Planet Blender

The #1 Reason Your Render Looks Fake
Blender Guru - 2010-04-27 19:09:21

Let me ask you something, when you slave away for hours in Blender, what are you trying to achieve?

To make cool shit? Nope. Think bigger.

Give up?

Whether you realize it or not, the sole purpose of all 3d art is to make something look believable.

That’s it. There are no exceptions.

If your image doesn’t relate to the real world in some way, the audience will feel disconnected and become disinterested. It doesn’t matter if your rendering an architectural fly-through of a house or an orc warrior fighting his way out of a volcano, you are still taking something that exists in your mind and producing it as a picture and hoping the audience believes it.

You’re doomed, unless…

Let’s say you spend hours intricately modeling each and every nail of a door frame, you piece together textures to create flawless materials, and you spend a solid week on the lighting setup.  Well guess what? If you hit render now your scene is still going to look fake. The reason for this is simple: You haven’t added camera imperfections.

It sounds like a joke, but it’s absolutely true. Photography is the single most important thing to understand when it comes to learning 3d, but for some reason most artists choose to ignore it.

When you take a real photo with a real camera, do you realize how many flaws are being built into the photo?

Just to name a few:

• Chromatic Abberation
• Vignetting
• Soft Glare
• Light rays
• Reflecting glare
• Bloom
• Lens Flare
• Glare burnout
• Ghost glare
• Depth of Field
• Motion Blur
• Lens Distortion
• Lens dust, scratches, sweat, fingerprints
• Film developing artifacts
• Color grading

Now guess how many of these flaws occur when producing a computer generated image?

NONE. ZERO. ZIP. NADA.

When you hit F12 you will produce a perfect still. Every. Single. Time.

For example, take a look at this image by the talented artist, Marek Denko:

Aside from the perfect lighting, flawless modeling and impressive materials. What else has he incorporated?

Effects. And lots of them.

• Depth of field
• Chromatic Abberation
• Lens scratches, dust & dirt
• Color Grading
• Bloom
• Reflecting glare

These are all things are done outside of the 3d viewport and added in post production. That means that after he slaved over every piece of detail in the scene, he flipped to the compositor and continued working. That is what pushed this scene over the edge.

Have you ever wondered how Pixar achieved that authentic film look in Wall-E?

This was actually the result of many months of work. Before they began working on the meat of the production, they focused entirely on trying to replicate the look of live footage in their 3d software. They even went as far as to consult the Director of Photography from No Country for Old Men, on tips for creating real camera and lighting setups.

“We rented some equipment and used the live-action DP [Marty Rosenberg] who eventually shot some of the live-action elements. He helped us do some lens tests. Our depth of field, our cameras never look as we expect them to.

“Life is nothing but imperfection and the computer likes perfection, so we spent probably 90% of our time putting in all of the imperfections, whether it’s in the design of something or just the unconscious stuff. How the camera lens works in [a real] housing is never perfect, and we tried to put those imperfections [into the virtual camera] so that everything looks like you’re in familiar [live-action] territory.”

-Andrew Stanton

(source: AWN)

The result was a very slick, very believable environment for Wall-E to explore.

Why using the compositor is crucial to your success

The most common question people ask is, why would I want to incorporate camera flaws into my renders? After all camera flaws are exactly that, flaws. So wouldn’t an image that is clean from these flaws look better?

Nope. Let me explain why.

When you look at a white car sitting in the hot sun, your eyes expect to see a reflecting glare. When you look closely at your spoon during breakfast, your eyes expect the bowl of cereal in the background to be out of focus. And at night time when you look at a street lamp, your eyes expect to see rays of light.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Our eyes have become so accustomed to seeing these imperfections that they have become apart of the object. And when they are missing, the viewer spots a fake.

Now don’t get me wrong, lighting, materials, textures and lighting are all important and I’m not pretending they aren’t, but until you learn how to replicate the look of a real camera in the compositor, you can kiss believability goodbye.

If you are interested in exploring this topic further, I am writing an eBook called The Wow Factor. It’s not available yet, but you can register your interest here: http://wowfactorbook.com

Blender, Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny at Connecticut Film Festival
Tube - Epic Production Notes - 2010-04-27 16:48:05

And me!
Connecticut Film Festival has a strong FLOSS representation since last year- they have multiple presentations on using Free Software to produce films, games or other interactive media. Last year I presented Blender workshops along with Jason Van Gumster, this year I’m going again. If you’re close to Danbury CT, come by.

Elephants Dream, 05.05.10 – 3:15 pm,05.09.10 – 2:00 pm

Big Buck Bunny 05.05.10 – 3:15 pm,05.09.10 – 2:00 pm

My workshop about making Tube with Free Software 05.06.10 – 1:00 pm

Other Free/Open Source related presentations about video production, audio, rosegarden,copyleft, open office, free software design and much more.

Logo part 2
Sintel, the Durian Open Movie Project - 2010-04-27 15:26:36

The amount of high quality submissions keeps amazing us!
We’ll do a final selection soon, but not before this thursday. To give everyone a bit of insight in what we look for, and to give some of the contributions an honorable mention, here’s a collage of designs that we liked. It might be that we missed one or two good ones, don’t complain if yours is not there! Also the ones added the past 24 hours haven’t been reviewed yet.

Don’t forget: the logo submissions and reviews are on our forums.

-Ton-

Comment on New plans by turkeys3d
Comments for 3D Animation Project - 2010-04-27 14:28:43

I agree with both of you that we would get more help by posting on Wreckamovie IF we had things to post. But, as I said before, the stuff we are dealing with at the moment are “un-postable”

I mean, they are all tasks that became problems because we didn’t work in the same room at the first place. Now we are trying to work as a team.

Hope you understand

Comment on 2 Problems solved, 98 to go. by turkeys3d
Comments for 3D Animation Project - 2010-04-27 14:08:08

Today we decided NOT to use the cloud generator. It produces too realistic clouds and we are looking for “cartoony” clouds

So, they will be drawn in 2D.

Using Edge Split in Blender to make my Spaceship model look less melted.
Starbright Illustrations (blog) - 2010-04-27 12:56:56

I’m using the modifier suggested here in this Blender wiki page to add some definition to my spaceship mesh. It’s a do-over of the Franklin, a model from the Vega Strike open-source space trading and combat game – or at least that’s the intention.

At the moment my mesh is “set smooth” which makes it a little organic looking and, well, smooth. A technological object like a spaceship needs some hard edges, even in games with a far future setting like Vega strike, and there is a simple way to add them. You just add a modifier to the mesh and chose edge split from the list of suggestions.

This particular spaceship mesh already has a mirror modifier applied so the edge split makes two so far. I’m sure there will be more.

I would never have had the idea to use this modifier myself, it was suggested in critique on my models I received at the Vega Strike forums.

When the model is done I’ll be marking the edges that I want sharp manually, but until then I’ve already added the modifier at the default angle of 30 degrees just to make my work in progress renders of this spaceship model sharper, and closer to what the final mesh might look like.

I’m also working on the thrusters, and as I was doing research I discovered that thrusters are a real thing which can be used on real spaceships.

I grabbed this thumbnail from the royalty-free content at Wikipedia. I particularly like the detail of the second beam of ions being added to the main beam from the top. This seems to be a common feature of real world spaceship engine thrusters. I’ve added a pipe to the top of the main thrusters on this spaceship to suggest this little technological querk.

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_askew.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_back.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_side.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_top.jpeg

http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12franklin_render_under.jpeg

MOVED TO ANOTHER LOCATION!
digital janitor - 2010-04-27 12:15:00

BLOG HAS MOVED TO A NEW PLACE!

http://sanders3d.wordpress.com/

Call for Content Blenderart #28
BlenderNation - 2010-04-27 10:45:00

It's time again to start thinking about articles, tutorials and images for Issue # 28 of Blenderart Magazine.

The theme for this issue is “Up to Speed” with Blender 2.5+

Blending Life 2 – Voting Open
BlenderNation - 2010-04-27 02:43:27

All of you who entered made it really difficult for us judges this year! Well done and keep it up! Of 49 total entries we settled on five. Before you vote please look at the full resolution details of each entry and the voting guidelines! It’s very important! Please be careful to not vote out [...]

GSOC - Dez projetos aprovados
4RTE DIGIT4L - 2010-04-27 00:54:00

Google Summer of Code é um projeto para incentivar estudantes de todo mundo a desenvolver softwares livres. E todo ano o Blender vem participando, e esse ano não foi diferente. Foram mais de dez projetos aprovados. Como podem ver a seguir na lista abaixo:

graphicall: Google Summer of Code results are in! 10 students approved! http://www.pasteall.org/12724 Congrats to all of them from GraphicAll
Twitter / graphicall - 2010-04-27 00:24:40

graphicall: Google Summer of Code results are in! 10 students approved! http://www.pasteall.org/12724 Congrats to all of them from GraphicAll