morph ball renders

2005-07-21 07:25:19 pm

Could you make a few separate ones, you know like a Phazon spider ball version of the first one with a black background or something? I'm sure it wouldn't be very hard, seeing as you've already got the scene in your first post.

DJGrenola

2005-07-22 09:53:01 pm

the big render is coming. It has been running for nearly eighteen hours, is 3/4 done, and is so far looking good.

In the meantime, I decided to have some fun and build myself an army.

supermpaddict

2005-07-22 09:56:19 pm

Quote from DJGrenola:

the big render is coming. It has been running for nearly eighteen hours, is 3/4 done, and is so far looking good.

In the meantime, I decided to have some fun and build myself an army.

Imagine when they unmorph...... wow.

nate

2005-07-22 09:57:09 pm

mmm, delectable grenola balls.

bartendorsparky

2005-07-22 09:57:10 pm

always move fast

hahaha man, that is so flickerbatting cool.

Mr. Aran

2005-07-22 10:01:44 pm

everybody knows it's true

One side of my brain(OSB) - Which one is the real one?

The other side(TOS) - The one right there, duh.

OSB - No, the real Samus's roll doesn't echo that much.

TOS - But it also has the scratch from boosting into Ridley

OSB - So does three other ones

TOS - But it does have the Samus Logo

OSB - You idiot, her suit doesn't have the logo!

TOS - Yes, it does! :x

OSB - No it doesn't!! Evil or Very Mad

TOS & OSB - NO!YES!NO!YES!NO!!!!

And thus begins the Brain Wars

supermpaddict

2005-07-22 10:05:36 pm

Lol, that was disturbing.... yet amusing, but mostly disturbing.

DJGrenola

2005-07-23 03:03:10 am

right, well, here we go ...

the big 1280x1024 PNG is here (~500k):

http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/xls54_final.png

I'm still not really happy with the phazon spider. I hate the way that the media inside the ball is orange and the light that comes out is pink. I think the media inside the ball is also rather boring and needs more variation in colour and texture. The plane the balls are resting on should be brighter so that you can see its reflection in the phazon ball. There were also a few odd pixels that were strange neon colours, no idea why that is, but it was easy enough to just blot them out after the render. I think the red bits on the phazon ball surface should be a deeper red as well, they look a little pink to me. Everything else I am happy with.

I may do another one with the above problems looked at and hopefully fixed, so nate, you may want to hold off on sticking it up on the site.

render time was 22 hours 46 minutes 2 seconds with a max_trace_level of 7. not too shabby, imo.

right, well, here we go ...

[img]http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/xls54_final.jpg[/img]

the big 1280x1024 PNG is here (~500k):

http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/xls54_final.png

I'm still not really happy with the phazon spider. I hate the way that the media inside the ball is orange and the light that comes out is pink. I think the media inside the ball is also rather boring and needs more variation in colour and texture. The plane the balls are resting on should be brighter so that you can see its reflection in the phazon ball. There were also a few odd pixels that were strange neon colours, no idea why that is, but it was easy enough to just blot them out after the render. I think the red bits on the phazon ball surface should be a deeper red as well, they look a little pink to me. Everything else I am happy with.

I may do another one with the above problems looked at and hopefully fixed, so nate, you may want to hold off on sticking it up on the site.

render time was 22 hours 46 minutes 2 seconds with a max_trace_level of 7. not too shabby, imo.

bartendorsparky

2005-07-23 11:00:25 am

always move fast

geez, go modesty.

but it was definitely worth the wait. so cool! :<i></i>)

nate

2005-07-23 11:34:01 am

yeah man ... i'd say that came out in spectacular fashion, myself. were you planning on signing it in the lower right or something, or was the "backgrounds by djgrenola" credit on the backgrounds page going to be enough? for the final, i mean.

Phazon Eater

2005-07-23 12:54:58 pm

Once again, awesome. I don't think the inside of the phazon spider ball came out that bad either.

arkarian

2005-07-23 01:11:30 pm

red chamber dream

My favourite one is actually the Phazon ball. Nice work!

Spectere

2005-07-23 04:01:32 pm

Pretty nice. One problem that I see is that the image appears to be stretched vertically. Make sure that your pixel aspect ratio is set up properly. POV-Ray defaults to 4:3 and 1280x1024 has a ratio of 5:4. To correct that, put the following line in your camera block:

right x*5/4

Quote from DJGrenola:

There were also a few odd pixels that were strange neon colours, no idea why that is, but it was easy enough to just blot them out after the render.

Did you use radiosity? If you don't tune it right you can sometimes get odd artifacts such as that.

DJGrenola

2005-07-23 11:33:11 pm

Quote from Spectere:

Pretty nice. One problem that I see is that the image appears to be stretched vertically. Make sure that your pixel aspect ratio is set up properly. POV-Ray defaults to 4:3 and 1280x1024 has a ratio of 5:4. To correct that, put the following line in your camera block:

right x*5/4

ahh, good man. I've been wondering how to do that.

Quote from Spectere:

Quote from DJGrenola:

There were also a few odd pixels that were strange neon colours, no idea why that is, but it was easy enough to just blot them out after the render.

Did you use radiosity? If you don't tune it right you can sometimes get odd artifacts such as that.

no, I played with radiosity when I was trying to get more realistic light cones coming from the crack in the balls, but it wasn't giving me the effect I wanted, so I just used two 180 degree spotlights inside the balls instead.

Quote from njahnke:

yeah man ... i'd say that came out in spectacular fashion, myself. were you planning on signing it in the lower right or something, or was the "backgrounds by djgrenola" credit on the backgrounds page going to be enough? for the final, i mean.

i'm not especially bothered. I think if I was going to daub it with credits I'd be more intereted in crediting the POV-Ray team - the amount of unpaid work they've done to bring this to you far outstrips the amount I've done. Perhaps you could just put a note to that effect, it's your call. If you want to put a "metroid2002.com" on it somewhere too, I don't have a problem with that. The same offer is extended to Mills, although I'm not sure he has a wallpapers section.

This is actually the only minor problem I have with releasing the scene code; while part of me knows that it could lead to better and better scenes, I really don't want some scummy n00b on some other site passing it off as his own work.

[quote="Spectere"]Pretty nice.  One problem that I see is that the image appears to be stretched vertically.  Make sure that your pixel aspect ratio is set up properly.  POV-Ray defaults to 4:3 and 1280x1024 has a ratio of 5:4.  To correct that, put the following line in your camera block:

right x*5/4[/quote]

ahh, good man. I've been wondering how to do that.

[quote="Spectere"][quote="DJGrenola"]There were also a few odd pixels that were strange neon colours, no idea why that is, but it was easy enough to just blot them out after the render.[/quote]

Did you use radiosity?  If you don't tune it right you can sometimes get odd artifacts such as that.[/quote]

no, I played with radiosity when I was trying to get more realistic light cones coming from the crack in the balls, but it wasn't giving me the effect I wanted, so I just used two 180 degree spotlights inside the balls instead.

[quote="njahnke"]yeah man ... i'd say that came out in spectacular fashion, myself. were you planning on signing it in the lower right or something, or was the "backgrounds by djgrenola" credit on the backgrounds page going to be enough? for the final, i mean.[/quote]

i'm not especially bothered. I think if I was going to daub it with credits I'd be more intereted in crediting the POV-Ray team - the amount of unpaid work they've done to bring this to you far outstrips the amount I've done. Perhaps you could just put a note to that effect, it's your call. If you want to put a "metroid2002.com" on it somewhere too, I don't have a problem with that. The same offer is extended to Mills, although I'm not sure he has a wallpapers section.

This is actually the only minor problem I have with releasing the scene code; while part of me knows that it could lead to better and better scenes, I really don't want some scummy n00b on some other site passing it off as his own work.

tomatobob

2005-07-24 02:34:23 am

One shall stand, one shall ball.

That's awesome, I don't see your complaint with the Phazon one though, it's my favorite of the group.

Spectere

2005-07-24 04:40:58 am

Quote from DJGrenola:

ahh, good man. I've been wondering how to do that.

Not a problem! :)

Quote from DJGrenola:

I played with radiosity when I was trying to get more realistic light cones coming from the crack in the balls, but it wasn't giving me the effect I wanted, so I just used two 180 degree spotlights inside the balls instead.

Yeah, radiosity is a pain in the butt to work with. It can give you some rather nice results at the expense of extremely long rendering times (especially when you tack on some media). As far as those artifacts go, what about your max_trace_level setting? It could have reflected just enough in those few areas to give you trouble.

DJGrenola

2005-07-24 02:52:12 pm

no, I think I know what the problem was - it was that the media inside the vanilla morph ball was too bright, and its reflection on the gravity spider was overexposing. Media (especially multiple medias in one object as I'm using here) is a real pain.

I've just looked at the scene for the first time on my powerbook's lovely TFT display, and I've realised that the CRT on my desktop machine, while highly desirable studio quality kit, is set for much lower contrast. This has led me to regret increasing the brightness of the external point light source in the render that's currently running, as I have to admit I'm fairly spellbound by how it looks on the laptop - so we'll have to see how that turns out.

The other stuff is fixed, except for the media in the phazon ball, which I'm sick of tinkering with, and I can't seem to get it to look how I want it anyway. :P

should be done in about fifteen hours. oh, and I now have a sig. :P

Spectere

2005-07-24 04:01:38 pm

Quote from DJGrenola:

I've just looked at the scene for the first time on my powerbook's lovely TFT display, and I've realised that the CRT on my desktop machine, while highly desirable studio quality kit, is set for much lower contrast.q

What OS is the desktop system running?

Mac OS and Windows use different native gammas. Macs use a native gamma of 2.2 and Windows uses 1.8. If an image has no gamma correction then the image will look darker on a Mac (or, if it's rendered for a Mac display, it'll look bright and washed out on a Windows system).

One thing that you can do to get around this is to render the file as a PNG, or at least convert the file to PNG. I'm pretty sure that POV-Ray supports PNG's built-in gamma correction.

arkarian

2005-07-24 04:11:04 pm

red chamber dream

DJG's sig:

Starblade

2005-07-24 08:22:26 pm

They're all extremely well done.

!

DJGrenola

2005-07-25 07:50:24 am

okay.

http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/grenola_morphball_render_final_800_600.png
http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/grenola_morphball_render_final_1024_768.png
http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/grenola_morphball_render_final_1280_1024.png

The 4:3 ratio ones (800x600, 1024x768) are just the old 1280x1024 one I posted above resized. As spectere rightly pointed out, they were rendered for a 4:3 ratio instead of a 5:4 one, so resizing them to 4:3 gives the correct aspect ratio. This means that only the 1280x1024 one contains the improvements I spoke of in my last post, so those using 4:3 displays will have to put up with the phazon spider belching out pink light. The alternative would be to do a separate render for 4:3 displays at either 1600x1200 or 1024x768 and then derive the other 4:3 ratio scenes from it, but frankly I cannot be bothered.

EDIT: here's an early bomb experiment. tis a shame that POV-Ray doesn't do motion blur, although apparently there are patched versions of it which do, so I might have to look into that.

okay.

http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/grenola_morphball_render_final_800_600.png
http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/grenola_morphball_render_final_1024_768.png
http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/grenola_morphball_render_final_1280_1024.png

The 4:3 ratio ones (800x600, 1024x768) are just the old 1280x1024 one I posted above resized. As spectere rightly pointed out, they were rendered for a 4:3 ratio instead of a 5:4 one, so resizing them to 4:3 gives the correct aspect ratio. This means that only the 1280x1024 one contains the improvements I spoke of in my last post, so those using 4:3 displays will have to put up with the phazon spider belching out pink light. The alternative would be to do a separate render for 4:3 displays at either 1600x1200 or 1024x768 and then derive the other 4:3 ratio scenes from it, but frankly I cannot be bothered.

EDIT: here's an early bomb experiment. tis a shame that POV-Ray doesn't do motion blur, although apparently there are patched versions of it which do, so I might have to look into that.

[img]http://www.ali1548.ukshells.co.uk/uxb.jpg[/img]

nate

2005-07-25 03:25:20 pm

one last time, great work.

do you approve of how they're presented/modified on the backgrounds page? also, i didn't know what to make your name's anchor tag, so i just left it off until further advisement.

arkarian

2005-07-25 04:14:09 pm

red chamber dream

Wow, never thought I'd see Bombs rendered. Cool.

supermpaddict

2005-07-25 05:16:13 pm

Awesome!!!
What about a power bomb, would that be too hard to render?

bartendorsparky

2005-07-25 05:47:26 pm

always move fast

and then mrs. aran said, "hey samus! no doing bomb jumps on the kitchen floor!"

very sweet. =p