while we were asleep - Apocalypse Competition 2011

[face]

I wouldn´t use a voronio. Maybe you can use cutplanes to generate a similar effect.
More like this...

face

[kubo]

I'm not an expert in which way would be better, but I'm a sucker for free plugins, lol, doing it by planes would take too much effort, and this was so easy it's almost stupid. I was thinking of doing it by hand in sculptris, which is another soft that I love, and even thou it would have been a lot of work, I don't mind it. I've seen what you do with ICE, and it's totally awesome, and also totally over my head, so if you said that voronoi's algorithm (or whatever ;P) it's not the way to go I believe you with my eyes closed. But I have to say that I knew what I wanted, but I didn't want to spend too much effort in it cause I didn't see a "fun" way to do it. I've spent tons of time on the scene, but doing archviz on sketchup is Fun, and doing anything in Octane is always fun, also sculptris, but this was a prop, which at first thought I could solve with some particles and textures, and later saw that I couldn't and later managed, it was great learning something new, but particles are not my main interest (again, way over my head ;P), althou I come out of every contest with something new learnt, which is great btw.

[Daniel]

The moon in that last render needs to be more faded to appear further away. Perhaps make it semi-transparent to allow the sky to appear to be having an effect on it?

[kubo]

well, here is the real reason behind the whole scene. In Malasaña there is a series of sculptures called "the students" that portrait students in different times. When I was also a student we used to pass by this one and joke how much it look alike my girl. I wanted to do something special for her birthday and I had the idea to model the sculpture but using her real face and print it in 3D. A month before the contest started I was working on it on my spare time when she wasn't around so it would be a surprise, and it has taken till now to have it ready, just in time. When the theme was posted I started to think who would remember us if an apocalypse would come. And it all came together. Now that I have everything ready I'll tweak the scene colorwise and set it ready for the finals.
BTW the print came out fantastic, and she liked it.

[ROUBAL]

Very nice model and texture !

[kubo]

the real models are prettier (both the flesh one, and the bronze one ). And there is some inaccuracies (as my girl pointed out) due to my artistic interpretation of both of them
Here you can see the real one (the sculpture, of course, some other time I'll post in off topic the pictures of the 3D print) http://maps.google.es/maps?q=malasa%C3% ... 39,,0,7.19
and another one of the same series http://maps.google.es/maps?q=malasa%C3% ... 5,,0,24.64 the street is more dificult to point out, since althou it's based on an actual street from that district, I wanted to recreate the Malasaña that lives in my mind. So it has details from the neighborhood mixed together.

[kubo]

well some finals ready. Found out two things, first PMC solves the glass much better at least under light emitters, while the rest of materials need more cooking, with pathtracing, most materials solve quick but glass takes too much samples (sometimes 20K and still noise in the glass) so I went for PMC, this finals have from 8K to 12K and about 5h for the 12K and 2x570 and 6H for the 8K and a single GPU. My rig has been having temperature problems with both gpus running and so much heat outside (it seems like summer here!).
The other thing I found is that I tried to use an image as distribution in the streetlamps so it would look more realistic, yet when I added this simple map the lights shed too much noise that took forever to solve. I had to go back to a plain emmiter with a floattexture value for distribution so it would look clean.
Minor color correction and small glare added to the street lamps, I also rendered an "occlussion pass" and added it, no other retouching, no background, finally I fitted everything in the scene topping my vram including the "exploding moon" and the sculpture.
Street modeled in Skecthup, tree and minor props in the left side shop from the google warehouse, debris and sculpture done in sculptris, posters, newspaper and curtain done in max, all mixed together in max and exported with the inbuilt exporter, textures hand painted or heavily modified from cgtextures.
Hope you like it.
I'll post more as they get cooked.

[matej]

Nice theme & nice touch with the statue (though, it remind me a little about those bleeding Mary hoaxes the Church is pushing around , maybe just use water instead of blood? It will be more subtle)

What I don't like is the monochromatic lighting. All that yellow emitters make the whole scene yellow and black. All the other colors are engulfed in the yellowness... Maybe you could differ the indoor from the street illumination, by using colder colors for indoor (people aren't there anymore - the apartments are empty & cold...) - pure white / blueish white or even blue (forget about archviz for a moment ).

As far s camera POV and scene composition goes, I like much more your previous daylight shot focusing on the statue and with the blurred background. IMO you should work on that and give a separated illumination for the statue with different color than the background street which you can keep yellowish.

Bottomline: the renders need to be less monochromatic.

[kubo]

thanks matej, I know the blood was not subtle at all, lol, my first idea was to paint it as if somebody painted it with it's fingers, but later I started to model it with polygons, since It's something I'm currently learning, and that's what contests are for. Like you've pointed out it's not subtle at all, but I like it that way ;P
There is 3 different light temps, streetlamps are yellowish, first because that's the color of those lamps in that district, quite yellow, and it's the color that comes to my memory when I recall the nights spent there (quite a few ;P). The moon, and the background have a red light, and the statue, has an orange. Inside I've use a colder light. The idea was to make an almost black & white render, with subtle touches of color, the day tests show the original setup which I tweaked for the finals and lowered all the materials saturation so they would blend more. I could try using a colder light for interiors.
The pov, you are right the test one with the sculpture is better, I wanted to see more clearly in the one centered in the scuplture and I lowered too much the aperture, and it's lost its focus and strenght.
It seems like I'm going to have some more time, so I'll tweak it further and I might add a thing or two.
Thanks for the comments and your time matej

[ttaberna]

Very good job! Wish you luck with the competition!.