Hair

Ideas, traveling

3D Graphics / By

Pingo van der Brinkloev hit me up for a very rough discussion of the conceptual approach to building knitted patterns in CG and came up with a pretty cool workflow to get similar results in C4D. Cool, nice work!

Art is collaborative. It loops back and forth between artists, techniques grow and we present constant challenges to ourselves and each other. Nothing makes me happier than to see this kind of mutual exchange of ideas across different toolsets. We are artists first, inspiring one another – the borders of studios, tools, location, language or genre should never keep us from exchange of ideas. Thriving ideas lead to a thriving market as a whole, employed artists, and most importantly better art across the board. I really believe lifting each other up is the best route to success for the individual artist as well as the industry as a whole, so when I saw how Pingo built this I was as excited as I was when I saw Jonah Friedman make entwiner in ICE. How can you not get excited? This is cool stuff!

Vray strand testing

3D Graphics / By

Been playing with Vray. I like it. This is an “out of box” render of some strands, no effort on my part to properly light it, which really is a requirement for fine strands/hair etc. Still, not bad, they have a nice hair shader. I’m less interested in character hair than in fine detail fibers as VFX elements, so I’ll have to see what other looks I can coax out.

This amount of strands doesn’t even come close to taxing Softimage, it’s still interactive on my box…but rendering it at 2k took about 20 minutes, without any optimization. I’d guess that with some effort adjusting some settings I could get a better look at about 2x the speed, which isn’t bad, considering this is a GI render.

It’s a bit splotchy and the exposure is meh – chalk that up to me being a Vray noob. Looks like I was a bit too aggressive with the jpeg compression, too… The full render is much cleaner, and of course this is just a beauty pass, no passes or color correction. A decent lighter no doubt could take this to another level. Hey, I’m a VFX guy I hardly ever get to render stuff.

I’d like to get a feel for how much impact more strands will have on render time. I may have to try a “stress test” over the weekend to see what the reasonable limit for a single machine is in terms of numbers of strands I can get into a 2k half float render while still maintaining this look as a minimum quality…