(EDIT: evidently the Vimeo embed is not functioning, so here's the URL: https://vimeo.com/706640198 (https://vimeo.com/706640198) -- also, full case study here (Behance): https://www.behance.net/gallery/143131865/Naturepedic-EOS-Series-Product-Animation (https://www.behance.net/gallery/143131865/Naturepedic-EOS-Series-Product-Animation) and Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/dngr.ltd (http://www.instagram.com/dngr.ltd))
Hi all!
Wanted to share another larger-scale project we completed a while ago but were only recently cleared to post-- this one was for Naturepedic (an organic mattress company who approached me for some motion/rendering work). It quickly snowballed into a pretty large-scale project that spanned several months, but was really a blast to work on. Hit some unfortunate snags with Keyshot on this one that forced me to render with only 1 GI bounce and scrap the original architectural interior I built out, but it still turned out pretty nice all things considered. Thought I'd share! The original is actually a full 2min with a voiceover and different music, so this is a more palatable, internal "directors cut" of sorts that sticks to the good stuff haha..
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/706640198[/vimeo]
The CMF for the mattress was pretty involved, and 100% procedural and/or map-based vs. using RealCloth. I'll post a few closeups in a followup reply here as well as some material graph screenshots, etc.
Credits:
Animation, shaders/CMF, environmental design, lighting, post: me (@sloan.elliot)
Soft-body dynamics + holographic overlays: Arman Beshkooh (@arman_pier) -- Simulated in TyFlow/3DSMax, rendered in VRay, composited w/KS original via AE
Modeling (mattress) + zipper simulation: Kirill Chepizhko (@oberfett / @spektralstudio)
Editing: Tyson Kroening
Music: "Be The Best" by Ian Post (via Artlist.io)
Here are a few stills
And here are some CMF closeups (with studio/generic lighting to show it in greater detail -- be sure to click the images for full res! they're at 4K)
And finally, here are some material graphs; one for the top quilt of the mattress w/debossed logo, and the other for the side / decorative encasement :)
Quote from: sloanelliot on May 05, 2022, 11:29:34 AM
(EDIT: evidently the Vimeo embed is not functioning, so here's the URL: https://vimeo.com/706640198 (https://vimeo.com/706640198) -- also, full case study here (Behance): https://www.behance.net/gallery/143131865/Naturepedic-EOS-Series-Product-Animation (https://www.behance.net/gallery/143131865/Naturepedic-EOS-Series-Product-Animation) and Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/dngr.ltd (http://www.instagram.com/dngr.ltd))
Hi all!
Wanted to share another larger-scale project we completed a while ago but were only recently cleared to post-- this one was for Naturepedic (an organic mattress company who approached me for some motion/rendering work). It quickly snowballed into a pretty large-scale project that spanned several months, but was really a blast to work on. Hit some unfortunate snags with Keyshot on this one that forced me to render with only 1 GI bounce and scrap the original architectural interior I built out, but it still turned out pretty nice all things considered. Thought I'd share! The original is actually a full 2min with a voiceover and different music, so this is a more palatable, internal "directors cut" of sorts that sticks to the good stuff haha..
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/706640198[/vimeo]
The CMF for the mattress was pretty involved, and 100% procedural and/or map-based vs. using RealCloth. I'll post a few closeups in a followup reply here as well as some material graph screenshots, etc.
Credits:
Animation, shaders/CMF, environmental design, lighting, post: me (@sloan.elliot)
Soft-body dynamics + holographic overlays: Arman Beshkooh (@arman_pier) -- Simulated in TyFlow/3DSMax, rendered in VRay, composited w/KS original via AE
Modeling (mattress) + zipper simulation: Kirill Chepizhko (@oberfett / @spektralstudio)
Editing: Tyson Kroening
Music: "Be The Best" by Ian Post (via Artlist.io)
Outstanding animation. I loved the concept and texture quality.
Awesome, I like it a lot :)
just to be sure, the texture change in the Logo "naturpedic cotten" was reached with a displacement?
Sweet god, this is one of the greatest things I have ever seen done in Keyshot. Loved it.
Could you please say a few words about deformable meshes and simulations present there? One of my biggest challenges nowadays is huge size of all imported alembic animations, how did you deal with it?
Btw interior animations are in my opinion nearly impossible to be done in Keyshot, no matter how fast machine you have. I fully understand you got rid of the rest of interior
Quote from: Morgan on May 06, 2022, 04:43:30 AM
Awesome, I like it a lot :)
just to be sure, the texture change in the Logo "naturpedic cotten" was reached with a displacement?
That one was bruuuutal to achieve, because there's this overlap of the white cotton and the nested brown/beige threading beneath, that "reveals" the logo-- so yes, there was a displacement that debossed the general logo area (blurred so it had soft boundaries), and then a label for the darker beige underlayment of the actual logo text that used the logo as a mask, but to get it "thread perfect" the actual black and white map of the logo itself had the identical fabric texture along the fringes/boundaries so that the logo looked stitched vs. perfect cutout. The results are pretty convincing! Total fuckery haha but that's kind of what it's all about :)
Quote from: Kuba Grabarczyk on May 06, 2022, 06:59:57 AM
Sweet god, this is one of the greatest things I have ever seen done in Keyshot. Loved it.
Could you please say a few words about deformable meshes and simulations present there? One of my biggest challenges nowadays is huge size of all imported alembic animations, how did you deal with it?
Btw interior animations are in my opinion nearly impossible to be done in Keyshot, no matter how fast machine you have. I fully understand you got rid of the rest of interior
Thanks, man! really appreciate it, it was sooo much work haha.. Just glad we can share it now. And agreed on interior stuff, if KS were better in that realm it'd be a game changer...it just never quite looks convincing enough to really sell it. On this I used a lot of very specific IES lights as 2" overhead downlights; a mix of warm and cool to really add some color data/depth and rendered as 32bit EXR sequences so we had some control..
Because this was still Keyshot 10, the deformable mesh stuff was all imported via Alembic-- NOW it sounds like we can do vertex deformations via FBX which would have saved us an actual eternity here, but oh well... They were done in 3DSMax using TyFlow and exported as ABC. The zipper was done in Houdini via ABC as well. The trick was, each ABC was so massive that we had to split this entire thing into 20+ Keyshot files for various shots. i.e., if a shot had the zipper sequence in it, that's ALL we could have in it to keep the files from being 100GB+. I had to composite several shots together in cases where we needed both in one shot (like floating sheet + zipper, or latex deformations + sheet, etc.). The whole thing was a complete hack, but it's really the finished result that counts.. Could have been a lot better and we learned a lot of hard lessons on this one, but still happy with the end result!
Quote from: sloanelliot on May 06, 2022, 09:40:30 AM
The whole thing was a complete hack, but it's really the finished result that counts.. Could have been a lot better and we learned a lot of hard lessons on this one, but still happy with the end result!
I feel this is the story with every difficult job. Pushing the software to its limits, people get creative on workarounds and patches and bandaids to get the final result.
Quote from: sloanelliot on May 06, 2022, 09:40:30 AM
Quote from: Kuba Grabarczyk on May 06, 2022, 06:59:57 AM
Sweet god, this is one of the greatest things I have ever seen done in Keyshot. Loved it.
Could you please say a few words about deformable meshes and simulations present there? One of my biggest challenges nowadays is huge size of all imported alembic animations, how did you deal with it?
Btw interior animations are in my opinion nearly impossible to be done in Keyshot, no matter how fast machine you have. I fully understand you got rid of the rest of interior
Thanks, man! really appreciate it, it was sooo much work haha.. Just glad we can share it now. And agreed on interior stuff, if KS were better in that realm it'd be a game changer...it just never quite looks convincing enough to really sell it. On this I used a lot of very specific IES lights as 2" overhead downlights; a mix of warm and cool to really add some color data/depth and rendered as 32bit EXR sequences so we had some control..
Because this was still Keyshot 10, the deformable mesh stuff was all imported via Alembic-- NOW it sounds like we can do vertex deformations via FBX which would have saved us an actual eternity here, but oh well... They were done in 3DSMax using TyFlow and exported as ABC. The zipper was done in Houdini via ABC as well. The trick was, each ABC was so massive that we had to split this entire thing into 20+ Keyshot files for various shots. i.e., if a shot had the zipper sequence in it, that's ALL we could have in it to keep the files from being 100GB+. I had to composite several shots together in cases where we needed both in one shot (like floating sheet + zipper, or latex deformations + sheet, etc.). The whole thing was a complete hack, but it's really the finished result that counts.. Could have been a lot better and we learned a lot of hard lessons on this one, but still happy with the end result!
Yeah, indeed the results are outstanding. Nice to see I am not the only one splitting Keyshot files into smaller ones. Even 15 seconds of deformable meshes like character animation results with ~10 GBs files and issues with GPU memory limit (having RTX 3080ti and 2070) So we do exactly the same, dividing the project into smaller parts.
Again, congrats and hats off this is really a great job
Thanks, man! Excited for the next project...seems like the sky is the limit now that we've ironed out some process stuff. :)
Really Great Job :)
Okay, this is nutty! So good. Can I ask how long this project took from start to finish? Seems like some tricky workflow, but you really pulled it off. And as far as materials go, did you use any scanned textures or were they all created in KeyShot or somewhere else?
Great job!
This is stunning work! Great effort from your team
Quote from: Will Gibbons on May 09, 2022, 08:15:22 AM
Okay, this is nutty! So good. Can I ask how long this project took from start to finish? Seems like some tricky workflow, but you really pulled it off. And as far as materials go, did you use any scanned textures or were they all created in KeyShot or somewhere else?
Great job!
Haha thanks, man! Really means a lot..
I'm not sure I could even say for sure on time because the client took well over a month each time we submitted anything for feedback (total radio silence), not to mention their internal Creative Director quit/relocated about a month after we signed on to do the project haha.. It was a mess. I bid 60sec and the final ended up exactly double that (the above version is our 60sec "fun" edit), but a lot of scope creep w/the owners making creative decisions. If I had to break it down into dedicated time, modeling took maybe ~2 weeks for all three versions of the mattress + internals; product CMF probably took about a solid week, maybe even longer (so many shaders between the top quilt, outer encasement, zippers, latex, coils, pouches, covers, etc.) and the environment/lighting was probably about the same? The animation and camera work were also pretty time-consuming, because so many separate files/shots had to be built out, with a lot of trial and error / shots thrown out along the way-- probably a handful of weeks total there too. And while I was doing that, Arman (who did all the soft-body dynamics) was working in tandem, so probably about the same amount of time on his end. All-in probably ~2 months and a few weeks on the farm, rendering?
We also had to work in this really annoyingly backwards workflow because KS can't export camera animations. So I'd end up setting up a shot, then send a preview of it to Arman along with the static starting position of the camera + lens/FOV/DOF details, transform/movement numbers, etc. and he'd manually recreate the same camera movements...but it's never perfect so he'd then send me HIS camera and I'd import that back into KS and manually reenter DOF details and finally we'd have a perfect match so we could composite seamlessly (between Max/VRay and KS)... ::) Haha we're scarred from this one..
Re: materials, no scans were used; everything was kind of "old school" and created inside KS with a combination of procedural patterns/displacements, generic fabric PBR's for the basic cotton/weave (can't remember from where, maybe CG Axis), custom quilt patterns/maps (the side quilt pattern was a bitch because I had to create a tileable pattern in Illustrator and then bring into PS to make displacements, normal maps, stitching/ticking patterns, etc.-- to make custom normal maps, I used ShaderMap4), etc. I'll attach a few examples of the tiles!
Quote from: DMerz III on May 09, 2022, 08:23:28 AM
This is stunning work! Great effort from your team
Thank you!
Quote from: sloanelliot on May 09, 2022, 10:27:55 AM
Quote from: Will Gibbons on May 09, 2022, 08:15:22 AM
Okay, this is nutty! So good. Can I ask how long this project took from start to finish? Seems like some tricky workflow, but you really pulled it off. And as far as materials go, did you use any scanned textures or were they all created in KeyShot or somewhere else?
Great job!
Haha thanks, man! Really means a lot..
I'm not sure I could even say for sure on time because the client took well over a month each time we submitted anything for feedback (total radio silence), not to mention their internal Creative Director quit/relocated about a month after we signed on to do the project haha.. It was a mess. I bid 60sec and the final ended up exactly double that (the above version is our 60sec "fun" edit), but a lot of scope creep w/the owners making creative decisions. If I had to break it down into dedicated time, modeling took maybe ~2 weeks for all three versions of the mattress + internals; product CMF probably took about a solid week, maybe even longer (so many shaders between the top quilt, outer encasement, zippers, latex, coils, pouches, covers, etc.) and the environment/lighting was probably about the same? The animation and camera work were also pretty time-consuming, because so many separate files/shots had to be built out, with a lot of trial and error / shots thrown out along the way-- probably a handful of weeks total there too. And while I was doing that, Arman (who did all the soft-body dynamics) was working in tandem, so probably about the same amount of time on his end. All-in probably ~2 months and a few weeks on the farm, rendering?
We also had to work in this really annoyingly backwards workflow because KS can't export camera animations. So I'd end up setting up a shot, then send a preview of it to Arman along with the static starting position of the camera + lens/FOV/DOF details, transform/movement numbers, etc. and he'd manually recreate the same camera movements...but it's never perfect so he'd then send me HIS camera and I'd import that back into KS and manually reenter DOF details and finally we'd have a perfect match so we could composite seamlessly (between Max/VRay and KS)... ::) Haha we're scarred from this one..
Re: materials, no scans were used; everything was kind of "old school" and created inside KS with a combination of procedural patterns/displacements, generic fabric PBR's for the basic cotton/weave (can't remember from where, maybe CG Axis), custom quilt patterns/maps (the side quilt pattern was a bitch because I had to create a tileable pattern in Illustrator and then bring into PS to make displacements, normal maps, stitching/ticking patterns, etc.-- to make custom normal maps, I used ShaderMap4), etc. I'll attach a few examples of the tiles!
Well, as crazy as this whole thing sounds, I can relate to how much growth and learning occurs in these. And workflows like this expose weaknesses in tools. There's lots of good insights here in ways KeyShot could be improved too. Thanks for sharing, and kudos!
Quote from: Will Gibbons on May 10, 2022, 08:56:39 AM
Quote from: sloanelliot on May 09, 2022, 10:27:55 AM
Quote from: Will Gibbons on May 09, 2022, 08:15:22 AM
Okay, this is nutty! So good. Can I ask how long this project took from start to finish? Seems like some tricky workflow, but you really pulled it off. And as far as materials go, did you use any scanned textures or were they all created in KeyShot or somewhere else?
Great job!
Haha thanks, man! Really means a lot..
I'm not sure I could even say for sure on time because the client took well over a month each time we submitted anything for feedback (total radio silence), not to mention their internal Creative Director quit/relocated about a month after we signed on to do the project haha.. It was a mess. I bid 60sec and the final ended up exactly double that (the above version is our 60sec "fun" edit), but a lot of scope creep w/the owners making creative decisions. If I had to break it down into dedicated time, modeling took maybe ~2 weeks for all three versions of the mattress + internals; product CMF probably took about a solid week, maybe even longer (so many shaders between the top quilt, outer encasement, zippers, latex, coils, pouches, covers, etc.) and the environment/lighting was probably about the same? The animation and camera work were also pretty time-consuming, because so many separate files/shots had to be built out, with a lot of trial and error / shots thrown out along the way-- probably a handful of weeks total there too. And while I was doing that, Arman (who did all the soft-body dynamics) was working in tandem, so probably about the same amount of time on his end. All-in probably ~2 months and a few weeks on the farm, rendering?
We also had to work in this really annoyingly backwards workflow because KS can't export camera animations. So I'd end up setting up a shot, then send a preview of it to Arman along with the static starting position of the camera + lens/FOV/DOF details, transform/movement numbers, etc. and he'd manually recreate the same camera movements...but it's never perfect so he'd then send me HIS camera and I'd import that back into KS and manually reenter DOF details and finally we'd have a perfect match so we could composite seamlessly (between Max/VRay and KS)... ::) Haha we're scarred from this one..
Re: materials, no scans were used; everything was kind of "old school" and created inside KS with a combination of procedural patterns/displacements, generic fabric PBR's for the basic cotton/weave (can't remember from where, maybe CG Axis), custom quilt patterns/maps (the side quilt pattern was a bitch because I had to create a tileable pattern in Illustrator and then bring into PS to make displacements, normal maps, stitching/ticking patterns, etc.-- to make custom normal maps, I used ShaderMap4), etc. I'll attach a few examples of the tiles!
Well, as crazy as this whole thing sounds, I can relate to how much growth and learning occurs in these. And workflows like this expose weaknesses in tools. There's lots of good insights here in ways KeyShot could be improved too. Thanks for sharing, and kudos!
We had a long thread of emails with their support on this during the early stages, and even had a video call to try and troubleshoot what was going on (that ultimately forced us to ditch our entire interior), but we legitimately stumped every member of the support team and then everybody kind of went radio silent (I don't blame them). I could write a book on small improvements KS could implement that would make a massive impact on collaborative projects like this / stuff that would dramatically improve the scalability of the software in more of a "studio" environment. Don't even get me started on asset management haha.. But I also respect / don't underestimate the developmental challenges ahead for them on that front. I've just noticed a trajectory where a lot of folks leave the platform for C4D or similar because of some of these basic challenges as they start to scale..
@sloaneliot I have same feelings. Making anything more complex than basic product overview shots and simple camera movements in Keyshot makes things extremely hard. There is plenty of room to make soft "studio ready", I am struggling same issues as you do. Btw I never use Keyshot cameras, always import them via Alembic from Blender, it provides way better flexibility.
Could you say a few words about DoF? Did you use Keyshot inbuilt option or it was added in postproduction in After Effects?
Quote from: Kuba Grabarczyk on May 11, 2022, 12:37:47 PM
@sloaneliot I have same feelings. Making anything more complex than basic product overview shots and simple camera movements in Keyshot makes things extremely hard. There is plenty of room to make soft "studio ready", I am struggling same issues as you do. Btw I never use Keyshot cameras, always import them via Alembic from Blender, it provides way better flexibility.
Could you say a few words about DoF? Did you use Keyshot inbuilt option or it was added in postproduction in After Effects?
Haha it's always a struggle in KS!
I would prefer to do camera animations outside of KS, but often the problem is: a lot of these projects start out as still images first, so I'll do a full CMF buildout in KS and then when the client says they want animation, I get kind of stuck in KS because most object-level animation is done in KS with no way to export that (so I could animate a camera around in outside of KS). And doing complete animations (like exploded-views etc.) outside of KS and importing them has its own set of issues, esp. if you're relying on NURBS/curved parts that would otherwise read as tessellated up-close / macro. There's always a workaround, but usually with each workaround there's a secondary sacrifice to be made haha.. So I have to choose my battles!
On DoF, I usually render it in vs. using depth pass, but sometimes if render times become too high that's a nice fallback, just never produces "as good" of results. I've heard a few times that "DoF Pro" (plugin) is great, but haven't tried it yet..
ALSO: this one is key-- sometimes you have to deal with noise/graininess in DOF areas because render times to clean it up would be waaaay too high, so there's a plugin by Neat Video called Denoiser (for AE) that is absolutely stunning. You wouldn't believe how noisy all of these shots were before that, and the nice thing is, you can use the clown pass to color key out regions (via adjustment layers) and apply varying NR algorithms to different parts/shaders, where some are more problematic than others (vs. blanket application to whole frame, for example).. Def. worth looking into. :)
This is so comforting to me, someone has same issues I face :)
We always do all animations/cameras animations outside KS and import evertyhing via alembic. I do agree it brings a lot of problems and usually this is very time-consuming process. Export/import parameters optimization, dividing files for smaller etc. And it is very ineffective when we need to make some modifications, it means beasically starting from scratch with materials, importing etc.
I also used to do DoF in AE using depth pass with not very stunning results. I have to check the DoF plugin for AE too, already heard good recommendations but never had time to test it (it's not cheap btw if I remember correctly)
Thank you for denoising plug-in recommendation, I definitely need to test it. So far, I used to avoid any denoising tools as I was afraid of getting not consistent results across animation frames. If you say it's worth checking, I will give it a try, thank you,
Quote from: Kuba Grabarczyk on May 12, 2022, 01:44:47 AM
Thank you for denoising plug-in recommendation, I definitely need to test it. So far, I used to avoid any denoising tools as I was afraid of getting not consistent results across animation frames. If you say it's worth checking, I will give it a try, thank you,
Give it a try! It's a bit complicated at first so be sure to read some tutorials etc., but the idea is that you select a target region inside the frame and let it scan for the noise patterns, and then you can customize temporal filtering and a million other things-- I've found that if you're getting less than favorable results, it's usually user error, not the program haha.. Usually the default settings lean pretty heavy on NR so you'll want to play with all settings and also try Advanced Mode (tons more options there). There are some tricks for various use cases etc. but worth the effort, it has saved me a landslide of render time over the past few years..