Ring animation

[guest84672]

Here's our first contribution - the beta testers may have seen this one already.

Jeff McCartney did this one. He added a little lens flare action in Blender, and the logo in After Effects.

[Zander85]

very cool. I am working on one myself right now. Taking my time with it though but I can't wait to share.

[guest84672]

Please do when you are finished!

[Zander85]

Thomas I am gonna throw this question your way, (hopefully you don't mind).

I want to give my ring animation a distinct look (basically not your average, neutral color lighting set up). My boss likes the brown so I need to create some interesting light rigs for each shot, but what I really need to do is create a neutral light rig which can be used across all of my four different shots to keep the shots looking consistent, but I need to build upon that to make each shot unique and interesting. My problem is that the light rigs I create to make the metals on the rings look good does not work for the diamonds. And I can't just keep adding lights to make the diamonds light up without ruining the look that I am after for the metal. What I really need to do is create a separate light rig for the diamonds but then the dilemma is how do I superimpose those diamonds on top of the rendered metal(but remember the prongs need to be on top of the diamonds, yet the bottoms of the diamonds need to remain embedded within the shank)?  I need the ability to create a selection somehow for the diamonds.

Any ideas as to how I can combine two different rendered animations of inter-woven parts (the diamonds and the shank)?

Hope this wasn't too wordy and confusing for you. I am doing my best to remain clear. 

[Zander85]

I was trying to think of clever work arounds but still have yet to come up with a solution. I thought about using the diamonds to bolean difference the metal part of the ring and then simply rendering those, but then put the diamonds below those but because the parts are interwoven this will not work. And I cannot bolean the diamonds because their look relies completely on the geometry of the model. 

[Josh3D]

Hi Zander. what version  are you using? Have you tried specular maps? http://keyshot.com/keyshot3/manual/texturing/specular_maps.html

[Zander85]

I am currently using Keyshot version 3.0.93

Spec maps wont really do it for me unfortunately (its a good idea but not really a solution for me because I need to render so many rings and I dont want to have to uv my models or create spec maps for all the rings and shots I need to do). I need some way of creating a selection between two "inter-woven" parts. That way I can use two separate HDRIs for my scene. Sorry I don't mean to pin you down if there is no easy solution. I was just thinking you might know of some technique that I was not yet aware of. 

[guest84672]

I'll have to ask our digital media artists Brian and Jeff if the can think of anything.

[Zander85]

Actually I just figured out a clever work around. Okay So I have here a ring (rendering as a 32 bit tiff so I can remove the background). I modified an emitter material and adjusted the colors and unchecked the mapping. I basically made it into a flat shade material that will not show up in reflections or shadows.

This new material needs to be a bright color that has not been used in the rest of the scene because the next step will be to generate an "action" in photoshop (automated set of steps). So now I can render out this scene (animation), then render out the diamonds alone for this scene with their hdri. And then I will run the "action" and basically have photoshop remove all the yellow from the first set of renders (bye using select by color range, select the yellow and then delete). This way I can just composite all the frames together on top of one another in after effects, and booooom there goes the dynamite!

Should work. Now I just need a couple of days to make sure it works.

[guest84672]

You may want to use the flat material for this. I thought about this, but it will require to do this for every frame, correct?

[Zander85]

well the reason the flat material does not work is because it does not yield a clean selection for me because the color gets reflected back in the metal shank. And there is no way to turn that off using the plan "flat" material.

So I used my new technique on 2 separate frames and it works great! Only problem is I still need to run my "action" on each frame in photoshop. Today was my first time using an "Action" in photoshop. I should be able to automate the process even more, but its pretty awesome to come up with an idea and have it work (even if its not as fast as it probably could be).

[guest84672]

Good point re: reflection. This is cool, though.

[Zander85]

And I just watched this on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmAJaWELViA

It shows you how to "batch" files. Which allows me to run my recorded "Action" on any number of files, all through automation. This will make this process viable. 

[Zander85]

KS renders the diamonds much faster without the metal. I think this might actually make up for the time lost by compiling the renders semi-manually.

[Ed]

That should work Zander.  The Photoshop "Actions" will probably go pretty fast.

For the next evolution in your workflow, you may want to try the After Effects color key (Green Screen, or in your case "Yellow Screen" to chroma key out the green screen to replace the original diamonds with the 2nd HDRI animated diamonds.  You may find doing it all in AE gives more control over the edges and the quality of blending the two animation compositions.

Note: You'll want to use the Keylight plugin from the AE menu:  Effect > Keying > Keylight

Keylight is a plug-in that comes bundled with After Effects.  Lots of tutorials on the web.

Ed