env art videos roundup

by - 2012/08/17 15 Comments Artwork

Hi, I’ve been putting together more env-art videos during last weeks , here’s a round-up (2 already posted, 3 new : design, dirtmaps, mapping and stencils)

It’s again a mix of tutorial and diary : in part it’s explaining and telling how scripts and techniques work , in part just recording the process and how i organized my part.

Of course it’s not a full overview off the whole process/project: I stop at the stuff I actually dealt with,  other parts/assets share some techniques but are very different in others (like robot -with different use of dirtmaps , painting and box mapping – and church – for the different use of photo textures ),  and -about rendering- there’s the whole step of projection / matte painting between the materials I mention and the finished frames, then the aspect of integration with live footage and much more… there’s quite a few tutorials I’d have to see myself! after the rest of the team is done with the project :)

INTRO, OVERVIEW and DESIGN :

TEXTURES; SHADERS and MATERIALS :

Hope you enjoy the videos, the batch-bake and object-pack scripts mentioned in the vids and  the 3-steps-blend node for dirtmaps, are available for test on pasteall  here (nodegroups and scripts in a single blendfile ) The file is a preview, there’s more work to do on the whole thing (nodegroups, scripts, general workflow ) so I look forward to comments here, then after Mango prob. a thread on BlenderArtist and then getting the scripts in trunk, make more polished test scenes, etc..

  1. marcoG says:

    Great stuff, bravo Francesco, a bit low video quality but still understandable.

    Keep rockin’ guys.

    Regards

    • marcoG says:

      *Nicolò, sorry, voice made me wrong :)

      Cheers

    • Nicolò says:

      Have you tried 720p playback ? that should be good , for simplicity i recorded with my usual screen res (full hd) then scale for web , but indeed at 360/480 it gets blurry , especially blender ui and text..

      BTW, I’m recording to h264 lossless (ffmpeg screencast , working nicely) then compressing for upload ( h264 again but that’s trickier to get right ..maybe i should feed youtube a bit higher q. videos)

      • marcoG says:

        Yes i tried, on a laptop with 1280×800 monitor and on a desktop with 1920×1080 monitor, no way. But don’t worry, with voice over is clearly understandable.

      • marcoG says:

        FYI, the problem is just on the last two videos. Fonts are extremely aliased and “destroyed”, first 3 vids are ok.

        Cheers

        • Nicolò says:

          uh-oh … you’re right ! this is it : when i downscaled to 720p in last 2 videos i didn’t have antialias on! argh!
          (and yep , all was edited in blender sequencer )

          I’ve had some issues with sequencer running out of memory exporting 25 minutes at once -only recently- trying to work around that, i messed up.
          Oh well, i’ll re-export properly somehow and update.

          • Nicolò says:

            Updated the last video , exporting for web went ok straight from Blender this time
            edit : updated the other buggy video too , this pages shows fixed videos now.

  2. Peter says:

    A lot of stuff to watch! Thanks!

  3. ndundupan says:

    YEY! Thank for share, it will be help my last student project :D

  4. SamCameron says:

    I have a question… looks like you are doing a heavy use of dirt maps and the workflow is quite extense… so my question is… why you haven’t programed a cavity shader or something like that directly in Cycles? Zbrush has something like that and many other softwares. It’s a very common technique and would be good for you to have it hard coded for these kind of projects.

    • Nicolò says:

      Hi good point, simple answer : i can’t code it myself (i can do only basic python :) ), and as request it wasn’t high priority enough for Mango (not even for me or Kjartan who have been using dirtmap , and raytraced AO was doing a good enough work)

      But as i said in a video , if any coder is interested it could be a nice tool to work on.

      About Zbrush and cavity shaders : screen space AO would be cool as a viewport effect for sculpting .. but also practical if usable as mask for sculpt/paint.. and if bake-able a great source for dirtmaps too. (this is similar to 2d filters in game engine being made available for viewport..)

      But Zbrush cavity afaik is not screen space , it’s basically vertex color AO .

      Which reminds me : this i could actualy try to script : using the remesh modifier (only temp.) to give objects a dense , uniform mesh , then running vert.col.AO and a bake that : it should give a pretty good dirtmap too.

      As soon as i manage to work a bit more on dirtmap script (late sept..) i should try to add that as alternate method , togheter with adding the Ideasman42’s object pack script in the batch .. that should make the workflow quite nice.

  5. SamCameron says:

    Thanks for reply, I just think would be cool to have the right shader nodes to build a cavity shader, that would bring more flexibility to Cycles to create some other crazy stuff.

  6. Big Fan says:

    Awesome videos. Thanks for taking the time to make these and posting the scripts and nodes.

  7. Michaelw says:

    Great videos! I really like the approach for dirtmaps.

    Trying the blend against latest svn (2.64 RC) the batch bake fails on “use_color_management”.

    Commenting out anything using color managment will crash blender instantly when hitting bake…

    Just thought you might want to know !

  8. ben says:

    Will this add-on be updated for 2.68? I could really use this :)