Aearon.de

More Invasion

I decided to go a bit deeper into the invasion thing. My goal with this is to do a complete sequence with fairly high complexity, while doing everything as efficiently as possible, especially when it comes to rendering. I want to stay under 10 minutes per frame on my CoreDuo 1.83ghz/2GB ram laptop.
None of what you see in this video is really finished, but it already contains most of the techniques that i will need for getting the look i want. Render time is about 5 minutes per frame at 1280×544 (This is 720p with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio). This is with displacement and proper motion blur as well as ambient occlusion.

All animation is driven by the crowd tools I’m working on, but it’s still a bit bumpy in places because of a bug in a new system I added. Even the camera is procedural system built for following any of the drones.

I’d really prefer if you got the 720p mp4 version (5.7mb), but here’s the low quality flash video for quick viewing as well.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Some of the techniques that I used are listed here:

• The general terrain shape is created using the compositing part of houdini, it’s mostly some voronoi noise mixed with other noises. There’s also some blurring tricks to get sand dunes against the mountains
• I rendered an ambient occlusion map without any displacement details at 2k resolution
• Extra occlusion details are added in comp using the normal angle of the surface (parts facing up get more light) and the depth of displacement in the rocky areas (deep grooves don’t get as much light)
• The occlusion on drones is rendered using a low poly version of the terrain. This is very fast so no need to bake.
• I’m writing my own shaders that do exactly what I need and only what I need. In the shaders I make extensive use of AOV’s (Arbitrary Output Variables). AOV’s provide a way to get any variable from a shader and render it’s values to a separate pass. This way I get all the passes I need in one render. This speeds up renders many times. I’m also exporting separate passes per light using illuminance loops in my shaders, so again everything can be rendered in one go.

3 Comments to More Invasion

Diego F. Goberna
September 15, 2008

impressive!! big great job.. :o

Borja
September 15, 2008

Really interesting, yes :D

Wish to have some of your kung fu hehe

Hola Diego, qué tal todo por ahí!!

lui
September 24, 2008

you’re a fucking crack man…

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