In this blog posting we have a chat with Simone Nastasi, a talented freelance 3ds Max artist, now living in the Venice area of Italy.
Simone has been using 3ds Max since its first versions in DOS. During this meeting we discussed his work on a recent and unusual project, which I thought it was worth sharing with you all.
A while ago Nastasi had the chance of working for London based Jellyfish Pictures, on a large scale and acclaimed TV production for the BBC: "Planet Dinosaur".
Simone says he was lucky enough to know, (via Splutterfish’s user webforum) Jellyfish former lead 3d artist, Matt Chandler, “a guy with an artist head the size of a planet and a shelf full of vfx prizes.” Many of the tricks described below by Simone were directly inherited or inspired by him, he shared his wealth of knowledge whenever he could. Matt is now co-owner at Analog Studio in London, along with Mike Merron, another former Jellyfish Pictures co-worker. Analog is a 3ds Max studio that is worth keeping an eye on.
They were in need of talented lighters / shaders for 3ds Max, and were utilising Splutterfish’s render engine, Brazil r/s, at that time. Simone says Brazil “is a great but kinda niche renderer for 3ds Max. I knew Brazil quite well, so I decided to send my CV and a few renderings. After a couple of phone calls (which gave me the sweat - I swear I'll never be able to get a grip of London's accent via phone), I kissed my full time job goodbye and jumped on a plane for London - Soho, here I come!”
Simone continues, “First thing that hit me was the workflow. Even though I was doing Architectural Visualization, I always considered myself a generalist – I examined tutorials daily, about everything 3d/VFX related. I knew how to script etc, so it was relatively easy to blend in. Yet, moving from a one-guy-does-everything to a studio-structured workflow, with specialized roles was kinda weird at the start. After a couple weeks I was assigned to what would have been my daily ‘dinos.’ These were water giants, known as Plesiosaurs, plus the really big guy, the so called Predator X.
They were protagonists of two 5-minutes episodes - full CGI. I had to shade, light and create the VFX for the vast majority of the shots.”
Simone Nastasi goes onto explain the workflow was primarily this: “We had to open the animated scene (in XSI, now called Softimage), export the cache files, then load the models and the cache files into 3ds Max, then we could start lighting and shading. We used a plugin called "Point Oven", which made it a relatively easy task of transferring vertex animation from XSI to 3ds Max.
Of course after a few we had some ‘basic scenes’ to start from (The very first shots for these episodes had been done by Matt Chandler and Mike Merron so I had already scenes to start from), plus a few custom tools scripted for different tasks - my friend Michiel Quist, created a few from scratch or modified existing ones, and I changed them even more to fit my needs. In the end importing the caches, the models and having a ready to light scene took just a few clicks thanks to the final script. The main, optimized script consisted in a very simple UI where you picked two paths - one to the cache files and another to a "template" 3ds Max scene containing the dinosaurs. One for each kind, and then pressed the "Import!" button.
Since there were strict naming conventions for the cache files, the script parsed the file names and cloned the respective dinos from the template file to the scene; there were a couple more functions/buttons, e.g. switching from network to local cache files to speed up the scrubbing of the scene. All in all, a lot of simple but repetitive tasks that were made easy with script automation.” Explains Simone.
“Speed was a major need for the production. We had to create a huge average of shots done per day. I remember some days where I sent to the farm something like six shots or so.
We had to setup and light the scene, tweak the shaders, set up the various passes, decide the LoD (Level of Detail) based on the distance of the dinos from the camera etc. Plus checking the rendered shots, do a quick precomp, to see how it was all progressing, in Nuke... it was tough, yeah, but fun and exciting.”
Simone mentions that the team that worked on those two episodes were using 3ds Max 2009, 64-bit (of course) and Splutterfish Brazil 2.0 as the main tools. “This was on HP workstations with 8gb ram, if I'm not wrong.” Brazil behaved wonderfully, “I can't remember a single crash due to the renderer. We were using Brute Force GI, so there was no need to worry about flickering. What impressed me was the speed and stability of the ray server - it chewed through millions and millions of polys without a glitch. The dinos had 4x4k maps sets (head, fins, body, tail) each, for diffuse, reflection, bump and displacement.” To quote Simone “Do the math... .” as that it is a large amount of textures to be pushing around, especially when you consider all the textures are stored on the RAM of your machine or render node.
“We were not using rendertime displacement for the dinos. Instead, we used the standard Displace modifier, putting a Turbosmooth modifier below, in the stack. We used different subdivisions for viewport and renderer, and the result was really good, even in extreme closeups (and there were a lot of closeup shots). Plus, it was consistent even when we had to switch to MR for some passes not available in Brazil r/s (like Velocity pass).” elaborates Nastasi. He also illuminates on some of the plugins used “As far as I remember, Krakatoa, Simcloth, Blur beta tools... and a countless number of scripts (notice that most of them are free). I have to name at least the Soulburn scripts - they're invaluable, I used them so much. The texmap preview script is fantastic when previewing procedural maps, the Blended Box Map script was top notch when we had to quickly shade organic shapes (flesh, rocks) and so on...”
VFX
Simone remarks he enjoyed the VFX work. “Here comes the real fun: the VFX shots… .
- “Sea water: I didn't use any specific plugin for creating the convincing sea water. Instead, I applied the same LoD technique used for the dinos - properly modifed plane based on camera position, Turbosmooth was again set to a range of very high levels at rendertime, and Brazil was left the task of accomplishing the hard work.
I used a combination of Noise and Wave Modifiers for recreating the realistic wave movements, plus some Vol. Select modifier to randomly select some sea "patches" based on a noise map. Then I added a Relax modifier above it in the 3ds Max’s modifier stack, this allowed me to effectively and quickly obtain the "calm sea" patches effect you can see in the real world. The same noise map was used to mix two slightly different water shaders. As a final touch, a negative Push modifer was used to give the waves a more crisp look.”
I was impressed with the look of the foam. Nastasi explains how this was skilfully crafted; “The foam? well that's just a Brazil r/s glossy glass shader mixed with some tileable foam map and a bit of thin translucency.
(Click to Enlarge Individual Images)
I created a mask for the fixed "obstacles" (like the sand islands), and used different methods for the waves' foam. The free Mankua Stress map was used as a mask, and then mixed with an animated noise, was one of the methods. A nice trick was also cranking up the negative spinner value of a Push modifier until the tip of the wave crossed itself, then I used a Double Sided black/white material, and would render a mask from the top view: this gave a perfect mask for the waves' tips. Then I used the mask to mix the water shader and the foam shader - even if, in the end, a much more crystal-clear water shader was picked up as final look.
Simone mentions that Matt created an useful, and almost-universal setup for the water, when viewed from below. This was based on the same plane with Noise and Wave modifiers, plus a clever shader and light rig for the sun, seen from below - it used a simple omni light to trigger a Falloff map set to "Shadow/Light". The map was then used as a mask in a Blend material, blending a sea water shader and a self-illuminated, partly translucent shader mimicking the refracted sun.
Even if it sounds really basic, consider that we had to take care of the scale, plus wide camera pans and rotations, often with a narrow angle. This rig was really helpful for both the scale control (using just a couple of parameters to control waves' amplitude and height) and the position of the sun.
- From here we start to discuss the Fluid sims. Nastasi jokes “in the show, the dinos spend most of their time trying to eat each other. Doing that underwater meant fluctuating blood, and introduced an extra level of complexity to our 3ds Max work”
Nastasi used FumeFX for that. Matt had already prepared some excellent FumeFX setups during the 5 months R&D phase.
Simone goes onto say: “Matt spent a few hours breaking them down for me. When I ended up being on my own, I used them as a base and tweaked them on a scene basis - sometimes it was tricky, for example when the camera started far away and ended up extremely near to the jaws and inside the ‘pouring’ blood. So I had to carefully balance the fluid domain, the resolution... Did I say that I had to do an average of 2 effects shots per day?”
Nastasi remarks that “luckily FumeFX is quite intuitive, fun and straight forward. Plus is fast! It was also used to drive sand particles in a few shots, with great results.”
Simone mentions he’s “very proud of my overall work - lighting, shading, creating FX and solving problems for something like 70% of the shots of two episodes of ‘Planet Dinosaur.’ Proving to myself and others that I was fit for the VFX industry.
But if I had to pick an episode, well, in the very first days of work we were facing some slowdown due to the original and required workflow. It was essential to keep the close up dinos at full poly resolution in viewport due to displacement and the four different maps used for each dino. We were selecting each of the four "areas" of the dino and displacing them individually. This caused a lot of calcs to, select the proper faces (already subdivided, so a lot of them), displace them, all of this for each of the four maps; A big stack, that was re-evaluated every time we reopened a file, for each of the displaced dinos.
Believe me, it was a major pain in the neck. And I was really bugged by that, 'cause I really believed there had to be a better way. I spent a few extra hours in office trying to find a workaround, and I eventually found it.
It was so simple, I just used the composite map to UV shift the single maps, thus assembling the equivalent of a single, 16k map. This simplified the stack so much: no more face selections, just a single displacement modifier, and we were finally allowed to keep different LoD levels for viewports and rendering.
When I figured it out I was glowing with happiness: I saved myself, and my fellow co-workers lots of time spent staring at the monitor. At the same time this old dog taught a new trick to a few of the best 3ds Max artists and TD's I know, and gaining a bit of their respect. Considering that I had just joined the crew and that I was pretty new to the VFX game, well, it was a good boost to my confidence...”
Simone finishes off by saying, that throughout the approx. 8 months he worked on this project, that “In the end, during this job, 3ds Max proved to be a terrific tool - using the modifier stack along with its default powerful modifiers (skin wrap, displace, turbosmooth...) did most of the job, and the gigantic availability of plugins (free and commercial) and scripts allowed us to do every shot we were asked to, all in an incredibly tight deadline.”
I am sure you will agree that the work the team (peaking at around 60 people.) produced at Jellyfish is impressive, even more so when you learn of the tight deadlines. A special thanks to Simone for taking the time to help with this post.
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Happy Max’ing
