Hi all,
Here's my contribution for the apocalypse competition, made with Octane 1.0 Beta 2.52 and Maya + After effects and Photoshop for color correction, glow and motion blur. No commercial models were used. I started to work on it in November and I must say one thing: I had a lot of fun! I used this 10 days of time-extension to enjoy myself on refining musics.
THE IDEAEveryone expects the apocalypse day will happen with some kind of fireballs, hurricanes and with a divine intervention that will punish us in a very special-fx way: I don’t think so.
The idea is that the human race will decree its apocalypse with its own hands, I don't think we need the help of external forces to accomplish that!
We are really over stressing the world's natural resources to create a lot of useless things, and this is what we call "progress". I believe the real meaning of progress is another. Our precious planet is seriously risking to be destructed by the garbage of our “progress”.
If we don’t change then our apocalypse will come simply as a result of our excesses. My video tries to tell this story.
MY PROJECTMy project consists in 3 different scenes that I called:
1 our progress
2 its price
3 the apocalypse
Besides the animation I’ve submitted 3 HD stills + 3 stereoscopic views. Hope you have a pair of compatible glass to enjoy the 3D images (I used the simple one made with paper and coloured gels).
I’ve also submitted some of the materials I used in the scenes. To say the turth I used a lot of simple materials (without a node editing), so I submitted just the interesting ones, where I made textures and material editing.
You can find the following materials on the live DB:
Bark_Lime
Leaf_Lime
Autumn_Ground
Grass_simple
Steel_Piston
Coca Cola Can
Gold Globe
Haze_gradient
The music was composed by me and my great compositor friend Paolo....I also enjoyed my self playing guitars tracks !!
TECHNICAL NOTES / SOME WORDS ON OCTANE RENDERI made every animation render with no more than 800s/px, I really had to fight with my hardware (gtx 560 Ti with 1.25GB in the first month and another 560 borrowed by a friend of mine for the last 3 weeks) so I had to avoid high quality render settings, but it pushed me to discover a lot of workaround/possibilities of octane render and I learnt how to speed up my renders without a noticable loss of quality and how to save the precious video memory for the important things. The avarage render time of my frames was 2:00 mins (for the scene 1), 8:00 mins (for the scene 2) and 1:30 (for the scene 3). The most time consuming part of the rendering was exporting mesh from maya, it's still a pain to manage 3M of polygons: you can wait 2 mins just to see the octane's render window. I know it's still a beta and I'm sure the team will fix this problem as greatly as it did for the render engine.
Now I must say the most important thing about Octane Render: it's very fun!
I'm mainly a Mental Ray user and I discovered the pleasure of the octane's work-flow, now I can finally spend my time on "photographing" my scenes instead of rendering them! I'm an amateur photographer too and I can finally enjoy the render as much as I enjoy the photography, I think this is the best merit of octane render and I hope the team will continue to improve the photographing aspects (I miss the real bokeh of my lenses!).
FOREWORDSI really enjoyed working on this competition. I learnt a lot of things about using Octane Render and I think it will become my main production renderer.
Thanks to all the community, the Octane's team and the people that will spend time on watching my work, I hope you will enjoy it!
VIMEO:http://vimeo.com/34784778[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/34784778[/vimeo]
YOUTUBE:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgLDRWQ76JY&hd=1[/youtube]