[The Lost Bytes] The Data Consumed

[Kifa]

Well, here's my WiP thread for the "Consumed Data" rendering for the ongoing contest. As I've done most of the work before making the thread, I'll make it more of a report, rather than a normal WiP thread. Also - I'll put all my work into a single post here, to keep things nice and clear. Ok, here we go.

As usual I started by making some utterly lame concept drawing. Try not to vomit...



Well, it doesn't look like much, but it's going to become a pretty good trace (in my own terms). Anyway, after a short while with Blender's polygon based modeller and setting up some basic lights and backgroud, I've came up with this:



Long live grainy DoF, eh? But this being that way or another - I liked the way shapes interact with light, so I decided to move out to materials. I've already had a concept by now, but it turned out much more complex than initially planned. First let's quickly review all the materials used in the scene:



There is a bit of it, isn't it? The last image is of course the backround seting for the scene. Also - it's worth noting that Virus_Body material uses a single Clouds texture, affecting only normals with value of 1.00, generated with default, Blender original pattern and soft noise scaled to 0.150 and depth of 2, nabla is 0.55 (Due to the way my shader editor window is organised, I won't make a screenshot - it would eat up a whole screen and won't tell you much ). Oh, and for good luck - the stencil tint is pink (does not affect a thing here, but oh well ).

Well, after applying the materials to the objects I initially got something like that:



Not very interesting, is it? As I like making things complicated, I started inventing some very strange methods of making it look more interesting (adding those zeroes and ones inside the virus body didn't do all that much of a difference), and eventually came up with one... Oh, and for the "binary strings" - by my mistake I've used different fonts on some of them, this is corrected in the next rendering.

As for getting things complicated - let's see how the Virus looks like exactly in Blender:



I've noted under each part the material it uses. You can probably imagine easily, how those things contain eachother. There is also a single point light in the middle of Virus_Core part, white, with power of 2.0 (the first guess for intensity prooved good). All in all - rendering this with Pathtracing and Path+Photon caustics gives us this:



The render is very small due to lack of time (yet!) for a bigger one and enormous amount of samples Pathtracer needs to make caustics bearable. Why do i do it the "wrong" way and not using photons? Well, basically, photomapping gives me strange artifacts (black or white random dots) which I'm still trying to eliminate (a thread is here: http://www.yafray.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8270#8270), so pathtracing is the way to go for me right now.

Well, after some experimenting I finally came up with solution to the sharp transitions which is lazy enough. first let's look at three images here:



Left one is how it looks in Blender - three UV-mapped cylinders, enveloping eachother. One in the middle is covered with digits texture, other two employ a gradient as their skin. The effect of this you can see on the center image. The rightmost image shows the material properities for all cylinders (only names are different, settings remain the same for both digits and gradients) - pretty simple, isn't it?

Now for the last part of work on this one - the bytes, or more precisely - the bits. The concept is that they are going to float aimlessly in the space, eventually forming small butterflies. The concept of one such form is below, and to the right you have some early "digital" version of it.



The "pixelity" of it is intended - each of the small boxes represents a bit of data, either 0 or 1 (darker or lightier). I'll probably add some "trails" behind them, to make whole thing more dynamic. Well, back to work...

Just a quick render of the tuned version. Also shortened render times by eliminating the DoF - it wans't aking that much difference anyway.



I've also changed the concept behind the byte ghosts - they are now more solid, and their bodies are built of similar "digital rings" as the masks for virus-folder connecion. Well, it wouldn't make much sense to show them spearate from the scene, so let's move onto the final stage.

I knew from the beginning that I'd have to postprocess the image to get the result I wanted (as YafaRay does not support bloom effects I needed). I also knew that I'll have to use GIMP to process the image, as using multi-layer composition via Blender nodes is impossible yet with this renderer. I've rendered three images you can see right below:



The scene was basically copied three times to a different file (to allow preserving independent settings), and then adjusted. I basically manipulated the lighting and materials to get the effect I wanted (YafaRay unified material menu prooved to be extremally handy in this case!). In the end I've put all the images to a layered GIMP file, applied a few filters and changed the way layers combined. The effect you can see below:



I'm quite happy with the final result. Note that I've not painted anything onto the image - I just used some filters and combiners, that's all. The final version will have a little more tuning to the overall contrast-color temperature-saturation balance, but I'm not gonna show theese - it would make the thead too long.

Anyway - the scenes are prepared and rendering parameters are determined - it's time to get final, high res version of the work!

[Starts the rendering of the main scene layer...]

[GreenIce]

man, that's really cool! mind if i steal your next bigger render? i'd use it for my desktop background.
nicely done!

[Kifa]

Hehehe, sure, be my guest. Bigger render will be the final one, I'm aiming at 1280x1024, but we'll see... Currently I have two quite 'big' exams to pass - both at the end of the week - so don't expect any update until sunday. Man, studying law is not fun...

[thv]

Nice work. I would also participate, but I don't have any time to create a good looking picture at the moment. Perhaps next time.

[umxprime]

really nice WIP !
maybe "0111010100011101010" lines are "too much"...
keep up the good work !

[teamonster]

you might want to uv map the transition from the folder to the virus. At the moment, you have a sharp line demarking the change from tan to purple. If you UV map it, or put a blend onto the shader, you would get a smooth crossover on the colors, indicating that the data is being changed and assimilated.

Just an idea

[Kifa]

I don't know if UV maps will give me anything as none of the objects is really using any textures (just one procedural, rest is done purely in shader/geometry). And theese are two separate shaders. The only thing that would help here would be some kind of "material-by-vertex-blending" thing I once had in old trueSpace 4.3. But I found no way to simulate it in Blender/YafaRay... In fact the transition in those places is the thing that I'm far from happy to see it look like it does now... Will need to work on that.

As for the "01" lines - they are filling the image pretty well, but... I'll try to reduce the contrast for them and see if it works well enough.

Thanks for the feedback! All suggestions noted and sticked onto the monitor.

[Kifa]

[POP!] The thread has been updated, I've also cleaned it up and shortened, substituting some images with Imageshack-based miniatures. Hope you like what I posted.

[Kifa]

Another, final update to the WiP thread is up. All that remains now is getting the final render in the contest thread. Thanks for all suggestions and comments you've made. And best of luck to those who are still working on their renderings!

[simpo]

Very nice work. Creative and colorful. I especially like the first render.