In the last few months I’ve been taking time to do a lot of self study. More details on all this over on the other “exploration” page. Here though I wanted to show some “final” images while allowing room for more “wip” stuff over on the other page.
There’s been so much advancement in what’s possible in real time rendering in the last few years. I have a very capable machine with an RTX card with lots of ram. One person with this software, a good bit of knowledge and curiosity along with a few supplementary tools can accomplish more than a whole team of folks could just a few years ago. I remember reading where Kim Libreri at Epic was talking about aiming to have Unreal be the next Maya. He probably wouldn’t remember me but I remember him working on the whole virutal human thing at ESC in Alameda on the Matrix movies while I was there. I think they’ve done much to make this come true.
I’ve been working with a variety of hard surface models as well as some more organics. The Metahuman tools are quite impressive right out of the box. Facial motion capture with the app on your iPhone?! That said certain aspects require some work to push it up to the next level.
Getting it to the 85% mark is pretty straight forward. Taking it up into the upper 90s percentile is something very different. I did some R&D work while at PlayStation. I did a good amount of technical photography to capture solid HDRI images of the stage and the lighting. Good high resolution textures makes all the difference in the world too. These days it’s easy to buy good sets of these thanks to the folks over at 3dScanStore. I need to pick up some of their hands as well to add into the mix.
Here are a few to get you started. I’ll be adding more to this in the very near future.
This is a series I’ve started in on recently. I need to give credit to Ozgur Ustundag as I saw him experiment with this idea awhile back. I thought it was a great and asked if he’d mind if I take a crack at it as well. Lighting studies from classic film up through modern cinematic masters like Roger Deakins help train the eye and allow you to see how close to reality you can get with the tools at hand. More are in the pipe and I’ll be adding them here soon.
