New Film Project...

[Corporal Hicks]

Looks fantastic! Glad to see you coming back to this!

[Xenomorphine]

Looks good!

What are some examples of a 'motion comic'?

Thank you.

This was what inspired me for that format (spoilers for the 'Mass Effect' series of games):

The really professional ones animate individual elements within each panel, but that depends on how things are when it's all finished. I'll be trying for that, but it's a lot of additional rendering which would eat into the production time.

Essentially, it's a means of presenting a professionally polished storyboard in a cinematic form, with the audio playing in the background of dialogue, special effects and music. It allows for a static story to be presented in a dynamic fashion, while allowing for greater impact during surprise reveals and so on. Like a radio play with a visual element.

I'm aiming for photo-realism in mine, rather than something comic-like. And, as I've been trained in film-making, I'm hoping to apply cinematic presentation techniques to try and give it a more atmospheric than cartoonish tone.

Can you build sets and props in Daz/Poser or whatever it is you are using?

Something called Hexagon exists, but it's apparently very unstable under Windows 10. They've been promising to update it for years. Stuff like Blender exists, but the tutorials confuse me... If Hexagon is updated, it looks much more intuitive!

I control placement, scaling, lighting, etcetera. Like a film director, I have to make do with the props and costumes I'm given. I can, however, completely change the properties of some surfaces and have the 3D modelling equivalent of 'greebles' I can use to make some vehicles and structures look more interesting.

Human characters I can completely change the look of (both facially and body/skin/hair/etcetera).

Looks fantastic! Glad to see you coming back to this!

Had to wait for a while, because I knew someone was going to put out some weapons and costume elements which are about as close to the Colonial Marines as they can get away with for copyright reasons! Probably altering them for my own purposes, but they should help mightily as a springboard for authenticity. They have one more still to release and a dropship-like craft, then some more headway should be possible, once I know whether or not I can utilise them.

[TC]

I like the idea in Amazon Soul where you can click inside some panels and it toggles the image to a close up. Not as difficult.as animation, yet adds a little bit of interactivity.

TC

[Xenomorphine]

Think that's possible with the software I'm aiming to use. Not sure if it would allow for any music to be continuously played.

[Xenomorphine]

Ran a poll on Twitter and the most popular request for the net type of preview were environments/sets.

Does not include any additional effects or lighting. Just basic visual renders.

https://www.deviantart.com/sentinalysis/art/Alien-Promotional-Environments-812614624

[Still Collating...]

Wow, that looks really good IMO. 

[Xenomorphine]

Thanks!

[Corporal Hicks]

They really do look fantastic! Keep 'em coming!

[thexenomorphfanboy]

im interested

[Xenomorphine]

New update on refining the Alien model to Iray-compatible renderings, with moody cinematic lighting (and a heat bloom).

Still not happy with how large those splotches of light are, but I've added a geoshell and applied a shader to make it look like water. Basically, the virtual equivalent of giving it a skin-tight 'suit' of water. Seems to work better than my previous attempts. I'll be experimenting to see if I can reduce the underlying texture's reflectivity, to see if the geoshell method can give it that oily, slick look without the splotches of glistening light being so big.

If that doesn't work, I'll just be going with this method, instead!

Making virtual Aliens look like they're covered in KY is hard, man...

https://www.deviantart.com/sentinalysis/art/Alien-Reflectivity-Cinematic-Lighting-Test-838143060

[TC]

Hi

That looks great!

Generally, when you want the wet look you would use some kind of multilayer shader. The bottom layer would be the dry base material (wood, steel, plastic, whatever) and the layer above would add the "sheen," which comes from the water on top.

Sheen (or "specularity") is basically a reflection of the very bright parts of the scene surrounding the object The "bright parts" are usually the actual lamp sources that are lighting your scene. Default lamps are often point sources, which in CG means they are infinitely small points of light. These do not make very good reflections (unless they are extremely bright, like the sun). If that's what you are using you should swap them out for area lights instead.

Area lights can be very expensive to compute, so you could try creating extra geometry in your scene exclusively for the purpose of creating these specular reflections on your object. So these objects should be large and white and usually self-illuminating (i.e. "glowing" but without emiting any actual light), and positioned out of frame but in such a way that the camera can see them as reflections on your object's wet surface. They should show up as bright, white, specular hits on your object.

Hope this helps.

TC

[Xenomorphine]

Very helpful, yes!

I've not seen multi-layered shaders in the Daz Studio store, but it sounds like that might be what I've accidentally achieved with this geoshell-shaded method.

There was only one light source facing the model, which makes this splotchiness a real mystery. I can make the surface flatter, but then it loses all that precious detailing. I will do some additional testing with indirect lighting, though... Maybe it is that which is contributing to the issue. Maybe look back over some Iray tutorials in regards to methods to make indoor scenes look brighter.

However! I've been notified that a newer version could be Iray compatible! Going to investigate that. My preference has always been for the ridge-headed look and the newer one is smooth-domed, but it looks splendid enough to be the ideal solution, if it renders well.

[Xenomorphine]

Good news! The people who made this model are also testing updated Iray textures for the older, ridge-headed model and the reflectivity looks a lot more believable than I had achieved with the older default textures!

The test they posted:

https://www.forender.com/media/kunena/attachments/62/cm_XenoMorph_02-01_0646_Promo_01_Iray.png

Between that and getting their more detailed smooth-domed version (so long as they also update the Queen and more), I should finally be able to proceed to rendering this as I need to. Not relying on shadows to hide it for anything aside from purely psychological effect.