Just a quickie…

I’ve been developing my workflow for my film project for some time. I want to have a rock solid pipeline setup so when I go full blast I can aim all my focus at the creative parts. So far I’ve concentrated mostly on the asset exchange, getting meshes and animations in and out of the different applications I am working with, as painlessly as possible. I am pretty happy with where I am at this point.

I’ve also put in much thought into the rendering pipeline, which of course also is really important to get right. So far I’ve mainly be working with animatics and test renders, so I haven’t had to set the rendering pipe in stone yet.

One thing I have decided on is to render everything to a floating point image format. Which has led me back into the dreadful lairs of color management. Again.

I did some lame attempts with color management a few years back, got myself a Spyder 2 calibrator to work with accurate colors. But after the calibration I couldn’t get my head around it with different profiles. Colors started to mismatch between applications and other mysterious things. I ended up uninstalling it and selling the device after a month. I’m pretty sure it was good hardware, but handled by a crappy operator. ;)

Anyway, when doing my initial tests with a floating point rendering pipeline, I encountered the gamma differences between the screen and the rendered images, as FP formats work in a linear gamma, and the screen does not, which led me back into reading up a lot on the subject. The gamma difference is an easy fix, but the control freak in me was not happy that I did not understand completely what was going on, so I’ve studied color management a lot more this time around.

A happy coincidence was that Gerardo Estrada just wrote an interesting article on the subject in the HDRI 3D magazine issue #18 and #19, proposing different workflows with linear color management in LightWave 3D, and have also been very active on the NewTek forums lately talking about the subject.

And that Sebastian Goetsch has just released an excellent set of tools for LightWave 3D, enabling an easy workflow for color management and ICC profiles right within LightWave 3D. Wow!

Well, well, as I’ve spent quite some time understanding the subject this time, and done tons of tests the latest week, I think I’ve actually got the hang of Gamuts, Gammas, ICC Profiles and a color managed workflow through the entire pipeline this time. Will even get myself a Spyder again to get my screen accurate, as I believe I can handle it this time. ;) In the end, which also my tests have shown, having a linear color corrected workflow do enhance both realism and quality of the renders and removes a lot of the obstacles associated with image manipulation. So it’s well worth the time to get it right.

As soon as I’ve implemented a decent, good quality, easy to maintain system/movie player to showcase animations and film clips on my website and blog, I’ll start posting some rendered sequences, and with that also write some more detailed text about my complete pipeline and workflow for my film project.

I’ll definitely also return to this subject and write a decent text or article in the blog about my color managed pipeline when I have had my film project in the rendering phase for some time.

I’m not posting any renders this time, but to not make this post lack images completely, I’ll just snap a photo of my latest McFarlane action figure I got the other week, standing happy on my work desk. :)

Just a quickie, here is an old darling of mine which I recently resurrected… Fear his wrath!

This character was like 90% finished back in 2004 for a SpinQuad challenge / thing, which I never had the time to complete. I’ve been cleaning up my old folders and content directories, getting rid of old crap and revived a few things that had fallen into the dark shadows, hiding under the dust, but deserved to be brought back to life.

This Ninja guy is one the latter. Back in march I fixed his topology, made some new UV unwraps and updated his textures and created a new clean rig to animate him. This test render is also from march while working with the rigging.

I’ve always liked this character and have had some great fun animating him when I originally created this cunning Ninja, so I am pretty psyched about finally having the time to get him finely tuned and bring him to full life.

I’ve some diabolic plans of where he is heading, more to come soon…

Get ready for some tough, serious, Ninja action!

There has been some unhealthy long periods of silence between my posts lately. The usual reason, commissioned work has kept me a busy bee. CG artists need to make a living as well - bills, bills and bills - unfortunately.

Some of my paid gigs are interesting and challenging though - gives me opportunities to tune my skills and dive into creating pieces using all my arsenal of CG tools which I might not have gotten into if I only worked with my personal projects. But still, some of the things I have planned to do for myself I really long to do. I’m working on a solution to switch between gigs and personal projects more freely, which seems to actually work out and become reality.

Anyway, I’ll probably be able to get back into posting regularly again, at least a few times a week. Starting from today. So now I don’t have any choice to not post, do I?

Even though my postings have been sparse I’ve spent a lot of my free time working on my projects. One of my different short films and animation projects have progressed rapidly, and I registered a new domain name for it a few days back, so it’s getting ready to be revealed real soon. Just a few weeks away for the initial release.

I’ve also been working a lot with my CG character development. Updates to those will be posted shortly. Just a quickie to go with this post to not make it completely boring without any images. A CG chick I’ve been trying out some things with in the last days. Modeling and sculpting is finished, currently working with textures and some hair guide styling.

A quick screenshot from the OpenGL view in LightWave with a temporary texture I’ve painted and the beginning of my hair guide styling.

Posting to be continued in the next days….