LAB#3015 Skybase

A frame from my currently in-development animated film "The Door to Tomorrow."

90% of the textures you see here in this shot are mostly made with FilterForge 3. Some were painted in by hand.

Here's a list of filters used:
Broken Warehouse Windows by Mike Blackney
Sand Ripple by Marcello
Metal Grunge by lords8n
Metal by MichaelTannock
Plaster FX by pixel8ted
Grunge General by Yog
BaseMetal by KGtheway2B
Returning Nature by me
several other custom filters made for the project (additional rust generation, grunge, junk, splattering... etc etc)

3D building models by Justin Holt and Jason Preis. Additional background material was filled up by me... simple cubes with seamless building textures I generated some time ago. hehe.

The shot was rendered using mental ray, processed using Studio Artist 4 for the painterly look. Additional "punching up" was done using Photoshop, finally all layers were composited in After Effects. The scene is relightable within the program via Normality plugin for After Effects by Stefan Minning. Useful plugin!!!!

The film will be done by the spring of 2012 yay!

hi skybase,

i like the running rust except that in some places it doesnt quite seem to follow gravity correctly. any way to correct that?

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i like the running rust except that in some places it doesnt quite seem to follow gravity correctly. any way to correct that?

Yup... it's pretty difficult to do it without a rough 3D model or something. The thing is "heighmap" that's been generated off of a photograph fails in its own way. The technical difficulty behind it lies in the fact that we don't have depth information (unless we deal with deep-compositing. Which is NOT going to happen for a very long time.) So this "rust" filter would be probably better off as a texture than a "filter" but if anybody can come up with a way to deal with rusting across all sorts of photographs, I'd love to see it.

haha Challenge!!

How long did it take to render?
I taught myself 3D studio 3 about a hundred years ago, and stopped trying when they released 3D studio MAX (The new interface was too much for me ).
My problem with 3D is that I can't ever render a proper scene. The flat shaded preview renders would take days on my machine, and by the time I upgraded my machine the software would upgrade twice already, meaning my machine still falls short.
Imagine that every FF filter you try took 10 hours to render, and by the time you get a better, faster computer that could do it in half the time, the filters would get so much better and more complex, that they would now take even longer to render.
I need a Cray supercomputer farm

Oh haha, yes Octane Render is MUCH cheaper and faster than Indigo but it turns out I need to probably build up a better computer for it and the one down side of Octane is that it's hardwired to CUDA, so that's nvidia only. Indigo's nice side is that it lets you use CPU or GPU which is a nice option. In the end results are the same, it's more about functionality in my stance and having 2 render engines helps a bit on my task load.

The sad thing is I'm still traveling around a lot and with that I chose a Macbook Pro to do my work on so I don't own a desktop machine anywhere. Once I'm done with this traveling mess I'm sure I can start building my dream comp and use Octane fully as well as Indigo. But if in any case I decide I can't afford nvidia GPUs I would still have a choice of using Indigo's OpenCL or Blender's Cycles render which is also a very fast render engine.

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How long did it take to render?

The quick answer is around 9 hours on Indigo Render. Pretty sure it'll go faster if I utilize GPU but I didn't. I left it just rendering overnight so it never affects anything.

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My problem with 3D is that I can't ever render a proper scene. The flat shaded preview renders would take days on my machine, and by the time I upgraded my machine the software would upgrade twice already, meaning my machine still falls short.

I don't know what your computer specs are but I guess in your situation I would save up and get myself a nicer computer. Although in some instances you can really really take the render time down by lowering the number of polygons, baking lights or literally painting them, and generally a proper understanding of what the render engine does can save you lots and lots of time.

I mean the one thing I know is that if you aim too high with a tool that's not so great, you'll end up screwing up more often. Or let me put it this way, you CAN sculpt wood with a screw driver if you continue to work on it, but that screw driver's probably useless by the time you're done sculpting. So what I can suggest is try doing something that's not too hardcore. Do something that's lower resolution, less computationally intensive but at the same time highly creative and fun.

That's just another way around that sort of problem. I would just do what I can do until the day I get myself a better machine.

Some fun with FilterForge. I haven't done too much displacement in a while, so I thought I'd give it a go with Indigo renderer RT.

In Indigo RT, you just have to make a "new material" and that's where I just threw in the maps and it was done. Pretty simple. Fun and colorful stuff.

And yeah, I have several test textures I made for various programs. This is just one of them.

This one has more specular on it and less bumpiness. Displacements make the gore really come out!!

Pentagons everywhere.

I made this filter after looking through several tumblr pages with some modern-retro styles going on. Thought I'd try replicating the effect in FilterForge so I can generate it instead of doing it manually using Photoshop.

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Are the low-fi pictures scanned? Or are these normal pics filtered with FF?

The images are normal digital picts. I previously constructed a filter called "Point and Shoot" which simulates the feel of analog film cameras. I threw an additional segment to it just for experimental purposes and made the filter you see.

Point and Shoot is available here: http://www.filterforge.com/filters/9310.html

Another render of the previous... different colors. 1920x1200 took like 15 minutes to render. Kinda long for a filter... or maybe about right for that resolution.

Looks neat
BTW, I already have your point and shoot filter, I just haven't played with it yet so I didn't recognize it. Another cool filter

Another variant... same color scheme.

The input bump / displacement map hehe.

Very cool!

I'm sorry, but a minute and a half is just too long. You can do better

All kidding aside, that looks awsome! Reminds me of something my inlaws have.
I bet it looks great on simple clean graphics too, not just photos!

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I'm sorry, but a minute and a half is just too long. You can do better

Actually if you just render the diffuse pass for it, the render time goes to about 10 or 20 seconds or so. The thing is, it's a surface filter so it just takes a bit longer.

Improved version now allows for alternative formulas and alternative color schemes for the framing.

Full renders (images over 4000x4000px in scale) take around 1 hour for a full render (unfortunately.) I reduced the structure quite significantly, though there may be some places I can still cut down on. It's pretty tricky what to remove at this point because each node's producing necessary material for the final output.

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Can we see the original of the last one?

Yup

Life saver image. Render times clock in at around 1 min 20 seconds with anti-aliasing.