Patience & Consistency II
The Flag of the House.
Trying out some new techniques with cgi, texturing, lighting and rendering techniques.
This one came out of a nice session trying out new techniques. I have been working with CGI software since 1998, but the feeling of “blink or you’ll miss it” only seems to increase with every year. New render-engines, AI and deeplearning options, GPU strength and the influence on look development. If you dip too long you lose the connection between what you know and the new techniques that can completely change workflows.
Texturing.
I started out with a certain goal, and tried to reach that as best as possible. I wanted to create a highly detailed, slightly transparant fabric that had a soft highlighted print on it. It was fun moving towards a goal again. I used a gpu based renderer with a node based shader system to really get the texturing the way I wanted it. Fun part was that I did get the look, but wasn’t content with the final look, pushing back one version because of the lighting.
Lighting.
The real enjoyment came with lighting the flag. I have always advocated the use of HDRI lighting. Mostly because of the way physically based renders handle the 32-bit workflow. GPU renders don’t mess around in that regard and I noticed that the lighting systems have a better way of handling rays then ever before. I used object based lighting to create this realistic yet abstract way of lighting in this project, that really elevated the look and sense of detail. The difference in how the lettering (Used the Patience & Consistency I elements as an overlay) reacts to the lighting versus the flag itself, really brought home the aesthetic I was going for after seeing what was possible.
Rendering and finalising the house.
Didn’t have enough time to get more in-depth with the actual render process of the engine. But the speed of look development made me doubt if I even needed it. Rendering 2k/3k pristine images in between 5 to 15 minutes was a very cool evolution from the cpu way of doing things. Some grading and enhancement have been done in Photoshop to really get the accents where I wanted it. A lot of fun. The workflow improvements have been written over to death, but the enormous speed boost for texturing and lighting and seeing the results almost realtime makes all the difference for me. More composition tests are in the works!
Patience and Consistency II
Orville Yssel 2019