[CG] Realistic Noise

Hi there.
This time, the question is: how to generate realistic noise ?
Ok, what do I mean ?

I mean; in the post production of a full CG work (3d); how much noise should be added, and how ?

Normally I add 2% monochrome noise, added to a new adjustment layer, and this adds quite nice effect, but thats not TOTALLY what I want.

So I thought, there may be anoy other tricky information that can improve the look of the noise, added in post – to improve realism.

Thank you.

Transformers – lighting and rendering

Hi,
Hope I got the corect sub-forum to post this.
I have been searching for discussions and information about how the lighting and rendering was done for those robots in PRman. All information I can find is more about 8K reflection map shot on set (not sure if it’s HDR pano), 30+ hours render time of each frame, and the rendering was done in a hybrid of mental ray and PRman.

I am wondering if there is specific technique to deal with those heavy hard-surface geometries, especially they are photorealistic shiny car-bots needing raytraced reflection, maybe?

Was image-based lighting used in PRman for this? If yes, how?
How did PRman address specular and glossy reflecitons? (brute-force ray tracing? environmental mapping? both?)
I saw displacement was used in the making of on DVD. But for subtle scratches/grooves on the surface, did they use bump map (or normal map?) or still displacement map?
Were those shaders custom Renderman shaders coded by ILM shader writer?
Is the approach (passes, compositing) completely different from the way they made Davy Jones? (Hard-surface vs. creature)

I will be very grateful if anyone can contribute some information.

Mudbox 2009: Quickstart Series – Part 11

In this new part of the series learn about speed concept sculpting and the magic of curves in Mudbox

El Prostibulo

Depth Pass Questions

Hi there.

I’m using cinema4d for my animations, and I want to use after effects for my depth pass, because as I know, it is a lot faster than rendering depth effects (like dof) in the 3d package itself.

Ok, here is the first question:

Is it possible to create realistic dof with a depth pass ? The plugin I hear as "the best" is fruschluft depth of field, but it has some artefects on foreground objects, which can not be fixed by tweaking plugin settings. And the default "compound blur" in ae is… Not close to anything real.

I was a plugin called "depth of field" in after effects "3d channel" effects (&presets), but I have no idea about how to use it, and I could not find any possible solution to that on net.

The second question about depth pass, is, 3d fog. I’ve used fusion before, and it has a very nice plugin called "fog3d" (deep pixel) and I’m looking for something close, to add 3d fog to my rendered scene by using the depth info in my depth layer.
Again, there is a plugin called "Fog 3d" in "3d channel" effects in after effects, but once again, I2m unsure how it can be used… it doesnt even have a setting to select the depth layer..

The last question – and hardest (for me) to explain, is, again a depth effect; which we can see on digital cameras "while taking photo or etc".
I knew this effect could be made, but did not see any examples so far, and could not explain to anyone; but; a nice video by aixsponze did that; and here is a screenshot

as you can see, as the objects go further from camera, they start to have "blue" and "red" lines at their left and right, which is VERY close to a real optical effect on a digital camera shot.
I’m wonderig how something like this can be achieved using a depth layer (and I guess it is achieved with that only !).

Ok. I know this is quite long, but I tried to -not to- keep this post boring as it becomes longer.
Time to shut up.

Waiting for answers, thanks for reading.

WSJ on Watchmen fx

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Ben Snow on Iron Man

ILM vfx supe Ben Snow discusses Iron Man environment effects in this Post Magazine video.

Pro Juice TV – Great Site for Beginners & Advanced

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Check it out at Pro Juice

We’ve got heaps of cool tutorials coming up including: how to make mortal combat style energy balls, colour grading techniques, day for night, how to build twitch style effects from the ground up and more.

reading out pixel values

i have a question
is it possible to read out a pixel value of the red-channel at a specific position like x100 y100 with an expression.
the value should be linked to a spinner that updates automatically on every frame.

thanks for your help

Discussion Forums for Autodesk Smoke

hi.. is there any discussion forums for smoke artists?