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Heroes Community > Other Side of the Monitor > Thread: the future of 3d/cg creation and use
Thread: the future of 3d/cg creation and use This thread is 2 pages long: 1 2 · NEXT»
fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted April 09, 2018 09:23 AM

the future of 3d/cg creation and use

i have mentioned before, at how, if not already, 3d/cg can be used against people, to push an agenda. that if not already, eventually we would have graphics so real, that media propaganda could be manufactured without any real-life connection whatsoever. the practical applications and uses of such technology are HUGE; and in no way limited to mere artistry for artistry's sake.

now, we've all seen great and realistic graphics in movies, so this is really nothing new. but i wanted to pinpoint this one artist, and his talent(and more than that, that others are quite capable of the same kind of work), to better drive my point home(which i'm sure, here at hc, will be largely ignored or argued with, regardless).

well, check this guy out. he(christoph schindelar) uses a program called cinema4d along with octane render and hdr lightstudio to do his spot-on realistic work.

his article in it's entirety(which is an interview):

Quote:
Introduction

Hi, my name is Christoph Schindelar. I’m a professional 3D-Artist (generalist), trainer and developer of the real-displacement-textures. Actually I live and work in Vienna / Austria, where I enjoy the city and the good network we have here.

When people ask me, how I came to work in the CG-business, I am always reminded of id- software’s Doom. Doom was my first ego-shooter and ID provided a free level-editor that made me freak out. I spent more time on level-, sound- and monster-creation than on the game itself. That was at the age of 12. I guess you can say I grew up with that stuff.

After DOOM editor, came the Descent Level Editor and later the Unreal Editor (the very first one) with a lot more freedom to create environments.

After playing around with those game-engines for some years, I turned my attention to Blender, 3ds Max and finally in 2004, when I started studying at the local SAE, I discovered Cinema4D, which remains to be the software I’m mainly working with to this very day. In 2007, parallel to my work as audio-engineer for local TV-studios, I started working on my first professional CG-projects. Since then I have worked for many local companies, mostly as independent freelancer, but also as part of teams on various assignments.

I finished hundreds of arch viz projects, animations and stills, RT-stuff, camera and motion- trackings, fluid-simulations, modeling-projects and scans.

Furthermore I work as a trainer for CG-Shop, which pushes me forward more than anything else, because I’m forced to describe WHY things work the way they do.

The Production of High-Quality 3D Models

There are certain plugins and tools that provide excellent solutions for specific tasks, but it’s not only that. Different artist have different preferences.

My standard setup involves Cinema4D and Octane Render, which is used for about 80% of my work. These two are both extremely fast. C4D has one of the best structured layouts I know, which speeds up my working-process immensely and Octane Render, in combination with good nvidia graphic-cards, is maybe the fastest physically based render-engine on the market. If you combine these two with HDR-Lightstudio you get an amazing realtime product-design-studio.

Most of the time I try to rely on plugins within my main host, because this allows me to interact with all available parameters of the host-program. For example trees moving on collisions. For this approach I use DepitPlants. But if I just need a still plant, I’d use ThePlantFactory (e-on software) or SpeedTree, because they are much more versatile (with the disadvantage, that it’s not easy to create any interaction with simulations inside my host.) One tip: modeling artists should definitely look into voxel-engines like the one in 3D Coat. They give you the freedom of polygonfree workflows. You can easily add and subtract volumes, without caring about the polyflow and in addition you get an automatic-retopo tool for finalizing and export of your model. 3D-Coat also offers a painter, but in my opinion Quixel is better for painting. It works as plugin directly inside photoshop and allows you to use all the standard photoshop features and more.

For cloth I recommend Marvelous Designer, for fluids RealFlow (now available as C4D Plugin!), for Sculpting 3D-Coat, for hard surface modelling or archviz I use Rhino and Cinema4D, for scattering CarbonScatter or Vue, for landscaping World Machine, for rendering Octane Render, for tracking Syntheyes, for texture/layer production Substance, for compositing AfterEffects or Nuke, for realtime-stuff Unreal or Unity…

There are a lot more tools I use in my standard workflow, some of them even custom coded. I simply love playing with new features and programs. It’s the combination of these features and thinking outside of the box that often produces unexpected and magnificent results.

Texturing

The knowledge of physical principals helps a lot!! You should know how photons react with different structures. To setup a base-material, I use 1-2 backlights (for reflections) and some kind of ambient light (for orientation). The look of the material is strongly dependent on the lightsources, so I try to use natural light-values and keep it simple for good handling.

First I import the color (diffuse) to see what I’ve got.

Then I set the color to black (reflections are most apparent on black background) and tweak the roughness while I have the glossiness on 100%.

Make sure you start with the roughness (defines how blurry a reflection is), because the glossiness masks out a lot of information. Now I tweak the glossiness to define how strong reflections are (per pixel).

After that, I bring the color-map back and start tweaking again while moving the light. Octane Render works awesome for this task, same as Substance or Quixel.

Now I’ve got good physically oriented base material, where I can start to setup bumps or normal, displacements, parametric features like dirt or worn edges and much more.

Real-Displacement-Textures

I originally created the textures for the sole purpose of using them in my own productions. As mentioned before the combination of various tools led to the results.

The beginning of RDT: One of my favorite fields is modeling landscapes, which requires a tremendous amount of scattering. Since I also work with tracking and photogrammetry I noticed I could use surface scans with displacements as a foundation (f.e. gravel) instead of scattered objects. Then I started to develop a workflow to make these scans tileable. First I experimented with 123D-catch by Autodesk, but soon switched to Agisoft Photoscan, which allows you to tweak every parameter, but it’s biggest advantage is the possibility to align several different scans to produce one big one. The main disadvantage that comes with photoscan is it eats up a lot of memory (sometimes more than 100GB). One last tip: The quality of your scans is highly dependent on the quality of your photographs. At the moment we use 42,5MP cameras with 35mm fixed lenses.

My main motivation is to provide textures at maximum quality, no matter how difficult the development process is, at a fair price. Since I’m an artist myself I understand the necessities of the product. I think, at the moment, we are the only one providing 8K textures with a “real” scanned 16bit depth-map including roughness-, glossiness-, high-gloss-, AO-, bump-, normal- and a nice delighted diffuse albedo-map. This makes our textures very flexible in use.

Within my productions as an artist, RDTs have saved me from countless hours of work and delivered extremely realistic results.

Another amazing feature of RDTs, is their ability to use them as brushes for sculpting and texture-painting. (f.e. SubstancePainter allows you to use depth, color and roughness at the same time on one brush).

One of the main development goals of the computer industry is realism. Right now there are new developments within multiple divisions such as texture streaming solutions (f.e. by Granite or Amplify-Textures) enabling you to process the huge amount of information provided by photogrammetry. At the same time shading quality of engines is rapidly improving – nearly all engines support PBR.

Also VR-solutions are getting more and more popular. This makes future animations so realistic they become more than simple games. Imagine students in the future could experience history instead of simply learning about it. It would allow them to travel to historic places, even those that don’t exist anymore. It can be used for therapeutic methods f.e. to fight a fear of heights and more. The possibilities are endless.

I see myself as a small part within this development.

To answer your last question, no they’re not too heavy, with our set of layers, you have the possibility to tweak materials for nearly all engines. You can start with the simplest setup, just using the color and normal-map in 4k and it will look great and run even on a smartphone, but you can also go as far as using PBR including displacement to reconstruct the surface and make it look like a very high detailed photo-realistic object. We’ve got demos online – feel free to check them out – like the new UE4 demo.

The Future of Photogrammetry

Everyone interested in realism, has an eye on photogrammetry. (By the way, this technique was first announced in 1860 in a German architecture-paper – finally it’s Pythagoras but nowadays combined with modern optical tracking algorithms) Consequently we are digitalizing the world around us.

In my opinion, at the moment, good photogrammetry scans deliver better results than many of the highly expensive laser-scanners. Take a look at modern full-body-scanners. They also have the advantage to capture a whole object within less than a second.

Maybe if laser scanning gets more affordable, we will combine these two techniques in the future. Meaning you scan the surface depth with the laser (that isn’t affected by transparency) and add images with high-resolution made with photo-cameras (in Agisoft you can match both).

I think, one of the reasons why photo-scanned objects look so good, are very small micro shadows baked into the diffuse map. These shadows are so small that a normal engine would not be able to calculate it in reasonable time, but all together they make the difference. What’s the advantage of tileable scanned materials? You can map them onto any convenient geometry and it will look as if it was scanned.

I do not think texture-artists fear the loss of their jobs, it’s the opposite, I see RDTs as an extension of their arsenal. Many of my clients are texture artists and seem to be highly content with the product. By the way we are partners of Allegorithmic (Substance).

Right now we are working on over 60 new scans of forest, floors, barks, roots, moss, leaves and more, with incredible details and are aiming to release them this Year. We also had the idea to develop a scan-robot, that does the photo-job fully automatically and should be available at low cost. I’m very happy about my recent success. It’s the best motivation to go on with the RDT- project.


and, some of his artwork(it is important to note, that the following aren't real pictures, but his art):

























now, it doesn't take a genius to understand that this kind of tech isn't needed to convince the dumb/compliant/willingly ignorant masses of anything whatsoever. that goes without saying.

the point of this thread, and the reason i brought this up, is for everyone else: you can no longer believe your own eyes; as long as what you see is on a screen of any kind.

AND, with the ever-improving holographic tech, soon, you won't be able to believe what you see, period.


just some food for thought. do with it what you will. i expect people to argue in response, as that seems to be popular online(and everywhere, indeed), despite reality.

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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted April 09, 2018 09:42 AM
Edited by fred79 at 09:46, 09 Apr 2018.

here's another nice batch of extremely realistic art from a different artist(you can stop after the jungle work, because the artist's work just goes right off a cliff after that).

i swear, if humans get their snow together, we have a helluva bright future for gaming/movies, and life in general.

my guess is, next up on the virtual reality agenda, will be "smell-o-vision"(we already have tech for our sense of touch). i have no doubt we will eventually be able to recreate reality, all contained in a body suit/capsule/helmet that you can wear. pair that with a life support system(and our ever-developing tech to elongate human life), and you have an infinite future of any life you want.

until the sun dies out/we get hit by a massive meteor, etc; anyway.

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blizzardboy
blizzardboy


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Nerf Herder
posted April 09, 2018 10:07 AM
Edited by blizzardboy at 10:11, 09 Apr 2018.

I will have a harem of 6,000,000 people with fins and animal tails and 3 boobs, etc.
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."

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blob2
blob2


Undefeatable Hero
Blob-Ohmos the Second
posted April 09, 2018 10:08 AM
Edited by blob2 at 10:41, 09 Apr 2018.

Aren't people kinda already being manipulated? Realistic graphics aside, it doesn't take much to make an uproar with fake photos or hoaxes?

There's another concept that might be exploited in the not so far future. It would be a part of social engineering, and supposedly in the future when cyborgs androids will become even more human-like they will make people develop feelings for them and use it to gain some advantages like extracting sensitive information or gaining their protection etc. Just another example of using "fake" (object for dispute in case of robots and AI) things to manipulate reality.

We already have "relationships" with robots. What's more interesting, I've seen examples of "human" couples in which for instance one partner accepts that his second half has romantic relations with a robot/cyborg android.

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artu
artu


Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
posted April 09, 2018 10:14 AM

fred79 said:
the point of this thread, and the reason i brought this up, is for everyone else: you can no longer believe your own eyes; as long as what you see is on a screen of any kind.


Merkel Trump Deepfake

Of course, such things will mostly be detectable by experts in cases when things come down to courts but yes, in this post-truth age when people sometimes almost willingly prefer fake news over reality to stay in their own cozy echo chambers, this kind of manipulation will hit the internet like a chain of tsunamis in the future.
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Are you pretty? This is my occasion. - Ghost

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blizzardboy
blizzardboy


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Nerf Herder
posted April 09, 2018 10:15 AM

You mean a.i. / v.i. right?

A cyborg is just a human with some artifcial parts. It is a sci fi term you dont actually use for RL people with pacemakers or such unless you want to be slapped.
____________
"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."

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blob2
blob2


Undefeatable Hero
Blob-Ohmos the Second
posted April 09, 2018 10:37 AM
Edited by blob2 at 10:40, 09 Apr 2018.

Well damn, why did I write cyborgs in the first place? Yeah I meant androids of course...

Although implants my be used for security breaches in the future also

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blizzardboy
blizzardboy


Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Nerf Herder
posted April 09, 2018 11:12 AM

Photo and phone evidence already has very limited applications in court. Newsflash: so does all the CSI bull**** that is less precisely scientific in real life than it is on shows.


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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."

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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted April 12, 2018 01:29 PM

blizzardboy said:
Photo and phone evidence already has very limited applications in court. Newsflash: so does all the CSI bull**** that is less precisely scientific in real life than it is on shows.


video isn't taken lightly. you can make video the same way you can make photos, with this stuff. and remember, that any tech/software civilians have; that the government versions of that tech/software is far more advanced, too.

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OhforfSake
OhforfSake


Promising
Legendary Hero
Initiate
posted April 12, 2018 01:34 PM

fred79 said:
remember, that any tech/software civilians have; that the government versions of that tech/software is far more advanced, too.


Like cars and shoelaces?

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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted April 12, 2018 01:42 PM

you're not seeing my point. if they are able to make stuff down to every little detail realistic, then how hard would it be to make a propaganda video? you do understand the possibilities of this tech/software, right? that this kind of power in the wrong hands, could be, well, disastrous?

if people are swayed by media propaganda, just THINK of the possibilities with this, man.

this snow could be used to sway the public into an nwo or orwellian reality, ffs.

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OhforfSake
OhforfSake


Promising
Legendary Hero
Initiate
posted April 12, 2018 01:56 PM

Well they can't even make video games look realistic enough not to be able to tell the difference yet.

And media propaganda swaying people isn't something new.

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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted April 12, 2018 02:03 PM

OhforfSake said:
Well they can't even make video games look realistic enough not to be able to tell the difference yet.

And media propaganda swaying people isn't something new.


video gaming isn't even in the same league as propaganda. and i realize your second point; what i'm saying, is that should they want to up the ante, they very well could, with this kind of power. remember, even though people believe in things they can't see, they ALL will likely believe in what they DO see.

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OhforfSake
OhforfSake


Promising
Legendary Hero
Initiate
posted April 12, 2018 02:12 PM

Well in my opinion it's the same argument for why we should all follow the lord's word.

I don't think there is anything concrete to discuss.

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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted April 12, 2018 02:19 PM

well, we'd certainly never know if something was authentic or not, anyway. the public, i mean.

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blob2
blob2


Undefeatable Hero
Blob-Ohmos the Second
posted April 12, 2018 02:33 PM

When it comes to games, it's great how they are moving forward with graphics and all, but they should stop at some point. Game's should stay games after-all, those should have a "cartoon-ey" element to them...

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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted April 12, 2018 02:54 PM

heck no, i want my gaming as real as possible. give me the most realistic virtual reality, and you have the most immersive experience you're ever going to get, outside real life.

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blob2
blob2


Undefeatable Hero
Blob-Ohmos the Second
posted April 12, 2018 03:20 PM
Edited by blob2 at 15:25, 12 Apr 2018.

Did you watch Ready Player One? It shows how it might look like at some point.

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fred79
fred79


Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
posted April 12, 2018 04:21 PM

no, but i certainly want to. the previews looked like the snow.

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Odysseus
Odysseus

Tavern Dweller
posted February 18, 2021 02:25 AM

Hello guys! Yeah, the 3d modelling has a great future, as I think. I will tell you my example. It usually takes me much time to understand what house I want to buy. Moreover, I prefer to visit all these houses. I think [url=https://visengine.com/real-estate-3d-visualization/]real estate rendering services[/url] would really ease everything because it is easy to fall in love with a house when you see every detail of it.
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