Nèstor Prado

Working all day trying to recreate the real world… it’s nice to see the beautiful complexity of it.

Today I’m going to give a book recommendation for anyone who is into lighting being for fine arts, photography or CG. Light for Visual Artists by Richard Yot

Like 3 years ago when I was starting to get serious about becoming a CG Lighter I tried to find as many resources as I could through the internet. Books, blogs, anything really. There are a lot of resources but most of them seem to touch on lighting from a very fixed perspective: photography manuals, lighting for films and tv, or lighting for CG…

I remember I stumbled upon this artist’s website: Itchy Animation by Richard Yot. In his tutorial section he had created these great Chapters about lighting in general and for digital artists.

It was a really clear, straightforward and to the point resource, with simple schematics of all different types of light, shadows and such. And I read through all of it at the time. I even made it into a little document that I carried around for reference.

At that time he had a note saying that he would turn this into a book in the future and that it would be more complete and so-forth. I had it in my Amazon Wishlist for years and I never got around to getting it. So my surprise was today when I found it on my doorstep as a gift given to me because of the “Diada de Sant Jordi” (Gràcies Inés!)

What I think that makes this book a good companion for anyone who wants to learn more about lighting or just to brush up on some concepts is that it is very easy and well structured, and the whole content is original made by Richard Yot, which I think is amazing. All the little diagrams, renders and pictures are Richard’s and that gives it that special almost “handcrafted” feel to it.

Diagrams of different types and qualities of light.

Exercises for beginners with original diagrams and artwork.

So I would recommend going to his site and checking out the resource and if you like it and want a extended version just buy it. And if you want to check out his work on Behance: behance.net/richardyot

Well! That is all for now! I have a lot of things that I want to write about but only in time when I can talk a little more about them! (I can only say it involves a very important space ship … :D )

So… lately there has been quite a buzz about GPU/CPU real time ray tracing and the possibilities this will open for games, but also for films and commercials as well as for animation.

Two of the main contenders are Octane from OTOY. An unbiased rendering application that is GPU driven and is proving to give very impressive results. It is both standalone and has versions for Maya and Max (these last ones support animation and thus, motion-blur).

(Click on the image to go to a fxguide post about Octane)

The other one starting to be well known is Isotropix Clarisse iFX that released a PLE beta for Windows and Linux and is planning to soon release a version for mac (at that point I’ll definitively give it a try). Clarisse is not only a render system but includes tools for scene set-up and asset management as well as a whole 32-bit compositing package.

(Click on the image to go to an old fxguide post about Clarisse)

Another to take a look at is TeamUp Technologies Inc. TeamUp A multiplatform collaboration tool that uses Cloud powered Multi-Optics® rendering technology that is also real-time. Here is a teaser I watched a while back.

And finally if you are new to real time ray-tracing and you want to get a quick look at what it could do for you check out this webgl page that allows you to play around with a real time path tracer. It’ll give you a feel for what it is to work with a real time ray tracer.

http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/

Personally I think this opens a whole new world of possibilities in terms of lighting and look-dev. Faster turnover means faster iterations which leaves more time for tweaking your lighting and rendering to take it to the next level. Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these renderers and play with it to see what I can come up with in a very short amount of time!

more@nestorprado.com

After taking a break from everything these lasts weeks and moving to San Francisco, at least for the holidays I saw this video and I wanted to share because I’ve been leaving the blog a little a side :D

This is totally my kind of shots, I’m a sucker for the slow-motion-macro look and I always enjoy them. I’ve been always finding excuses why not to do one, but eventually I’ll get the right one to work on. 

Also, who doesn’t enjoy a good behind the scenes and breakdown!

Cheers to Neon for rocking it with this little piece, you made my day :P

More @ nestorprado.com

Final project of my Masters Degree. 

Full detailed breakdown can be found HERE

http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Control-Room-(Plus-Breakdown)/5739127

Today I had some fun with my Nikon D7000 + Nikon 10.5 mm Fisheye Lens and the manfrotto QTVR with 360º Tactical VR. 

After that I’ve spent the afternoon assembling these HDR panoramas and testing them out. So here are three interior HDR’s that I give to you if you want them :D

Interior 1: Montgomery Hall Classroom

[DOWNLOAD Unclipped HDR Panorama]

Interior 2: Montgomery Hall: Byte Cafe

[DOWNLOAD Unclipped HDR Panorama]

Interior 3: Montgomery Hall: Parking Lot.

[DOWNLOAD Unclipped HDR Panorama]

It was nice to try it out and learn the best workflow for shooting with these elements and then being able to build the HDR spheric panoramas in a quick and efficient way.

Enjoy! And if you use them and want to photo-reply or send your results feel free to do so!

UPDATE: Nov-03

This is a little test with the environment 2 that I made this afternoon.

more @ nestorprado.com

It’s nice to read something that gives you assurance on your beliefs, and when it comes to CG lighting… I couldn’t agree with this interview more…

I always try to stress this to people that I talk about this too and although it might seem obvious, people who are beginning to learn this art form aren’t fully aware of what they are really learning. It’s not about how this program works or what hacks I have to do to light an egg to match it to a live action one. It’s a lot more than that. And learning the tools that closely and more accurately mimic the behavior is a must, but in any case it is only the beginning…. 

Some quotes from the article that might make you interested in reading it:

[…] is there a difference between the way live-action DPs approach lighting and what we do in the computer?

(On the question: what do you look for in a lighter?) 

For full CG, I’d look for good artistic sensibility along with the technical skills you look for in any lighter.

Pixar’s Jeremy Vickery told me that he’d like to get to the point where he could recruit people with a background in cinematography or illustration, not CG software.

I could not agree with this more:

Lighting workflow wants to mimic live-action cinematography more closely. Fewer CG cheats will be required, and you will want to constrain yourself to what’s possible on a real set. In other words, you won’t want to place your area light underneath the floor and turn shadows off: that sort of thing. 

So it was refreshing to read this article and I hope you find it useful as well.

Little video explaining how basic re-lighting in NukeX can be achieved. This is a simple render made in a hurry in Mental Ray… Please disregard the poor shader work as it the default shader used to illustrate the concept.

This post is a step by step on how to unlock the power of Mental Ray in Maya 2012.

This post shows how to set up a Unified Sampling workflow using Mental Ray and Maya 2012. 

This is nothing new there is a lot of stuff around the web about it. I’m just trying to condense it as much as possible as I have been using this workflow for one of my projects and it has become THE workflow to use for any project I use Mental Ray. 

Unified Sampling

For those of you who have heard about Unified Sampling you might think it’s kind of a mythical creature, something that parents tell their kids that they once saw. Well it’s is indeed real and it works like a charm! :D

I’m not going to go into any technical details on what it is or why it is beneficial to you. I will say that if you don’t know what a mia material is or you still use spotlights to light EVERY-SINGLE-THING in the world, even if your are trying to do some physically accurate lighting… then stay away from this.

The advantages it has when using mia materials with this workflow is that you do not have to worry any more about samples. Not even with lights…. In fact when you set up unified sampling the Anti-Aliasing controls from the render settings no longer work! So that means no more people setting up Fixed Sampling of min 4 and max 6 without knowing what they’re doing!!! Thank god for that…

Anyway let’s get to the chase. To unlock the power of unified sampling you should use this handy code:

UnifiedSampling.mel

(I think i got this code from here, although I’m not sure because I’ve read a million things about unified sampling in these last months…)

This will create a few String options in the Mental Ray defaults. Once you’ve done that make sure to change your primary renderer to Raytracing:

Here you can see the options (panel on the right). Basically using unified sampling is like turning a quality knob. The more you increase the samples quality number the less grain you’ll have but the more time it’ll take. (It’ll never take as much time as setting fixed sampling to ridiculous samples…). This approach to managing the quality of your renders this way is very similar to using Adaptice DMC in Vray, so those who are used to that, this should be fairly quickly to pick up.

And that is basically it! You have it set up! Go try it! It is truly awesome in my view and the results it has given me are amazing.

So how do I take Full advantage of this!?!?!

Well… in terms of shaders: USE MENTAL RAY MATERIALS!!!… Because they are easier to use, and now even easier because you don’t even have to worry about glossy samples! Leave them at 1 always! Unified sampling will take care of the rest.

In terms of lights? USE AREA LIGHTS! But not normal crappy expensive area lights… Cool  ”more physically accurate” Mental Ray Area lights.

• Set up Decay to Quadratic
• Mental Ray shadows with everything to 1 (unified sampling will take care of it!)
• And Enable the Use Light Shape check box in the Mental Ray>Area Light tab.

And thaaaaat is how you do that! :D

Well I hope this helps… it definitely took some time to figure out the fool-proof approach for all of this but I hope this helps people get a little love back for mental ray if you have no other option left…

To read all about Unified Sampling check out http://elementalray.wordpress.com/ These guys are awesome and have a tone of stuff on this topic. That is why I’m not going to copy all of their info in this post! Go take a look at it!

Also I recommend creating a couple of buttons in your shelf for setting up this workflow easily. And use the command:

select miDefaultOptions;

To acces the string options that will allow you to change the render parameters of unified sampling. Yes it will not appear in your render settings in maya 2012. 

This has been my first approach at building a gizmo inside of NukeX 6.3v8.

The idea behind this gizmo has to do with the experience gained coding my Light Contribution Manager Tool. Having different lighting passes you are able to control the final look of the lighting within Nuke without having to re-render anything. Changes like intensity (Exposure) of some light pass or color can be easily and non-destructively changed in post.

But having all the nodes for each light pass can rapidly clutter your node graph. This is where the “LayerManager” gizmo comes into place. Here is a quick view of what it does and how it can be used.

This is the basic properties view of the Layer Manager. Basically it groups the most important controls for handling the different light passes: Exposure and Color.

With these simple controls you can combine different lighting passes and have all the control you need right in one node, instead of fetching around for nodes when you only want to change a simple value.

Case study 1: Fast visual development

To give an example of why this could be useful let’s take a look at this “fictitious” scenario. Let’s say we are in a production and we are in the Concept/Visual Development stage. So the Concept artists come up with some visual scenarios and the Art Director and/or Director want to start seeing what some models will look like in these environment to see if they’ll work.

Using a stock model from Infinite Realities I created a simple 8 light rig in Maya and rendered each light separately making sure the SSS shader was set up correctly to prevent adding up the Sub-Surface incorrectly. Those renders where brought into Nuke and piped into the “Layer Manager”.

This is what the final node graph looked like.

I then proceeded to find 3 backgrounds and try to match the lighting of the model rendered using only the layer manager.

Here are three results created in a matter of minutes.

As we can see, even-though in no way perfect, these images suffice as a proof of concept to determine if the three environments will work for the Art Director or if they won’t.

Well, this is all for now! It is one of the many application this little gizmo can do and I will surely use it for some upcoming projects. 

What is this?

This is a solution for capturing light probes for integrating CG objects into a scene with one single photograph. No HDR photo-bracketing required.

Why is this important?

As we well know shooting HDR’s for live action integration is a tedious process. Whether you are using the most rudimentary approaches of shooting mirror ball and gray ball references or you are using other techniques like fisheye lenses or a spheron etc… it isn’t a one click instant solution.

Tedious = Time and Time is the thing that you are bound to have the least in a production set. So trying to photograph HDR environments of sets can become sometimes an impossible task.

For this reason the paper presented at this years Siggraph 2012 in LA from the ICT Lab led by investigator and HDR Guru Paul Debevec is a very interesting approach of extracting lighting information from a set or scene with a one click intant solution.

How does this work?

Basically you take a single RAW picture of this new handcrafted mirror ball + gray ball + color checker and with this single image and some math you can reverse engineer the actual intensity value of lights in the scene even if they are clipped in the picture.

The image on the left is what this new mirror ball looks like. As you can see it is a mirror ball that has been cut into quadrants and then has been mounted on a cross of plexiglass sheets that have then been sprayed with grey photographic primer 32%.

The image on the right is a simple reconstruction that I did as a proof of concept just taking the picture on the right and reconstructing the mirror ball. As you might have guessed by now the quadrants of the mirror ball have the sufficient overlap to not create artifacts. So this means that you basically need 4 mirror balls to create one of these single shot mirror balls :D.

Paul Debevec talking about this aspect in an interview in fxguide was saying that there is a little bit of parallax from having to reconstruct the mirror ball from the 4 overlapping quadrants, but that parallax is about 2-3 cm so it’s not a tremendous deal and doesn’t create noticeable artifacts. 

The Results

These images are also from the fxguide article talking about this development. As we can see the results are really really close… amazingly close if you take into account the time spent in taking a single shot light probe with this method and a normal light probe with 7 bracketed exposures. 

This next series of images shows how from the single shot light probe the light intensities and colors of the light sources in the scene have been solved (images 2 and 3) and finally the fourth image is a CG recreation of the light probe proving that the method works.

Is this magic?

No… actually it’s a really simple and elegant mathematical solution. (So maybe we can call that magic :D)

After reading the paper from siggraph I think I got a little bit more of an understanding of the math behind all this that makes this possible. (even dough my math abilities are a little rusty from my undergrad) 

The whole importance of this paper is resumed in this formula:

Where:

  is the Irradiance sample on point 

 is the Lambertian Combolution of 

 is the direction vector from the gray strips at angles  and optionally 

 is the direction vector from the center of the clipped light i in Probe P

 is the intensity of light i (this are the unknowns that we are trying to solve) 

 is the clamped cosine of the direction vector from the center of light i and the direction vector of gray strip j

This is an image I’ve put together to better understand the elements in this formula. The white arrows represent the direction vectors from the different gray ball strips. The ones on the right represent the vectors at a +45 and -45 angles and the ones on the right represent the optional +75 and -75. Bare in mind that these vectors are used on both sides of the gray ball strips. The orange arrows represent the direction vectors from the center of the light sources. 

As we can see the formula leaves us with a linear system of m equations with n number of unknown light intensities . Solving this system will provide us with the correct intensities of the lights in the scene without having to have sampled the un-clipped intensity of the lights (no HDR bracketing required). 

This is is a real clever method of acquiring light intensities using the help of a grey ball. It’s a combined method that might seem trivial but that I’m sure a lot of work has gone into discovering this method. 

Conclusions

As said by Debevec himself this method does not provide a better result than traditional methods (it doesn’t intend to replace any of the old ones). But it is a much much quicker solution of acquiring lighting information from a scene which is what gives it an edge that in my view is the most important thing.

This method would be perfect of integrating objects that aren’t that reflective or that have non-glossy reflections as the light probe that you get out of this method isn’t going to have the best resolution and reflection detail you would want for really reflective objects, but I’m sure that a lot of us would sign right now between having a plate with no lighting information or having a picture of this in the set :D

That is about it folks! I hope this has interested you and feel free to share comment or read more about it!

more@nestorprado.com

This past week I’ve been painstakingly UVing in maya some hard surface models that I’ve modeled for a new project I’m working on. One thing I found is that having a lot of repeated objects (for example buttons) transfering the UVs from one to the other was easy enough. Just go to Mesh > Transfer Attributes > Option Box and with the default options just change Sample space to Component in the Attribute Settings Tab and your set to go.

The problem comes when you have a million objects. You can’t do it in one go… You have to go object by object and do the same steps over and over again.

Luckily with the magic of python I wrote this trivial script that will do this for you. Just select the first object that has the correct UVs an then select all the other ones that you want to transfer the UVs to. 

You’ll turn this:

into this:

With the click of a button (that button being the script in your shelf :D)

Well These next lines are what do it, you’ll see it’s so trivial that you’ll say I could’ve come up with that… :D So if you wanted here it is for you!

import maya.cmds as cm

#grab all the selected objects

selectedObjects = cm.ls(sl=True)

#save first one into variable

#pop first one out of the selected objects list

driver = selectedObjects.pop(0)

#for each object in the selected objects list

for object in selectedObjects:

    cm.select([driver,object])

    #transfer attributes

    cm.transferAttributes(sampleSpace=4,transferUVs=2, transferColors=2 )

That’s it for today folks if you want to check more Programming stuff for maya just visit my programming portfolio or at nestorprado.com

Enjoy!

Ever since I saw the first magazine apps for the iPad I dreamed of having a Cinefex magazine app for it. I thought it made so much sense. Since the beginning Cinefex has been THE vfx related magazine. It always has great insight on the years biggest VFX productions with in depth interviews with some of the greatest VFX supervisors and crews of the industry.

The thing is while the information in this magazine is priceless and insightful you still want to see the finished result and those breakdowns that we all love. So the iPad really would give that possibility of beautiful images and breakdowns that the user can experience in a great device.

So in the last issue of Cinefex I saw that they were preparing the iPad app and I was really excited about it. And just yesterday I saw a post that ILM posted on their facebook page saying it was finally out. Of course, I had to see for my self and got home and downloaded it.

Now I’ll do a little review about the app :D

When you open the app this is what you get. All the covers of this amazing magazine sorted by year. There is the available column and the my issues column that represent the issues you’ve downloaded.

Once you click on one of your issues (after buying and downloading it) you acces the contents. The first page is the cover of the magazine and if you tap on it you get the menu bar that we now explain.

• The first icon will return you back to the Cinefex home screen
• The arrow icons will help you cycle from one page or the other but you can also do so by swiping across.
• The watch icon is the history that saves the pages you’ve just visited. I guess it can be used like a bookmark-ish kind-of feature.
• The next icon is the one you see on the previous capture. It is an index of the articles so you can directly go to an article of your choice
• The last icon of this bunch is to see an expanded view of the magazine contents. Let’s see the next capture to get a good grasp of what this means

As we can see in this view, this allows us to see all the contents of the magazine. At this point the magazine is structured in a very simple way. There are the:

• Ads: which are a single page and some of them with interactive content such as promotional videos or showreels in the cases of studio ads
• The articles: which are basically a cover page, the text article itself, and the images and breakdowns that are mostly mentioned in the article text. The Text bit is the long piece you see in the image above. You basically read through it by scrolling up and down until you finish it and move on to the images and breakdowns.

• Another feature of the magazine is the search feature that allows you to search for contents within that issue of the magazine.

This view is a combined view (not what you actually see on the magazine) of the images and breakdowns part of the article. There are some images that you can cycle through the various stages of production of the effect, and in some cases even see some lovely video breakdowns that are always welcomed.

And that is about it! So in my opinion this totally what I was looking for! The issues are cheaper than the normal tri-monthly magazine that normally runs about $12.50. The electronic issues are $5 dollars or you can do a yearly subscription to get all of them for $19.

Lastly you can see the video that Cinefex has put together explaining the App. Oh and by the way Issue 127 is FREE so just for that it is worth downloading the app and the issue and seing the amazing effects created for Captain America, Cowboys and Aliens, Anonymus and Harry Potter 7.2! So enjoy thanks to the Cinefex team!

more @ nestorprado.com

Facial tracking with Face Shift and Microsoft Kinect

Initial tests with Face Tracker and the Microsoft Kinect - The 3D Model adapts itself to the user’s face via a brief configuration process, tracking various facial features and recognizing gestures such as pursed lips or raised eyebrows, as well as independent eye tracking. This data can be broadcast via OSC, and the program can be configured to run with Maya.

This looks like some amazing tests from the people at Süperfad. 

If you love High-Speed Video you will love how The Marmalade captures it! In the first half of this video they explain how they handle capturing those incredible moments and talk about the craftmanship and gadgets they build to achieve their unique and precise look. The second half of the video of the video is a showcase of their best work!

Enjoy!

Insane cinematic from French Studio Unit Image for the game Zombie U

The other day I was setting up my Maya 2012 Prefs on my new Mac and I was going crazy trying to find the prefs folder that maya has to set up your shelves and marking menus if you have any custom ones.

So the deal is that basically that folder is in a directory that in Lion is hidden by default… so basically you have to set up Finder to display hidden files and then you can put them in there.

To make finder see hidden folders you can open up a terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

And then relaunch Finder. When you do you’ll see that all the hidden folders are now accesible:

Then you can navigate to your maya prefs folder and deposit what you need on it:

/Users/<you-userName>/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2012-x64/prefs

Once you are done you can use the command that you used before in the terminal with NO instead of YES to restore the look of your finder. Or if the look of a unix folder system doesn’t scare you just leave it.

Hope this helps!

Here is the second part of the LCMT series! For those of you who didn’t read the first post, LCMT is a little utility tool that helps lighters in maya manage the contribution of the lights or light groups in their scenes. 

It also lets the artist easily create render layers in maya with these different light groups and/or lights.

This next video shows some more of these capabilities. Specially managing the light contribution of the different lights in the scene and the render layer creation phase.

I hope you find this helpful and hope that you might want to know more about it or even try it. If so go on to the LCMT v 3.3 page and read all about it’s functionalities and advantages that are current implemented in this release.

Hi there! The summer is starting and I just finished my first year at the Savannah College of art And Design. 

In these couple of weeks I want to talk about some of the work that I’ve done in this last quarter. The first thing I want to talk about is the LCMT.

LCMT stands for Light Contribution Management Tool. It is basically a tool for lighters that use Maya to light. The main premise of the tool is allowing the artist to take full control of his lighting setup and having the ability to clearly and easily view and modify the contribution of each light in the scene or the different groups of lights in the scene.

Here is a little video showing it’s functionalities. 

Next post will also talk about LCMT and will give more insight about how it works with another video and where you can find all about it!

For those who were under a rock today and haven’t had the chance to read this, it is one of the best articles about Rendering techniques and the state of the art in terms of rendering.

So head on out to FXguide.com and read this awesome article:

The Art of Rendering