Havenhurst - Architectural Walkthrough Animation - 1080p Workflow Montage

FULL CREDITS LISTED IN VIDEO DESCRIPTION

Notes: To see the animation in stereoscopic 3D, check out the video below, which doesn't include the workflow montage presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9zN7uj0Unc

INTRODUCTION:
This video presents the project "Havenhurst", a short architectural walkthrough animation using 3D computer graphics software and techniques. All modeling, animation, rendering, compositing, and video work by Gary Backus. This is a personal project meant for practice. The music tracks used in the video presentation montage are from the album "Vendetta - Position Music Orchestral Series 6" by Jo Blankenburg. Full credits (such as software used, and exact music tracks used) are listed below the project description.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
In this video I put to music some of the tasks involved in creating a 3D computer graphics rendering. The project itself took over a hundred hours to create, and about 840 hours (35 days) for my computer to render at 100% CPU usage (AMD 1090T 6-core CPU at 3.2 GHz), so only a small amount of the overall process is seen in this 10 minute video. Rendered at 2048x1152 spatial resolution. This project represents my first attempt at modern and more accurate rendering techniques: Colorspace and gamma-correction compensation (also known as "linear workflow"), using a monolithic and physically plausible surface shader (the mental images architectural shader) that respects conservation of energy concepts, high-dynamic-range imaging (HDRI), and a more elaborate manually setup compositing dependency graph using multiple passes and channels down a lossless 16-bit half floating-point precision, full 2K high definition (2048x1152 pixels), stereoscopic imaging pipeline. The entire composite references 62GB of rendered data from Maya, contained in over 19,700 separate image files, most of them being OpenEXRs. My next project will be far more ambitious, as I'll be putting to use a multi-tile hi-res surfacing workflow in Mari, ZBrush, and Maya for a realistic creature animation. I'll also be significantly improving upon my rendering techniques as this project looks good, but is not photo-realistic. A note on presentation style I might have to eventually address in the video comments: Yes I know the music is sort of intense at times and also the video is fast-paced, but it's meant to make exciting a relatively arduous and lengthy but nonetheless immersive experience of generating 3D content. I recorded the video using a single monitor, but when working I use two 1920x1080 monitors. My future 3D computer graphics projects will be presented in a montage-style video as well.

FULL PROJECT CREDITS:
Project created in its entirety by Gary Backus; that includes all 3D models. The plants and trees were created with Maya's "Paint Effects", a built-in "L-system" included in Maya. However, some of the image files used for some materials (such as pictures of wood) were downloaded off the internet, and the image used for the sky is from "CGTextures.com". In addition, a few scripts were used to transfer camera data from Maya to Nuke, from "3Dmation.com".

FULL MUSIC CREDITS:
The montage used tracks from the album:
"Vendetta - Position Music Orchestral Series 6"
Composed by: Jo Blankenburg
Published by: Position Music, Inc.
Tracks used, in order of use:
"Lament for Cherubin"
"Imperatrix Mundi"
"Knights of Palmyra"
"Kingdom of Avilion"
"Conquest of Antaria"
"Praetorian Guards"
Note: As a production/trailer music album, it is available in choir and non-choir versions, as well as vocals-only, percussion-only, etc. I mixed various elements together in some of the tracks, so what you hear in the montage sounds somewhat different than the individual source tracks as I tend to mix between choir/non-choir versions, and I use Sony MDR7506 headphones as my monitoring tool for audio editing. Unlike the vast majority of trailer music albums, this one is publicly available for purchase on Amazon and iTunes.
http://www.amazon.com/Vendetta-Position-Music-Orchestral-Vol/dp/B004SPTNFG

FULL SOFTWARE CREDITS:
Autodesk "Maya": for 3D content creation
Mental Images "Mental Ray": for 3D rendering
Foundry "Mari": for a few textures
Foundry "Nuke": for compositing
Sony "Vegas Pro": for video/audio editing
TechSmith "Camtasia Studio": for screen recording
x264 CLI: for MPEG-4 AVC video encoding
ffmpeg CLI: for FLAC encoding and muxing to MKV

ADDITIONAL NOTES:
Project size: 158GB from 35,340 files in 390 folders.
Hardware: ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 board, AMD 1090T CPU, 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 RAM, ASUS GTS 450 GPU.
Frame time: Each of the 840 frames averaged 1 hour for all rendered elements, generating 62GB of EXR image files.
Render time: 840 hours (35 days) at 100% CPU usage: 3.2 GHz, 6 AMD K10 cores.
Render settings: 2048x1152 pixels, 0-2 adaptive sampling, 16-bit half-precision floating-point framebuffers on main render passes.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• 3d
• cgi
• cg
• computer
• graphics
• maya
• mental
• ray
• nuke
• autodesk
• foundry
• modeling
• rendering
• animation
• walkthrough
• digital
• design
• content
• creation
• compositing
• workflow
• montage
• gary
• backus
• architectural
• architecture
• visualization
• arch
• archviz
• viz
• jo
• blankenburg
• trailer
• production
• position
• music

[viewingiseasy]

I am absolutely floored by this. What devotion..what pristineness, what beauty in these images...wondrous work sir. Your video has a rookie like me, whose experience with rendering extends only to doing still image renders with Mental Ray in Autocad 2012, feeling completely inspired. Doing walkthroughs seems like the next logical step...thank you for the upload. I'm on a 2.4 ghz quad-core with 16 GB of 1300 mhz RAM and a 1.5 GB Nvidia GTX 560M video card. I hope I can manage with this setup

[Asephei]

@viewingiseasy Thanks, I appreciate it. I'm glad it can inspire other people out there to produce their own walkthrough animations and such. Animations just take more time to render but the overall principles are the same as producing still images. Oh, and your computer setup is definitely adequate for this sort of work.

[n8skow]

Thank you for that thorough reply.

Does checking the 'enable color management' box just take eliminate the adding a gamma correct node to every file texture? Or is there more going on behind the scenes?

[Asephei]

@n8skow Basically all Color Management is doing is remapping file nodes, and the default setting takes care of all 8-bit per channel "color" textures, but it's important to not remap those scalar-type textures. Your textures have been remapped properly into linear space. Now you need to see the entire image in sRGB color space. Use the options for the Render View to do that: Render View > Display > Color Management.

[Asephei]

@n8skow Use the options in Render View for the display LUT (Image profile: linear sRGB, Display profile: sRGB), or use the tone mapper with gamma set to 2.2. If using the options in Render View, set gamma to 1.0 in the tone mapper. Basically you don't want to double up on the gamma correction (gamma at 2.2 is "99%" the same as sRGB color space). The only problem I have with the Color Management feature is the translation of textures for each render, besides that it's a good way to work.

[Asephei]

@n8skow I said "LUT" (Look Up Table) but to clarify, I'm meaning it in a sense that even a gamma correction is "like" a color look up, but LUT files have nothing to do with the typical sRGB linear workflow. You won't be using a LUT file unless you're in a production studio or certain project that requires it, as LUTs are very specific and might be used to calibrate the CG renders to match a custom color space, as a simple example. In Nuke you can create 3D LUT files if needed.

[Asephei]

@n8skow Yes to your first question. To your second question: You check the box, and then all file nodes are assumed to be the "default input profile" (which is sRGB), and are remapped to the default output (which is linear sRGB). This takes care of most color textures, but you should set it to the same as the default output profile (so that no remapping takes place) on "scalar" or "data" type file nodes; displacements, bumps, normals, reflectivity, as well as for HDRs.

[Asephei]

@n8skow If using the mia_exposure_photographic, you should set Burn Highlights to 1.0 and Crush Blacks to 0.0 before doing the Gamma 1.0 render for compositing; this will essentially provide a true linear mapping of values (no tone mapping). Only do this if you want to re-tone map your primary framebuffer in the compositing phase. For mia_exposure_simple, set Compression to 0.0 and Gamma to 1.0 for an untone-mapped linear primary framebuffer render.

[Asephei]

@n8skow Once you have a middle grey reference in your scene (material with 0.18 diffuse), textures you paint in Mari, Photoshop, etc will render the way you'd expect them to. Everything starts looking less cartoony and more photorealistic; you get excellent and slightly flatter results in the render itself, with latitude for image editing, because the exposure and tone mapping are being done properly. I'm applying these concepts to my current project and the results are much better.

[Asephei]

@n8skow So here's my current method: On each 8-bit image, add a gamma correct node, and load my preset sRGB de-gamma (0.455,0.455,0.455). Leave all "scalar" (like bump, normals, specularity, etc) maps alone, same goes for HDRs. Add tone mapper (with default gamma 2.2). Set up lights, materials, test renders, etc. When ready to render for compositing, simply set gamma to 1.0, use EXR format and 16-bit half (or higher) primary framebuffer; this maintains linear workflow in compositing.