3D Rendering

[richardandtracy]

The sentence was handed out in England, and things may be different in other parts of the UK.
The boyfriend was sentenced to life in prison. The tariff of 20 years is the earliest point at which he can apply for parole. Depending on his behaviour in prison and his 'repentance' in jail, he may or may not be released at that point. At the moment few child abusers are released at the earliest possible time. We can hope.

Regards,

Richard.

[richardandtracy]

Still playing with my 3D rendering.
There is an add-on to the basic DAZ Studio figure animation package called 'UltraScenery' that allows the generation of landscapes and various ecologies. This is an example. I also dropped in a shiny gold obelisk (as they seem popular at the moment) that I've modelled and a figure to inspect the inside of it:


Some things that can be done now are absolutely stunning. The reflections on the inside of the obelisk would have taken 48 hours 10 years ago, instead the whole image rendered in under 2 hours. The capacity of the machines is amazing too. That landscape has 160,000 grass plants, 120,000 pebbles and 20,000 trees and bushes over a landscape of 64m square (70 yards square).

And here, a track in Australia...

Are you feeling hot yet? It's nice to see in the middle of winter.
The only thing missing is termite mounds!
Can I re-iterate - no part of the image has ever existed physically. It's not a spherical HDR photo with a 3d figure stuck in front (like the 'Big Hug' image on page 1 of this thread), it's even more impressive to my mind. There are hundreds of thousands of individual models positioned by a script that creates the landscape based on user specified or randomly generated monochrome height maps to generate the landscape height, then it creates a ground colouring scheme dependent on the slope of the ground and then distributes vegetation based on slope, altitude and user defined distribution maps (where some areas can be made free of plants, if you want to put an obelisk or house, say). The range of patches of landscape is almost infinite, and mind boggling. Each tree, each stick, each stone is a copy of a small number of fully detailed models put into the scene and then duplicated hundreds or thousands of times in different positions at different heights, angles, scales and rotations. You can choose an 'ecology' which specifies different vegetation and responses to slope, different river & track forms too. Absolute tour-de-force by the gent in Australia who came up with the idea in the first place. He fulfils my idea of a modern genius. The script to create one of these landscapes and position the vegetation takes between 7 and 20 minutes on my moderately powerful 8 yo rendering PC, and the landscape image takes a couple of hours to render. The PC now has a pretty hefty (but still 6 years old GTX1060) second hand graphics card. By way of comparison of the effect of the graphics card, the portrait image at the top of page 1 now takes 3 minutes compared to the 50 it took first time round when only using the processor.

Oh, and it's even possible to frolic in the river after making a dam across it, though ripples caused by people in the water are very hard to create:


Don't worry, the water's about 2 1/2 ft deep, she'll be OK.

Regards,

Richard

[rcperryls]

I went back and read the previous posts and remembered how amazing these photos are. I stilll don't quite understand how you create these images but I do love the results. And to be able to create these in what seems like a very short time makes it even more amazing. Next thing will be to imagine the image you want, attach electrodes to your temples and get the result you want. Amazing.

Carole

[fccs]

These are incredible!

[richardandtracy]

Thankyou for your lovely comments.

Carole, I'll try to describe the process with pictures and descriptions, but will have to wait for the weekend before I do that. Things are a bit frantic at work at the moment and spilling outside work hours for a few days.

Regards,

Richard.

[Serinde]

Holy Moley, Richard, but these are good.

Makes me understand how "deep fake" has become possible -- given professionals, good images of real people and the right processing power -- which is very scary.

[richardandtracy]

Serinde, these are created using free software and a few paid-for add-ons running on out-of-date tech, so think what specialist software could do.

A current top of the range gaming PC makes my one seem utterly pedestrian. A render like the portrait on the front page will go in under 25 seconds, of which the majority of the time comes from passing the information to the graphics card and getting the image back out. The PC cpu has only 12-16 cores, while the high end graphics cards use 3000 highly efficient processor cores running a streamlined task at higher speeds so the calculations needed go in an absolute torrent. It's mind boggling what can be done. At under 25 seconds a frame, doing a deep fake video becomes possible on home equipment.

There are people who absorb celebrity culture, and 3d figure artists are not immune from the contagion. People model characters who look very like their idols, and sell the models for others to use. Most for entirely legitimate & innocent purposes, the visual equivalent of fan-fiction. Take a simple one, Jemma Coleman from Dr Who, is almost certainly the inspiration for this figure: https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs/ ... uct=126928. I suspect the darlek and tardis-like interior are supposed to be subtle hints in the promotional images just for those who might miss any likeness. Other frequently, but rarely very accurately modelled, people include Cara Delevingne, Keira Knightly and Emma Watson. Must admit with most celebrity-look-alikes I haven't the faintest idea who the original model is in the first place, so doing a representation of them is utterly lost on me. [I suppose that I should mention that popular culture and I are utterly unacquainted with each other.]

Regards,

Richard.

[Mabel Figworthy]

I want to see the splash when she hits the water !

Seriously Richard, these are really impressive. Your explanations make my head spin but have I understood correctly that you can more or less decide how much to leave to the program and how much to specify yourself?

[wendywombat]

Holy Moley, Richard, but these are good.

Makes me understand how "deep fake" has become possible -- given professionals, good images of real people and the right processing power -- which is very scary.

I have to agree with Serinde. Just goes to show that the Camera CAN Lie!

[richardandtracy]

Carole,

I said I'd try to explain how one of these 3D Figure rendering images is created. Please forgive me if I start at a point you already know about but I'm trying to make a coherent description that is also self consistent while describing enough without going to excessive detail. Not an easy tightrope to follow, and I may have set myself up to fail. Sorry about the links instead of images, for some reason my website doesn't want to share them, or maybe it's because my site is not https. Don't know.

Right. Imagine, if you will, a segment of a plane hanging in space. This rectangular segment has its corners defined. These corners are called vertices (singular: vertex). The segment of the plane is called a facet. This is shown in the image below.
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure1.jpg

Now a single facet isn't much use. You can create others that share vertices (to make sure they join properly), as below:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure2.jpg

Take this idea further, and you can put lots of small facets near each other at different angles and start to define a surface. There is no limit to the complexity of the surface, so.. how about a human face?
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure3.jpg

Hmm. That's not terribly realistic is it? It needs to look more skin-like. As a start, you can wrap a picture (called a texture) over the surface to make it look a bit better. Here's a scaled down image that was intended for the face in the last picture:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure4.jpg

You can see that there is a correlation between areas of the texture and areas the face model, and there are parts that are stretched a bit, but the areas of least stretch are where you're most likely to look. There are textures for all parts of the figure, male or female - but as this is a family forum I'm not going to show the whole figure model or those textures. Creating the mapping is an exceptionally difficult task, and I'm glad I don't have to delve into the most complex parts of it..

The program I've been using to create the model images so far is not complex enough to be useful any more and we'll go into the figure animation package I use, DAZ Studio. Despite the fact it's much more complex, it still uses the idea of vertices to define the position of the corners of the facets. Here is a display of a character that shows the facets used:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure5.jpg

Now, this image is of the character with a few clothes on her. The clothes can be selected from a library in the program. The clothes are modelled to fit the character in her default position and they automatically fit and conform to the figure when loaded. This is what the clothes look like without the figure to attach to:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure6.jpg

With only a texture to wrap over the surface, you don't get much like skin or fabric. What you also need are things to create detail that is too small to put into the facets. So the surfaces have their own shaders to tell the bit of program that creates the pretty rendered picture how to modify the way the surface is portrayed. The shaders all adapt the amount of light that goes through the surface, how translucent it is, how reflective it is, how rough the surface is, and all these modify the way the surface appears on the screen in a render. So, having defined these things, we get an image like this:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure7.jpg

To create an easy 360 degree environment, you can use one of the spherical images like those you can use in Google Earth to see exactly what the view from a viewpoint is. Using clever mathematics and an HDR version of the image, you can actually light the scene too:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure8.jpg

Now, suppose we actually don't want the character to have her left arm down at waist level, but instead as if she's delighted to see a friend. To move the forearm facets we need to move the vertices in the forearm and hand. To do this by human intervention would be impossible, instead the figure animation package has a shortcut. There are bones defined, and parts of the figure move with their bones. The movement of each bone has limits, so each bone is limited to its natural movement limits. There are 50 odd bones in the characters in DAZ Studio, rather than the hundreds in a real figure, so posing is not impossibly slow and difficult. Anyway, to pose the left forearm, the forearm is clicked, the bone is automatically chosen and the available range of movement sliders are shown in the lower right part of the image below.
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure9.jpg

And then change the bend on the forearm from 12.62 degrees to -107 degrees by dragging the 'Bend' slider to get:
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure10.jpg

This idea of moving the vertices can be extended to other ideas, where you can deliberately distort part or all of the figure, this is called a morph. There are all sorts of morphs available, and the actual basic character shape is one morph of a pre-defined generic figure. There are many, many others. How about we make the sylphlike figure above weigh 100lb more with a weight morph?
http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/photos/Figure11.jpg
Ooh, poor lass. She didn't even get to enjoy any cream cakes... Notice, though, how her clothes still fit the new shape. Clever, isn't it?

To get landscapes like the wooded landscapes above, the ground, each different tree, each different blade of grass and each different leaf is modelled in the same way as the character, with different materials applied, using exactly the same ideas, loaded in and positioned many tens of thousands of times by a mini program that runs inside the DAZ Studio Scripting Engine.

That's a very quick canter through the concepts of 3d figure rendering. I hope I've covered it in enough detail to understand the general ideas behind it.

Regards,

Richard.

[richardandtracy]

I want to see the splash when she hits the water !

Seriously Richard, these are really impressive. Your explanations make my head spin but have I understood correctly that you can more or less decide how much to leave to the program and how much to specify yourself?

I also want to see the splash. I have tried modelling one from scratch, but it doesn't look at all realistic. Need fluid modelling software to look right.

The thing you do when creating these images is really to furnish a photographer's set. You can do it as detailed or as sparse as you feel is right for what you want to do. It does have different skills from photography, but there is an overlap. Figures in the outdoors is what I'd love to draw, but can't, so I make do with this.

Regards,

Richard.

[rcperryls]

Thank you ever so much Richard! Your explanation made a lot of sense and the diagrams and pictures helped tremendously. I had some experience long ago with Adobe Photoshop and Premier (I think Premier was the name of the movie program) for designing Safety Training Videos using another program made specifically for that purpose. Of course those versions are all antiquated now, but I had so much fun. Never thought that developing programs on Confined Space Training and Lock and Tag procedures for Maintenance and Operations employees would let me be creative. If I was starting out now, there is no doubt in my mind where my interests would have been. I look forward to seeing more of your 3D renderings and now with your explanation, I will enjoy them even more.

Carole

[richardandtracy]

Glad the explanation was of use, I've found they it's usually possible to explain the most complex of ideas if you think about it hard enough, and if it's not clear, it's the fault of the person doing the explaining. There was an occasion when I was offering a program that calculated the loads in bolts to a model engineer who offered little utility programs on his website. He was very uncertain that anyone would be interested, until I sent him an explanation that includes an elephant's scratching post so it can scratch behind its ear. That convinced him. You can see that somewhat off-the-wall explanation after the title 'A Beginners Guide to Bolt Group Analysis' here: http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/misc/boltgroup.html. [Oh, and it really was used to check the loads in an Elephant's scratching post in the old pen in Howletts Zoo near Canterbury after there was a spate of elephants knocking the scratching posts over. A friend of a friend got to hear I was an engineer & I got roped in to solve the insoluble. The problem was the base they were using was way too small and weak and there was no chance it'd last very long.]

Looks like I'm going to have to investigate Https'ing my website as it's getting hard to show links from it. Very annoying.

Regards,

Richard.

[wendywombat]

Elephants scratching posts?? What will you be involved in next!

There was an Elephant at Bristol Zoo called Wendy...daughter thought that most amusing when we visited.

[richardandtracy]

Children can be so cruel..

[rcperryls]

Richard, I looked at your bolt instructions and I think I actually understood it for the most part. It is very well written and the diagrams are very clear. My job was a trainer, though mostly in areas of supervision and leadership and communications training. I also was trained to teach Analytical Troubleshooting which was so much fun. Your instructions are the kind I love: using clear language, defining new words or concepts and recognizing what knowledge your audience already has or doesn't have. I am the least mechanically inclined person you will ever meet and I have enjoyed reading your instruction guides. Thank you.

Carole

[richardandtracy]

Thank you Carole, nice compliment.

I do feel that general, hand wavey overview ideas should always be possible to get over to almost anyone. The details, well it's often not necessary.

Regards,

Richard

[rcperryls]

This 3D printed house isn't exactly what you are referring to in 3D rendering but thought if you hadn't see this it really is taking 3D to another level. And for a very good purpose as well.

Carole

[Mabel Figworthy]

Interesting!

[richardandtracy]

Sorry, missed the printed house.

Hmm. I do actually own a small 3D printer, but I have developed a contact allergy to the resin (even in the cured state) so I use it much less than I want!

I think 3D printed houses are interesting, but they are at too early as stage at the moment to risk buying one. At the moment I am unconvinced as to their durability. However, I can't disagree with the idea we do need to do something about the way houses are made. It takes too long in Britain, is incredibly energy intensive and the quality control standards are abysmal. I think the first sensible step is to prefabricate buildings in a factory where decent QC can be applied. Then work on energy usage. Factory production lines can be improved much more easily than on-site building.

I once saw a 'Grand Designs' program where a couple bought a prefabricated 'Huff' House. The building was mostly treated timber, the insulation (sawdust from shaping the building timbers), electrics, plumbing, tiles & first decorative layer were applied to the flat panels, laid on 2 trucks in reverse order of usage and delivered. Assembly was 5 days, start to finish. Then the QC check occurred, and due to a 2mm offset in the tile grout lines between two panels in the kitchen, the tiles were re-done. Final fittings (toilets & kitchen units) were done 6 weeks later after all had settled. Total build time from cutting sod to moving in: 12 weeks as the foundation slab was given 6 weeks to cure before the walls were applied. Amazing, and definitely a brilliant idea.

Regards,

Richard.