Ian Hubert
HAH! Yeah! I was adding animation to folks, but the subtle stuff wasn't really reading at all, and the "standing up" animation was nice and visible. I think 3 folks total stand up? As Carter points out below, only one of them is actually sitting on anything beforehand, though :P
Ian Hubert
Ahh! I'd love to see that! The link you posted seems to be for some sort of Dutch Cream, though?
Ian Hubert
Do I have a floater?? OH! The guy sitting in air? I really thought I'd get away with that one. It's... special pants.
Doug Brown
The Dog's Danglers!
Carter Burr-Kirven
Another satisfied HoverPants™ customer under the Welcome sign there
Hey Ian, just found this amazing tutorial on stacked planes that form clouds. https://youtu.be/RgRPUlFBHH4
super epic just like everything else u make
D1a1v1e1
Ian this is stunning! Fantastic work!!!
SO RICH IN DETAIL! Great job Ian! After replaying the living hell out of that video to see all the gorgeous details, I realized something funny. The dude at the bottom of the screen, on the docks, stands up and as a response, his clone on the boat (bottom floor, screen left corner) looking at him, stands up too. :D
I don't know what I love more, your worldbuilding or your willingness to just try different approaches to film making and the problem-solving that comes with it. its really inspiring! would you ever be open to having patrons submit photoscans of themselves that are the same quality as yours to add to your collection for Dynamo Dream?
Justus Hulmu
xD
Paul and Anna Spooner
All the poles sticking out the sides with lanterns and banners, combined with the name "The Ox", suggests a bevy of banderillas.
it's that guy!
This is absolutely buck wild. Oh my god you're insane
Mornarion
This looks amazing, as always. Can't get enough of your stuff ;)
Spooky! People on the ship do not move. :-) The texture on the background wall makes those stones waaaaay too big: if you think of, they are like two stores houses! Cool shot tho, hell of a work.
Jared Soto
Dude your insane
Felicia White
Those photoscans are doing some work!
Man! this is super impressive. I'm so inlove with your work
Thanks!!! I have been using blender for almost a year now, I need to get better in making the screens more efficient, thank you for the inspiration to create art and for the reply
Zachary Macintyre
I'm so happy we get to see your process, I hope to one day get to this skills nirvana where you can just wish things into being. Very inspiring stuff!
Ian Hubert
Thanks Eduardo! All of these were about 3 minutes per frame (except for the stills, where I cranked the settings a bit). Normally I prefer keeping the render times close to 1-2 minutes or so, but I really wanted the render clean, so I boosted the samples. One of the things that's really been helping me with render times is having as little set in there as possible. The more immediately a scene has access to the HDRI/sky, the sooner it can stop bouncing the light paths around.
Wao!! That is just beautiful, I have a question Ian, a scene like that one, how long does it take you to render it? Thanks
