Final render comparison vs real Audi r8

Soundtrack choice

Ok this is just a little vid i put up sampling the background theme i will be using for the commercial. Let me know if any of you recognise the music

Quite hard indeed

well at this point im done modelling and texturing what not, so at this point im animating the car and boy is it something. I dont know how people can animate cars so realisticly because what ever i do the car drives robotcilly. Animating a character is far more easier and less fustrating to do then this. Well i have managed to animate half of the commercial but not to what i kind of wanted it but still i think it ok knowing that i cant animate cars for shit. End of the week is when i should hopefuly have finished and renderd the comercial, i plan out my day with coming in to uni and doing garaths work and then at home i carry on with Maya. This works out best for me

Part 1 intro

Preview of the final scene

Here is a quick screen render i did of what the final scene will look like, i know i have to add lights in becuase it is quite dark. Soon i will present the whole thing

Flood scene render out complete

finally the flood scene has completely renderd out from realflow, altogether it took 25 hours and 37 minutes. From the very early test i done, i first had less resolution for the fluid which resulted in the fluid being jelly like. For the final version i increased the resolution a notch which gave out a more realistic fluid simulation effect, but the bad side was that the render duration would increase. Overall i think i managed to use realflow to achieve what i was aiming for, and if it was not for my research i would not have known about realflow.

way of animating the wheels

ok im going to give the low down on how i animated the wheels for the car, it was quite simple actually and far more easier then some of the tutorials i have been reading. I first started with combining the whole car together, once that was done then i had to get each wheel and parent it to the car. After parenting the wheels to the car i selected the car as a whole which included the wheels also, i key framed the car being stationary at frame 0 and towards frame 100 where the car moved forward a bit.

This would move the whole car together with the wheels but the problem here is that the wheels would not rotate but would only drag fowards this was because i had key framed it using the move tool. Going into perspective view i watched each frame and calculated it speed and distance it would need to follow the car smoothly. This is how i animated the wheels and i say it works best for me.

Progress

Ok just wanted to update on the progress so far, well i have animated the car which is now something i dont need to worry about. What i am waiting for now is the rendering process from realflow, so far it has simluated 200.bin files out of 520 and the time taken is 7 hours. While waiting for this to render out i just recived street fighter 4 through the post and will be playing that while i let realflow render out :)

Animating wheels test

Here is my second attempt at the wheel movement

Animating wheels test

Here is my animation for the wheels i produced in about 5mins, i think it really does go well with the pace of the car. To animate the wheel i first had to combine the whole car together then for the wheels i had to parent them each to the car. This allowed me to animate each indivisual wheel, here is my first test with R8 engine sound

Help from a Youtube friend

while looking at realflow flood effects to get ideas on how i could produce a flood for my scene, i came across one which was awsome and outstanding. I had no idea how to produce this awsome little sequence but that was not going to stop me from finding out so i had to message this indivisual over youtube. Few days later and i gained a reply from him stating:

http://digital3d.altervista.org/Pic_emitter_1.jpg
http://digital3d.altervista.org/Pic_emitter_2.jpg
http://digital3d.altervista.org/Pic_emitter_3.jpg

In Alley scene I used two emitter (Pic emitter 1).

One for "big wave" and second little emitter for "boost" (Pic emitter 2). and splash (Pic emitter 3) and Daemon gravity.

I have placed this little emitter back of principal emitter.

Setting of emitter:

Emitter (little):
Resolution 5, Density 1500, pressure int 1.3, pressure ext 1.0, viscosity 2, particles 80000. speed 12 (for boost)

Emitter (big): all parameter equals of little, except particles limit 100000 and speed 6

Mesh paramert: Polygon size 0.02, Filter method yes, Relaxation 0.04, tension 0.1, steps 200.

One mesh in all emitter.

Important: for realistic result, you need a correctly scale.
I used Lightwave, but I think they are equal scale parameter in all software.

Important geometry scale setting. Big scale geometry more realistic wave, little spalsh etc...

Contrarily little scale are too large splash compared to the geometry.
In Lightwave good parameter is scale 4 or 5 for scene.


I hope to have helped

Good work for your project fuzzy101!!

Bye Adry

Here is his video of the realflow sequence
http://digital3d.altervista.org/Real_Flow_Alley_mov.mov

Test1 of flood effect

Here is my first test of the flood effect taking refrence from the titanic flood scene, my opinon on the test is that the fluid simulation is abit to slow and the fluid itself is more jelly like then water. What i could do to solve this would put the resulution to 4 and at the moment i have it on 0.004, i dnt know if my quad core can handle the fluid simulation smoothly as it has crshed a few times

rendering/simulation progress

At the moment I’m undergoing the second stage of the water flood effect, but this time i am using a similar environment to the final version. I have placed the fluid dynamics in the scene and have left it for simulation. Simulation in realflow is similar to rendering in Maya, what realflow does is simulates the scene producing .bin files so then they can be imported into Maya. At the moment i have left mine on simulation for about 2 hours and has only done 31 bin files out 501 :(. This is largely due to the increase of particles i added in and also a larger room for the fluid to travel in.

Titanic reference

Here is where i got my refrence from for the water chase scene, starting from 0:16 onwards you can see the coridoor water flood sequence. This is exactly what i want to try and achive with the car trying to escape it.

While talking to Ashlee yesterday i explained to him the scenario of the advert, basically long story short i told him that its going to be similar to Titanic-ish. Well it starts off with the camera showing off the car at first then through the camera you see a huge wave approaching the corridor. Then it becomes a little chase scene with the car trying to escape the flood. Here is a little sample of fluid dynamics produced in realflow then imported to Maya. This little test was done so i can get used to the fluid simulation system

Undergoing the R8 part 3

Now it was time to set up the back side of the car, this could be done in two ways one would be to modell out the side f the car again but for the back and the second would be to duplicate the front and place it at the back. Obviously some changes would have to be made though after duplicating it because for the R8 the back part where the wheel is is different commpared to the front.


































Here i just added the little deatils on the car such as the vents and parts for the main window

Undergoing the R8 part 2

Part 2 is relatively short as i only focussed on the sunroof and door for the sunroof all i did was first make side panel of the car. This is the part of the car is connected to the driver’s window, don’t know what you call it. Throughout the whole process i have been using polygon planes to model the car but for this part i will be using polygon cube so it will able to have some depth to where the window is. After the first cube was made all i did was extrude each time to make it reach the back side of the car, this is where the sunroof was then produced. Yet another extrusion was done but this time to the bring out the sunroof forward, i can’t really explain correctly but once you look at the image you will get an understanding of what im talking about :).

The door was created separately from polygon plane, and was the most tricky to do. It was easy modelling th door but when you take a look at the actual car you can see that the middle of the door slightly curves inwards. The reason this was tricky was because i did not have enough faces and vertices to modify to produce the smooth inwards curve, and my topology was not all that good on the door so i had to start again but this time taking in how many vertices i need into consideration. After finally spending a long time on adjusting the door it looks good to me so now i can move on, here are the first stages of the door

Undergoing the R8 part 1

First of all to get the modelling started on the R8 i first had to get some blue print planes of the car, this will be used ot guide me around the bumps and curves of the car. There are two ways of modelling a car, one would be to use the Ep curve tool and scale out the whole of the car. I am not going to be taking this approach as i feel this is basiclly cheating and will not improving any of my modelling skills.


















Next i had to use the Ep curve tool to produce a rough outline of the car, this is used to help me model the outer curves of the car. I started off with a polygon planes which i positioned near the wheel. This was then duplicated on the other so i was able to bridge it together to produce the circular curve for the wheel. The plane was then extruded several times upwards towards the bonet, this is where i had to take most of my time as i tried to get it accurate and with a smooth curve throughout.


















Once i was happy with the top part of the car i then had to model towards the front bumper. This was hard and tricky because the blue print template i had for the front of the car did not match the side and top in size, so whatever i modelled at the front and back of the car was not accurate. The way i resolved the problem was to first start modelling using the small template then once it was modelled to my liking i then just enlarged it and combined it with the side view.


















actually found modelling the front part of the car pretty fun as this kind of challenged me in away to get it spot on. The small front template wasn’t any help either as i kept of getting confused when scaling and reducing the front bumper. But i just sat down and took my time and I’m happy with what i produced for the front fender.


















The easiest part of the car i modelled was the bonet, as all i had to do was extrude the edges of the fender upwards towards the front window of the car. Then i just played with the vertices to give it that nice curvature. Ok this is end of part of the making; part two will be about producing the door and the sunroof. Here is the progress so far

Test 2 of sandcar effect

Here is my second attempt at producing the sand ca effect, i managed show the car driving off while some sand particles are attached to the car and some falling off. What i want to try and fix is the origin of when the sand particles start falling off from the car. Im going to try and get the sand to stick on the car for atleast 4 seconds to let the audience know that what they are seeing is the Audi R8 sand version before the particles explode

Advice from Jamie

Today we had formative assesment with Jared, but my one would start in the afternoon so i was able to get help from Jamie who came into today to help the class, i first met Jamie when i was in first year and we were learning to build model faces. The first problem i found was that the boleans tool was not functioning properly, i asked Jamie what the problem was and he said that this is one of the glithes that occur when using the boleans tool, there was nothing that i could do to fix it as it was a problem within Maya.

The second problem i encounterd was with the extrude tool, the problem i found was that each time i extrude it outwards if would leave a whole in the front face of the polygon. I wanted to know the reason for this and how i can over come it, when asking Jamie he said again this yet again another problem within in Maya and is just one of those glitches. He said the only way to get around this would be to just extrude the edges down and snap the vertices to the bottom row, this is something which i aslo considerd but was only last option as this is more time consuming.

After the talk Jamie was talking about how i had modelled my car i said that it was done with polygon for the bonet sub ds for the top and nurbs for the wheel. Jamie stated that will lead to problems in the long run, because the car is made up from different elements and it should just by one whole polygon for the car. I know what he is talking abut as i tried to animate the car which ended up being a nightmare because the car was not combined as a whole unit but only parented together, this caused problems when moving the car foward as one par of the car would move and oter parts would saty staionary.

At the end i had a little chat about UV and how i could apply it to my car, he said it would only be used when applying patterns and stickers to the car just like modded up cars. But seeing as how im having the car brand sapnking shinning new i would just have to apply the car paint sahder to it. Over all Jamie helped me out alot

Test 1 of sandcar effect

Here is my first test of the sandcar effect, this was done using Realflow 4 while integrating my Maya file into Realflow. Basically the effect i have here is that the car is driving straight then it suddenly explodes into small particles of sand. I still need to add the chainball in to realflow so the particles will be ale to interact with it. Once i have produced a render which i like i will post up the print screen of how i made it, but in the mean time here is the first test

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Sorry guys!!

As i stated in my other posts about me having the R8 finished today was not accomplsihed, this was becuase i ran into a few problems on the way while merging the vertices after mirroring half of the car. I am looking into this problem very carefuly and will have it sorted soon, I will update the blog if the situation changes

Little idea

While thinking about the story of why the car would turn into sand, i came up wwith a good story. well i was thinking that while the car was driving straight and making its way to the exit a large ball chain is sent on a collision course towarsd the car. I will make the ball hit the side of the car resulting inthe car exploding into to small particles of sand.

Sandman/Car effect

The effect i will now be using for the scene will be similar to the one used in Spiderman 3 sandman, this effect will be done using Realflow4. While watching Spiderman 3 the other day and seeing the sandman emerge from all that sand gave me ideas for my commercial. I thought it would be a nice idea that during the end of the commercial the R8 drives towards the camera and disintegrate into little particles of sand. I know that this is going to be a mission to accomplish but this is something i know that will look good when done correctly.
If you guys have forgotten the Spiderman 3 sandman scene here it is

Learning Realflow4

Now at the end stage of the modelling and i have decided to take a look at the special effects which I’m going to add in later. I know i want to use the fluid dynamics for the scene but what Maya offers in fluid dynamics compared to Realflow is nothing. I have used my spare time to learn this new program and learn to get to grips with the tools and work flow. For those who do not know what Real flow is take a look at this

This is there Demo reel - http://www.realflow.com/img/videos/showreel_2008_sound.html

and here is there website - http://www.realflow.com/

What you think?

What you see now is a 95% completed R8 and a polycount would you believe it or not of 10000 which I’m quite happy with as my limit was 100,000. So true to my word i should have this completed fully by Sunday and will post up the finished product, so hope you like it :)

Ocean deformer

Here is a little effect i made in Maya while still thinking about possible story lines. One of the possible storylines for this one would be a chase between an object under the road going after the car, the car has to safely get across to its destination without being hit. This effect was created with the help of the digital tutor’s movie, i learnt the effects of the wave deformers and soft bodies. If i do decide to go with this effect i will completely change the look of the effect so would not seem i just copy it from the tutorial. Over all took about two days to make that’s including long ass breaks i used to take so without the breaks should be completed in a day

Real flow fluids and dynamics

Still taking reference from the Audi tts advert, I’m planning to have some sort of fluid dynamic collision on the car at the end of the advert. If you look back at the previous blog where i produced the water flow i want to create something like that again but maybe from a balloon colliding on the bonnet of the car. The water flow i made was done by creating a 3D container with an emitter and also changing the settings.

While looking on the net at how i can improve on the fluid dynamics colliding on the car i came across a software called Realflow.

RealFlow is a stand-alone application for fluid and dynamics simulation that allows easy, intuitive control and visualization of the behaviour of fluids and rigid bodies, and their interaction with a surrounding environment. RealFlow was the first, and remains the definitive tool for creating impressively accurate and realistic fluid simulation effects in the Computer Graphics market. It has been used in movies like “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” and “Sweeney Todd” as well as a wide range of high-end advertisements, short films and animations.

I know if i can use this programme for the fluid dynamics i will be able to produce wonders with it, but if i can’t ill have to do as best with what Maya has to offer

Finished by end of the week

I have been modeliing the r8 for bout three weeks now and i am glad to say everything is going smoothly. The satus on the car is almost complete, im just tweaking rows of vertices and edges other then that no problem at all. Reviewing how much work i got left i plan to complete the car by end of the week and that should include the textures and other minor details.

This means i will be able to start on the environment and should have that done in about two weeks max. Once the car is done i will post the the complete overview of how i made it so watch out for that

Mental ray with HDRI render

Through the stages of modelling the r8 i began to wonder what type of textures or shader i will be using for the car. I have already played around with the lamberts and binn for the car, i knew that assigning the bin shader to the car it would result in a metallic effect. After trying this out it did not go as planned as it somehow gave a bit more of a cartoon effect that would not work with my photo realistic car.

Researching on the web on correct shaders used for modelled cars, i came across the HDRI render. What is HDRI images you ask?, High Dynamic Range Image. A series of photos that are taken at different exposure levels then combined into a High Range image format. The HDR stores the amount of light every pixel represents instead of on-screen colours that normal bitmaps do. The advantage is greater dynamic range of light and colour. Photo realistic lighting at its best.

Why should I use them ?
# You don't have to spend time lighting your scenes with multiple lighting rigs
# Photorealistic Illumination and Environment Reflections in your 3d scenes
# Wide-range luminosity data can drastically change the overall light style of your scene

After following the set up for the HDRI render i came across a few obstacles when assigning the 2D v-ramp texture the original binn shader. After finally resolving the problem and completing the setting for the mental ray and hyper shade the results came out pretty good i must say.