I found rfm would not give you 100% what you see in the ptc at render time, even when baking the sss pass and then set the diffuse to 0. And I spent a lot of time trying to find the right balance diffuse vs subsurface. You end up very quickly with an over bright shader when mixing them.
Another way to have more control over how to mix those channels is to output them from different AOVs and then use a compositing software.
Here an early test using Nuke for mixing sss and diffuse.
As I mentioned, I 'd like to add more contrast to the image, get some spec brighter,etc...
Once I got the occlusion and reflections working with the HDR map, I can just re-use the baked point clouds, so rendering time is still not too bad. One trick is to render passes at a lower resolution, bake them and then increase the render resolution. Then I am adding lights to tweak the image locally. Some of them are here only to crank up specularity and don't affect diffuse, others are for specific objects only (working with object sets).
As you can see here I kept some of the ground elements separate objects so it makes it easier to move them closer to the camera for fog or DOF effects.
We need to output the z channel to be able to add those in any compositing program.
You just need to chose the rgbaz channels as output, and run the batch render.
Compositing
Once we have all the passes we want, we can go and reassemble those in a comp app.
Here I am using nuke, but my preference still goes to shake :-)
The main thing here was to get the DOF and fog work using the z channel from the image.
Nuke has a great node for DOF, called ZBlur. It has a fast preview using colors to show you where it will be blurred using the z channel.
I have applied a light blur node to the z channel as there is no anti aliasing for this channel.
Here is my graph:
Also adding grain to get rid of the smooth and too prefect CG look.
Here is a before and after:
Finally, I painted out some minor things I didn't like in Painter, and drew some elements in the background that get blurred quite a bit at comp time.
Here is a part of the raw painted BG.
I know... it's cheating :-)
Hope this making was somehow helpful, and please feel free to send me comment on this.
|
Rate this Making-
|
|
|
|
|
