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Hi, before falling asleep for a week, and for people who have not followed the recent competition entries, here is link to my recent mini serie featuring Elisabeth Warfield :

http://3d-synthesis.com/46-LostInSahara.html

Modelled in Blender 2.49b, and rendered with Octane 2.42.

Thanks for watching !

Really an interesting & unique approach to the competition (+10 points ). And I bet it was a lot of work...

The flare is great, btw.

I know I haven't said anything before, but really this competition is been crazy for all of us, and fun too, but let me tell you I love the whole story, it might not be a movie, but it's moving pictures allright, It could be a comic book (european style not marvel stuff), and who knows, when you have the power and the time (I know we are all short on both) you'll make an awesome movie out of it. Congrats and good luck

BEST!

very nice and detailed renders.
how did you achieve the smoke?

Nice work....

Hi everybody ! Thanks for your comments. Well, the server hosting my website has been out of order for a moment today, but fortunately it seems to have been repaired now !

Even if it is not much noticeable at first glance, there are many little things in my images using the new alpha transparency : the smoke, the propeller motion blur, the glasses of the car, the battery sticker, the eyelets holes in the texture around the green tarpaulin, the cutout of the chocolate paper, and of course Elisabeth's upper eyelashes and hair.

@radiant : The smoke is a texture made In ParticleIllusion3. I created myself the smoke emitter. The texture is mapped with alpha layer on a plane having its center at the location of the smoke cartridge. To get the best effect without losing too much contrast and brightness, the normal of the textured plane must be well lit by the environment light, with its normal facing at best the camera. Alas, satisfying both conditions reduces a lot the possibilities to play with the shadows.

Normal pointing toward the camera allows adding a bit of emission power, to increase the brightness of the smoke, at the price of a little loss of contrast.

@kubo : thanks for your encouraging words. I have thought of a comic book, if this projects is too big for a movie. It could be made either in current medium realistic style, or with some filtering, faking hand drawing like on these images :

Beautiful work Philippe! This is the best stuff I have ever seen from you. The modeling, materials, textures and render are superb. The only thing lacking polish is the character poses. I know this is something you are working hard on, learning animation is quite difficult. I learned a lot from Jeff Lew's tutorials, not that I am much better at animating/posing than you! Good luck with this, all the best wishes for success.

@ 3dementia : thanks ! Yes, I'm still fighting with bad joints to pose my character. It is half due to a bad topology at elbows and shoulders, and probably a too simple rig. I will have to pass this difficult step to go forward with animation.

I also know that there are some visible flaws on the images, due to both the deadline not allowing me to create better textures, the memory limits of my hardware and the "no post treatment" constraint : the border between high poly real displacement and low poly and simple texture is visible on the tires tracks, on some wide angle shots... I have already fixed that on some images, and still have to do it on some others. I also encountered another problem : when creating a RGB normal map in CrazyBump from a tileable texture, the normal map is not perfectly tileable : CrazyBump can't treat perfectlythe fringe of the texture. This leaded to some artifacts on the sand on some views, and other little flaws...

Anyway a competition is a good motivation to create images. Ordinary, I mainly learn theory and make experiments, but the pressure of a competition is a great opportunity to wake up creativity and produce some images, pushing forward my projects.

I totally love the hand drawn effect on your pictures, If you make it in a comic you already have a buyer!
And I totally agree with pushing the limits, this contest has been lots of fun, I've tryed to stay away from the stuff I know and had lot's of fun character modeling and rigging and playing a lot with particles, which is as far off from my line of work as it gets, but I have to say I've always wanted to learn and play with. I'm more than satisfied with the contest just for that, besides, Octane makes look good even my poor shots at modeling, so it's been great. And I think that yours it's the most ambicious proposal of all, I thought it look good on the previous contest, but now, completed, with a whole story behind is great. Hope I to see what comes out of it.