Hi guys.

It’s been a while. Here’s a little post I promised last time. T5 is a much bigger project comparing to previous Speedies entries and to be honest it’s far from finished at this point. In fact it’s on hold as I fail to find free time for some 3d fun these days and other group members seem to have the exact same problem.

I think I’ll just make a short series of posts showing you what T5 is all about, what has been done already and what’s yet to be done as I think it’s a high time to refresh things a bit here :]

Let’s start with a little introduction. Some of you may have noticed that I’m a bit nuts about LEGO modeling and rendering. I’ve been thinking about this project for a longer time really. T5 is about recreating official 8480 set – “FOS Light” Space Shuttle in 3d. I’m sure most of you have heard about this set as it’s pretty much a classic example of how brilliant LEGO can be. You can find some details about this thing here.

As you can see, it’s a very complex model. It contains around 185 unique pieces (1366 bricks in total). The plan is to polymodel and map all of them in detail so the bricks can be detached and used in different sets (so I model every bottom, stud, hole etc even if it’s covered by other piece). Once it’s all done the whole thing needs to be assembled and rigged. The last stage would be to render it.

So, this is a very ambitious project for me and a great opportunity to explore rigging tools in modo.

Some of you may have stumble upon these renders on RandomControl site. They asked me to share the scene as they wanted to test some core optimizations and upcoming modo plugin.

Current parts list:

78 parts waiting to be modeled (including 2 without a proper reference)
76 finished parts (including 3 that are waiting for a review)
30 parts in progress

More info in next post

Cheers

We have finished Theme #4 a week ago. Themes #1-3 were strictly about hard surface modeling but this time we focused on organics. I always felt like I needed more practice in this area to be honest, so it was a good opportunity to learn something entirely new.

We planned to create a whole human figure but it quickly turned out that other Speedies members were pretty busy with their own stuff and couldn’t fully join me with this struggle. Eventually I went into „lazy mode” and modeled only main human head features, so I don’t have much to show you here aside of few wireframe images.

Anyway, I must admit that although my first head attempt was pretty sluggish, I’m quite satisfied with the final result. Here are some wireframes:

As you can see the topology is not so great in certain areas, cheeks for example, but overall shape is there.

If you’re interested in watching timelapse videos you can find some here: ear modeling, nose modeling, but that’s all I could upload as most of my recordings got corrupted due to some problems with CamStudio compatibility on Windows 7… Fortunately enough I solved it already and will upload more videos regarding Theme #5 soon. In fact I have few already compressed.

By the way, Theme #5 will be a bit different as it will be the first Speedies collaboration. I’ll reveal more details in a next post, but it looks like it will be much bigger than our previous projects. I might divide it into few „work in progress” posts with wireframes, videos and few test renders maybe, so stay tuned. Here’s a little teaser for you.

Thanks for stopping by.

Cheers!

Hello,

Just wanted to write a quick note about stuff I’m working on right now. Sorry for a longer delay. I realize some of you are waiting for Fryrender tutorial I promised last time so I want to let you know that I’m still alive, working on it and on many other things.

Last months were pretty busy. I did few commercial projects,  reviewed some of my older scenes, trained organic modeling (my first ear ), started planning two collaborations and next Speedies theme (back to hard surface modeling) and raced a lot of laps in LFS . I also had a few short but lovely weekend trips with friends. Thanks guys!

Although Fryrender Scene Optimization tutorial is almost finished I’ll wait a bit with publication. I’ll send it to couple of guys and ask them to review it. I want to make sure all the technical stuff I’m writing about is true…

Besides this, I’m preparing more posts with Speedies updates, some stuff about productviz modeling, and another tutorial (short one) about texturing. Let’s say 33% of this stuff is done.

I’ve created a Facebook account lately, so if you’re registered there feel free to add me. If you’re not, I suggest you to try it as it’s a really cool site with lots of interesting features. It’s also a quick way to connect and share information. Let’s socialize!

Ok, so here are some of images I can show you:

About future plans, looks like there will be lots of modeling for both commercial and personal projects in upcoming weeks. I’ll try to update blog more frequently with some wires or renders maybe. Time will show.

Thanks for patience.

Cya

Next subject, next entry. It’s the first open theme at Speedies – model a cell phone. No particular model or type given.

This time I wanted to make something less time consuming than previous entries. I picked Voyage concept by MILE, it looked simple enough, but once I started working on it… Well, let’s just say it was much too long. I was busy with other stuff, so it took me over a month to finish. When I grabbed all videos (this time nothing got corrupted) and stitched it into one big file it turned out to be around 8 hours. Not that bad, quicker than T1, but it’s still rather cold comfort.

Anyway, you can find the 50x version on Vimeo. As you may see on the video I blew the lid hinge at the first try… Modeling from photo reference is not the most accurate work flow around, but that’s all I’ve managed to find about this great phone concept. Even the exact size is a mystery…

Wires:

Some facts:

• Modeling time: ~7h 50m
• Raw video size: ~30,5 Gb, 1680×945 in 26 parts
• Speedies members were able to download x4 time lapse, 800×450 material in 8 parts
• Compressed video size: 410 Mb
• Polygons generated: 11 226 (11 194 quads)
• Efficiency: ~23,6 polygons/minute (T2: ~~54 p/min ; T1: ~~50 p/min)

Dividing polygon number by modeling time is not the most accurate way to measure your modeling speed I guess, but it gives a general clue about your productivity. Judging on efficiency I think it could be done twice as fast… Why is that? Mainly it’s because I was so bored with this project, but there was also some customization going on. It could slow things down as I wasn’t accustomed to the new environment. Besides that, I had to redo whole lid part…

Sooo, since it’s such a modeling fail let’s leave it behind and move to the render section

I did this one just to test materials. It’s heavily based on a photo by Takumi Ota (you can find it on AU design page). Initially I wasn’t planing to include it here but it turned out quite nice, so…

All these small details on gold material and keyboard are done with normal maps. They’re not perfect in every light condition but are much faster than displacement. I’m still learning how to create them well and how do they behave in Fry.

Oh, by the way if you’re from Japan ignore the keyboard, please The reference photo was too small to trace all characters, so I placed some random stuff there

This time I forgot to note the render time. It baked roughly over night in this resolution and it was so clear that I had to add slight noise to make it look more realistic. Sp2 is fast, but speed is not everything. There are other problems with this version but I’ll save it for the next post

Next one baked for 10 hours in 1440×1800 even though the scene was totally unoptimized… There’s a lot of wasted samples here. Again, I’ll try to write a quick tutorial about optimizing Fry scenes in next post.

Cheers.

P.S Few days ago I got a mail from David Dopacio with a beautiful render of my chair model. I’ve included it in the original post. You can find it here. Thanks David!

Isn’t it a beautiful concept to make textures using DSLR cameras? It is, until you won’t place them on a big surfaces and hit tiling problems like uneven brightness, visible seams, color shifts etc. There are few tricks to deal with these problems though. One of them was recently showed here. It inspired me to write this post and show you how I prepare my textures before I make them tileable.

Personally I rarely use Photoshop to paint out tiling. Programs like Pixplant or Imagesynth let you make tileable textures automatically using seed images. Although it’s not a perfect solution for wood and other organics, it can save a lot of time. Basically, you can take few photos of a surface, import it and get a tileable output with just a few clicks. Theoretically it works with all “raw” photos but practically it’s better to invest more time and prepare them carefully before importing. Making them even in terms of color tone and overall brightness will pay off in the end.

I’d like to show you the way I equalize my seed images using layers in Photoshop. But firstly I have to admit that it’s based on this mini tutorial by Peter Guthrie. To be honest I just couldn’t grasp it fully so I started to mess around with layer blends and eventually developed my own technique. The goal was to minimize the amount of steps.

Step by Step

Bookmark Cgtextures.com if you haven’t done it yet

1. Download Image 1 (Large) from this page
2. Open it in Photoshop
3. Duplicate Background layer [ Ctrl-J ]
4. Open Filter > Blur > Average…
5. Double click Background layer to change it into movable layer.
6. Move it to the top of the stack, change it’s opacity to 50% [ 5 ] and blending mode to Linear Light
7. Open Filter > Other > High Pass… and play with Radius parameter to control the effect

Note: If you’re using the latest Photoshop version you may need to click “Show All Menu Items” in order to access Average and High Pass…

Radius of 100 works just fine in most situations but you might want to tweak it in the range of 50 – 150 depending on image resolution and size of detail.

Actions

I use this trick a lot, 90% of my textures are equalized and as you imagine, it’s not very handy to go through all these steps each time I edit a seed image. Turns out you can easily automate the process using Actions, so now it’s a single clicker (link fixed).

Examples

wood

copper

cardboard

Cheers

Today I want to share my second Speedies entry. This time it’s sort of related to game modeling. We had to model AimPoint sight. You mount this thing on top of your rifle ,if you have one . It’s quite common in modern shooting games so you might have seen it already many times.

Even though Pedro has provided many reference pictures I was a bit afraid of this challenge. It’s the first time I model something related to guns actually.

I had some problems with setting reference properly but the AimPoint itself turned out to be quite easy to model. It was a quick session (~4h) so I wanted to add something more to make it look more complete. I picked a nice mounting and spent another 4 hours modeling it. Harder than I expected but still fun to do. Here’s the result.

Finally I did a couple of renders in Fry Sp1.

You can find 50x time lapse here. Unfortunately, 2 parts out of 10 got corrupted while recording and are not included. I’ve found the workaround for this problem (already added to recording tutorial) so hopefully it won’t happen with next recording session.

By the way, I’m working on Speedies T3 right now. This one goes extremely slow as I’m busy with other stuff, but I plan to finish it this week.

Oh, and the Speedies info section here… should be up very soon.

Cheers!

One of the main strengths of LFS community is skinning. There’s a whole section on forum devoted to custom made skins. There’s even a special application made by developers to make a process of texture making and viewing much easier, so there’s a full support for handy mans. If you look carefully you might even find 3d scenes ready to modify or render

The average quality of custom made skins is very high and that’s one of the things that makes this game so great in my opinion. A game without a modding community is a game without a spirit…

Some time ago I decided to join these guys and contribute somehow. Since my skinning skills are rather poor I decided to make a 3d scene and render some variations.

While browsing forums I found a VW Scirocco (VWS) 3d model and instantly though about using it. VWS is a part of next, unreleased LFS patch. It was postponed few months ago and the official release time is “when it’s done” so you can imagine that some players are really anxious about that

Anyway, some smart guy managed to get this model out of a new version of CMX Viewer and shared it on forum. I made materials, reworked smoothing groups and replaced few details like: headlights, wheels, VW badge and other minor stuff.

Here are finished renders.

First one was made with a skin kindly provided by Mogster. As you can see he makes some sweet custom LFS stuff.

Front, back and side renders are a bit older and were rendered in Fry Sp1.

Hope you like it

Hi!

I want to share my entry for the first theme at our modeling group – Speedies. I uploaded (almost) complete session on vimeo as a x50 time lapse. You can find it here. It wasn’t technically possible to upload original x4 material anywhere outside Speedies, so x50 in HD is all I can offer

The first theme was rather complicated – we had to model this machinery:

Only one reference photo given, no dimensions. It turned out to be harder than I expected, but it was fun at the same time.

Someone at #Speedies said that it’s a part of a tank… but I’m not sure about it

Let me know if you know what it is

Some facts about this modeling session:

• Modeling time: ~10,5 hours
• Raw video size: ~49 Gb, 1680×945
• Speedies members were able to download x4 time lapse, 800×450 material in 17 parts
• Around 2% of material was dropped due to problems with CamStudio
• Compressed video size: 869 Mb
• Polygons generated: 32 378 (32 336 quads)
• I had to work on default modo layout so there are some minor customizations going on during the session
• I used 100% freeware software to generate these videos as described in this tutorial

I did a couple of quick renders in Fry (sp1) to show you how it looks finished:

Speedies is a great learning experience for me. Recording whole session proved to be very useful in a later interface customization process. I learned a lot about planning the work flow too.

There will be a separate page on this blog in upcoming week. You’ll find there more information about the group and how to join. I’m not sure if it will pop up in RSS channel so keep your eyes wide open.

That’s all for today

Happy Easter guys! Best wishes!

Screen recording is a great way to share your knowledge with friends and demonstrate your skills to potential employers. It’s an easy and fast solution to present your ideas to the world and it’s fairly easy to learn too. All you need are good tools, some planning and few tips for a good start… (pdf version).

Planning

There are many screen recording workflows. The decision depends on a number of factors like: the outcome you wish to attain, your viewers attention span or even their internet connection speed. That’s why it’s essential to plan your work before you even decide what software to choose.

Timing

We are going to record a modeling session and this is often a lengthy and fairly repetitive process. That leads to a boring output and we don’t want to bore our viewers to death. A good way to avoid it is to speed up our video.

Time lapse is a process of recording video at a specific (often low) frame rate and applying a higher playback rate to the output. Personally I believe that 1:4 ratio (x4 time lapse) is the best choice for showing modeling sessions, so I will focus on it in this article.

Output

Now it’s the time to decide what output format we should choose. If your monitor resolution is higher or equal to 1280×1024 I would advice to use HDTV 720p format. This is a new technology and it’s supported by most of video sharing sites nowadays, besides you are always left with an option of compressing your video in smaller formats like EDTV or LDTV if needed. HDTV 720p stands for 1280×720 non-interlaced. I’s a wide-screen 16:9 aspect ratio, more or less compatible with most of modern LCD screen sizes. There’s one more advantage of using a standardized output – most of video compressors are optimized to produce the best quality versus size in these formats.

HDTV 720p is compatible with many different frame rate standards, but video sharing sites accept 24fps only. Since we speed up our video 4 times we need to record only 6 frames per second, but I would advice to use 12 instead. This way we will get more data to interpolate from in case of a dropped frames. As a result our output video should be smoother.

Recording area

Once we have our output video format chosen we have to decide what screen area to record. It’s up to you whether to use full screen recording or fixed region, but you should keep in mind that a perfect screen recording size should be equal or bigger than the output and it should have the same aspect ratio. This way we can avoid unnecessary cropping or stretching later on. My advice is to use fixed-region with the highest possible screen width and adjust heigh to meet the 16:9 aspect ratio as shown on illustration below.

recording areas

Keep in mind that big recording area may result in low performance. You can check the the frame rate in CamStudio window while recording. If it drops under 6 fps I advice to use smaller resolution.

Workflow

We will divide the process into two main steps: recording video and producing final output. That means we are going to grab a recording area in original resolution and save it using a lossless codec. After doing so, we will produce final video using more efficient compressor, smaller resolution and faster frame rate.

This approach is time consuming and it requires a lot of disk space to store lossless data, but will result in best video quality and will give us a flexibility of reusing recorded video with many different production settings.

Tools

There are many tools for both screen recording and video production you can choose from. We don’t need the ability to record many full screen frames per second nor professional video editing tool set, so we will try to accomplish our goals using freeware only.

Preparations

Download and install software.

• CamStudio + CamStudio Lossless Codec
• VirtualDub 32bit
• x264vfw 32bit

CamStudio settings

1. Open CamStudio
2. Open Region > Fixed Region and enter your recording area dimensions
3. Click OK
4. Open Options > Video Options
5. From the Compressor drop-down list select CamStudio Lossless Codec
6. Use Auto Adjust checkbox to enable Slider below
7. Move the Slider until you get Playback Rate at 12 frames/second
   

   Note: We are forcing CamStudio to save 12fps video file, but most likely real recording frame rate won’t reach this level. I encourage to use 12fps anyway, as it leads to more fluent 24fps conversion.
   

8. Click OK
9. Open Options > Program Options > Temporary directory for recording > Use user specified directory … and choose a location for temporary files
   

   Note: Recording fullscreen requires a vast amount of disk space. 20Gb should be enough to record 1-2 hours session in 1080p format.
   

10. Open Options > Keyboard Shortcuts
11. I advice to remap Cancel Recording Key to reduce the risk of confusing it with Stop Key
12. Close CamStudio to save modifications

Long recording issues:

I faced a number of problems with recording long modeling sessions in CamStudio. I’m not sure if it’s a codec issue or a general rule in CamStudio but lossless videos longer than 45 minutes may get corrupted. Sometimes it is possible to recover those files using VirtualDub error mode, but there is no rule. The only workaround I’ve managed to find is to stop recording after 30 minutes, save file and start another one. There’s an option to stop recording after a certain amount of time in Camstudio. To activate it go to Options > Program Options > Preset Time and set 1800 seconds. Your recording will stop after 30 minutes and you’ll be able to start another one right away. You can easily merge two or more video files in VirtualDub using File > Append AVI segment…

VirtualDub settings

Output size:

1. Open VirtualDub
2. Open Video > Filters…
3. Click on Add… button
4. Double-click Resize on filters list
5. Filter: Resize window appears. Select Aspect ratio: Compute height from ratio and enter 16 : 9
6. Select Lanczos3 from the Filter mode drop-down list
   

   Note: You can use Show preview button to experiment with different filters.
   

7. Select New size: Absolute (pixels) and enter 1280 x 720
8. Click OK to close Filter: Resize window
9. Click OK to close Filters window

Frame rate settings:

1. Open Video > Frame Rate…
2. Select Change frame rate to (fps) and enter 48
   

   Note: This will speed up our video 4 times.
   

3. Select Convert to fps and enter 24
   

   Note: This will interpolate 48fps data and convert it to 24fps output
   

4. Click OK to close Video frame rate control window

Compression settings:

1. Open Video > Compression…
2. Select x264vfw - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec from the list
3. Select Force keyframes every and enter 24 frames
4. Click on Configure button
5. Select VirtualDub Hack
6. Open Rate control & Other tab
7. Set the Threads number if you want to use multithreading option
8. Click OK to close x264vfw configuration window
9. Click OK to close Select video compression window
   

   Note: As you can see there are many more compression settings not mentioned here. Personally I use more or less default configuration, but feel free to experiment.

Saving changes:

1. Select File > Save processing settings
2. Choose desired location and name the file “timelapse_x4_720p_24.vcf”
3. Click Save
   

   Note: This file will store compressor settings as well; You can create multiply files to quickly load different production settings using File > Load processing settings.

Quick Example

Recording video

1. Open your modeling application
2. Open CamStudio
3. Click on Record button
   

   Note: If you wish CamStudio to minimize on recording start, choose Options > Program Options > Minimize program on start recording. Alternatively you can minimize it manually and use keyboard shortcut to start recording.
   

4. Recording area frame appears
5. Choose the area you wish to record, left-click to activate recording, right-click to cancel
6. Start recording, you should be able to see flashing corners indicating that CamStudio is working
7. Customize your modeling application interface to meet the recording area nicely.
8. Stop recording using keyboard shortcut (F9 default), or by right-clicking on CamStudio icon in system tray and selecting Stop
9. Save AVI File window appears
10. Choose desired location and name the file “quick_example.avi”
11. Click Save

Producing final output

1. Open VitualDub
2. Select File > Open video file…
3. Open “quick_example.avi”
4. Select File > Load processing settings
5. Open “timelapse_x4_720p_24.vcf”
6. Open Video > Filters…
7. Double-click Resize on filters list
8. Filter: Resize window appears
9. Enter new size: 768 x 432

Note: From the compression point of view optimal width and heigh are multiples of 16. In case of 16:9 aspect ratio I would advice to use: 512×288, 768×432, 1024×576 or 1280×720.

1. Click OK to close Filter: Resize window
2. Click OK to close Filters window
3. Select File > Save processing settings
4. Choose desired location and name the file “timelapse_x4_432_24.vcf”
5. Click Save
6. Select File > Save as AVI…
7. Choose desired location and name the file “quick_example_x4.avi”
8. Click Save
9. VirtualDub Status window appears, it will close automatically when our example video is finished

Summary

As you can see, recording screen activity is a very simple process and can be done entirely using free software. I encourage you to experiment with all settings I haven’t mentioned here. Remember, you can save your own processing files in VirtualDub and create your own library of video production settings.

I hope this tutorial will inspire you to create time lapse videos and share your modeling knowledge with others. In case of any questions feel free to contact me.

Here’s something new for all modeling freaks. If you like fighting with polys or would like to learn it you might be interested in this one. There’s a new project established by me and Pedro Amorim - Speedies.

Speedies?

The idea is simple. We are a small group of people (currently 12 members) devoted to 3d graphics of all sort. We want to communicate and share knowledge. We meet on IRC channel and do speed modeling contest weekly. No prizes, just good fun and learning experience. We use dropbox to share models, images, and timelapse videos.

We have car modeling freaks, game artists, architecture visualisers etc. Everyone can propose a modeling topic so we hope for a wide variety of subjects. We hope to generate around 2gb of video material every week.

Status

Currently our small community is closed to public because we are still in sort of planning state. Hopefully we will be able to invite more people next week. I’ll post more info about  joining and rules soon. In the meanwhile I want to show you an example of what you can find in Speedies folder – Quick nut in Modo

I’m cooking a “How to record timelapse” tutorial and plan to post it here as well so stay tuned.

Remeber, it’s all for fun

Cya!