Chaos Corona Forum
General Category => General CG Discussion => Topic started by: Phasma on 2017-06-29, 16:56:28
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Hallo. I am Alex, TD of EVE Images.
Although we are not that well known at the moment, we are a big berlin based studio that specialized in archvis for norwegian and german clients. As we are 50 People+ and we are even opening a new office in budapest. I have a lot to do to keep 3D related technical issues under control and also deciding for new ways/workflows and implementing them in our pipeline. I am currently working on a system that will be able to enable even a beginner level artist to produce a consistant quality output of images and to speed up the the time to get there for all the others. It will be called Lumière and in this thread I would like to give an inside in its development, a little inside to EVE's Pipeline Development.
I will try to update this thread regularly in every one or two weeks to show the steps that have happend. Of course this will not be a Tutorial on how to exactly reproduce our workflow though. Still I hope this can be interesting for some people and thatswhy I decided to post this in the Corona Goodies Thread. (it will depend heavily on Corona :-) )
In this first episode I would like to give you a little introduction of what we used to do in the past, what the concequences were and why and how we still want to improve on what we already have.
About 1.5 Years ago (about the same time ago where we decided to switch over our production from VRay to Corona) our CD and Boss was not very happy with the look of our Exterior images any more. At this point we all agreed on that an HDRI based lighting solution will be much better but also this would mean, that everyone needed to not only go through all HDRI's in our Library every time but also need it to setup, testrender and most importantly: carefully rotate it into position. As we need to often be very precise regarding the real sun angle on a given location, setting up an HDRI environment to this level can be very challenging, espeacially in heavy scenes. So I wrote the first version of Lumière. this is how it looked like:
(http://eyedea3d.com/Corona_Forum/Lumiere_old.JPG)
you can select between hdri's here with Previews and use it like a normal targetlight. Rotating around the target will automaticly rotate the hdri. rising and lowering the sun will change the angle values and better fitting HDRI's will be suggested to the user. you can label it, have different ones in the scenes where you can switch between and so on. Our Artists/CD and Boss liked it a lot as it was now super easy to get to a good result fast. I added around 25 hdri presets that rendered good and as you can see it even had backwards VRay compatibility (inverse gamma)
This was good until we slowly realized that using HDRI's from different sources did not pay out completely. We dont know the correct exposure the HDRI needs to be used at to be at a physical scale and the same goes for other parameters as well (like white balance for example). So the next big thing will be: Shooting our own HDRI's based on a controlled workflow with parameters we set. This Rig will also be rewritten as well and to make everything perfect: I will write a camera that will only be able to setup physical based values (based on camera and lens setup out of a library) with autofocus (viewport click), shutter prio/ aperture prio, different presets and so on.... (keep in mind: this is super early alpha)
(http://eyedea3d.com/Corona_Forum/lum_cam.JPG)
And also a Light based on the Corona light with some simple Presets for light sources including correct power and Kelvin values.
At the end the user will just drop in an HDRI, turn it like they like it, put in a camera that is setup correctly,pick fokus... and If the light changes to night: every artifical light source will be correct in scale as well...
It would be nice to hear from you If you are interested in this 'making of'.
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Looks & Sounds realla helpfull and good to me, thanks for sharing this infos
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Great! Can you add multiple lights to the max file with different hdri's and position values? I like vray dome because I can setup each camera with different lights, turn off render hidden lights and render all views in one click with state sets. The only way I've been able to do this in corona is to animate the hdri in the environment. But this is more difficult because I also use motion blur for my stills and it makes things more complicated to set up.
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Hello. Yes you can have multiple instances with different HDRI's in there, as well as different positions etc.
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I just checked out your guys' website , renders look awesome.
Sounds very promising what you are developing, keep up the great work : )
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This would be super useful.
I assume that since you'll be producing your own HDRIs that it is easier to link the sun position within the HDRI to the Corona sun for control, but what about using other HDRIs? Or was this part of your problems in developing this? Perhaps you could include a custom tab/button where one could load any HDRI, locate the sun and link it to the Corona sun to then use the plugin moving forward? Or is there a way to auto locate a light source within an HDRI somehow?
Would definitely buy this if you decided to sell it.
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Thanks Jadefox! we will try to do exactly that :-D
the big problem with 3rd party hdris (and all other assets as well) is that you as the end user are not in control of the circumstances of there creation. in case of textures, they can be shooted with different white balance setups or lights do not use physical correct scale or color temperature... there are a lot of (sometimes just subtile) little differences but in the end they accumulate. An artist normally has to adjust some shaders in his/her scene just for his/her scene because on top of what I just said, the artist and his/her workflow is also part of this problem.
in order to make sure assets can be dropped in your scene with a much higher success rate of not having to touch them again: eliminating all these little errors is crucial. we are already making our own 3d assets. once our own hdri library is ready, we can start adjusting all the maps/shaders again based on these sets of lights. artificial lights as well.
we will do all at 6500 kelvin for example (like the corona default), but we will include 18% gray samples/spheres as well as chrome spheres to always be able to check the quality and as reference. Just imagine how all comes together. Even after rendering (done at 6500k) you can throw in some 2d people in photoshop that have been shot with the same settings/light but without adjusting the colorisation. Of course this might be a little bit to simple idealisation, but something like that should be the goal.
I will include some making of pictures soon as well :-) this week we can test out some nice equipment: http://www.roundshot.com/xml_1/internet/de/intro.cfm
as well as a 5D MKIV a EF 16-35 f2.8L II and a Sigma 8mm 3.5 fisheye.
I will update sooon :-)
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and here are some photos
as you can see, one half is dry and the other wet. the graycard in the back was the reference for the paint shop to mix the color properly. i think they made a good job. the panorama head is also very nice!
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After one week with the roundshot vr drive we can show some examples. I was able to capture some light situations and use the HDRIs without further adjustments and at the correct exposures.
(http://eyedea3d.com/Corona_Forum/results_s.jpg)
As you can see, the spheres match pretty ok in every HDRI.
The Files are 650MB and more and have a resolution of 18k * 9k. You guys want a sample?
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Fantastic stuff Phasma.
Can I ask, did you use the grey ball/chrome ball reference to tweak HDRi into 'true exposure' inside framebuffer (by adjusting hdri intensity until it matched CGI) or already during your HDRi creation ( like the ubisoft guys using lightmeter).
The little renders above feature some contrast adjustment by the way ?
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OK. Something about the progress (wich is itself still work in progress):
once everything is set up I checked the exposure. In the roundshot VR you can setup the lowest exposure, so I exposed for the sun using 1/8000s, ISO100 and f16. manual focus and white balance of course. also of course: RAW.
7 exposures with an EV difference of 2 were taken for each of the 16 angles. one straight up, one down and two rows 7 positions each. all together 112 Images to load into PTgui.
(http://eyedea3d.com/Corona_Forum/exposures.JPG)
Images are stitched there using a Papywizard xml file provided by the panorama head.
once loaded in the 3d file using a corona output map you can adjust the exposure there using a reference photo and its exif data as a brightness reference. I therefore set the correct exif values in my camera. the only other variable I touched was the gamma and a little bit highlight compression (set to 3). all the other values are default. once you have the correct base exposure, you can even adjust this in PTgui and you bake in the physical light scale to the HDRI.
I hope this helps a bit
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Wouldn't first match between HDRi and CGI be more precise than against reference photo where tonemapping (esp. the HL=3) is already involved ? That would be good control match afterwards.
Do you use ND filters or just boost in post-production ? 1/8000 100 f16 is still missing roughly 4 stops for Sun intensity at mid day.
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good point. we get some more EV's out of the MK IV's dynamic range. It is not all of course. but the current process takes around 3 minutes already, adding more exposures (although not super crucial - because the result is ok already) would just raise the chance of failure. So no, we do not use nd filters at the moment (as in my experience they tend to change the color a bit)
Also, its not about matching CGI and HDRI. Its just about matching the brightness of the HDRI. for the CG part in my simple examples I used only the gray value of our 18% gray color. In the future we will also shoot with other color information also.
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I just worded it poorly perhaps, I meant the matching of brightness/exposure of HDRi, I consider artificial correctness of CGI at linear level to be truer match than reference photo, which even if custom raw-extracted (through DCRaw/etc..) to linear level, will always feature corrections that can't be accounted for.
No, ND filters are definite no-no for full quality, unless used locally for bright spots only, but that complicates the capture process, definitely not 3 minutes :- ) You get plus points for such automatization. Looked at the Road-VR toys...expensive, heh.
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ok, got you. but how would you match it then? lets say you have your hdri in your scene and you need to find the exposure multiplier. you set up a camera with the correct values, and then? of course there are still some issues, but the converted raws are as neutral as they can be. I dont see a big problem there.
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Don't have much an answer yet :- ) Just testing different methods now and see which one gets the very closest. With CGI, just sampling the values in framebuffer until it matches. Currently comparing that to luminance metering as shown by Sebastien Lagarde in his paper.
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Hi there. here a little update.
regarding HDRI's we will defenitly go for an nd filter. this way we will be able to capture the full exposure range. resulting HDRIs will work out of the box without adjusting the gamma. results/free giveaway will be posted here :-). color shifts will be eliminated with the use of a spyder color chart and the corresponding software. Also we bought a nix color sensor for evaluating rgb values of everything we take fotos of. this will also clarify wich color value our gray card has, so we can rebuild it in 3D.
more infos soon.
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hmm :-) more later :-)
(http://g.recordit.co/K5VtHFSGzS.gif)
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so this is the beta of that HDRI tool - lumière_sky
(http://recordit.co/bc2OyvMvmM.gif)
It suggests HDRIs out of your HDRI Library based on the sun's altitude in degrees. then you can select a more specific HDRI from near the sun's altitude. This looks like a directional standard light but it actually does not light your scene by itself. After you lock in the desired HDRI, it will be put to the environment slot. the light's angle will be lockt as this rotation axis would not work on a spherical image. The arimuth however is still adjustable and will automatically turn the HDRI around its z axis.
This is the most simple and user friendly way to manage and load in HDRI's I could come up with. I wanted to combine the ease of use of normal lights with the renderquality of HDRI's (that are normally not as intuitive to setup)
If there are enough users that show interest in using this in there own workflow, there might be a way to make this public.
NOTE: the preview Image and the loaded Environment map in the sample are just placeholders for now
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for artificial lights:
thanks to ondra! he wrote some special code to make these scripted plugins work!
(http://g.recordit.co/hHEkPd1efK.gif)
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Looks nice & usefull... Will it be downloadable somewhere ?
Or maybe a commercial plugin ?
Regards
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yes any chance we could test it? Looks awesome
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sign me up for testing as well
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thanks guys! I will have a chat with my boss If we can arrange something here. At the end this thread was so supposed to give away some thoughts and workflow ideas not the tools themselves.
(although this is indeed pretty cool right there :-) )
http://recordit.co/yIlWEPnBLy (http://recordit.co/yIlWEPnBLy)
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Hello. after I had a chat with my boss: As I thought - we can not give away the custom software for free. we will not even do that on a commercial base as this is our way to produce better looking images faster and more reliable.
However this thread is here to show our way to the goal and is therefore a giveaway of research and development ideas for others. That Said, as we will soon have our HDRI shooting setup with the roundshot VR Drive, a EOS 5DsR and a ND Filter as well as color chats and such, I can happily say that we will definitlely give away a super High-Res HDRI for free! also this thread will soon show some more progress in detail and usability as well as some before and after pictures regarding render output quality... so there is a lot to come
Also: If you find this inspiring and you want to code something similar for your workflow, you are more then welcome to write a PM.
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Moving this to general CG topic, since it turned ot more of show off rather than real contribution to community.
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OK. if this is not seen as a real contribution here, I will just stop posting then. No HDRI giveway, and no development insides. Thanks.
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calm down boys, no one is banned from the forum.
Keep up posting and give something back for the input you got so far and in the future from the users of this forum.
edit: and you were planning to do so
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Was kinda looking forward to this
I think it was just elaborate advertising for their firm...um well played ?
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OK. if this is not seen as a real contribution here, I will just stop posting then. No HDRI giveway, and no development insides. Thanks.
Didn't know that you're giving away HDRIs in this topic - must be slipped through my attention. If you would move links to your HDRIs in the first post, i could move that topic back.
Sorry if i badly expressed myself, i didn't mean that you're not contributing to community, of course you are, like everyone else who actively participates in forum's life. Even those who only post in gallery are contributing to community :] I just want that Corona goodies board would be filled with real goodies, where members can come, pick a topic and download something that can be used with Corona without need to filter through countless dummy threads.
I hope that this will not prevent you from informing us about progress on your script. Even if you decided not to share it with community, it's still interesting to see in to what it will evolve.
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Hi guys!
from now on I will only post if there is something "real" to give away but I will stop spreading -not so real- contributions such as describing the workflow and the idea behind things as well as how we did it at the end. This might seem a little bitchy but at the end it took me some time to prepare all the information for this forum and without this I have more time doing R&D and scripting here. If you still want to know something more in detail you can always write a pm.
but lets move on to the content of today. Its a little tool generating aperture shapes
http://recordit.co/lcupoweAO8
this will be included in our own camera (that you can see on the right) and the parameters will be messured from real lenses and will come from a lens database. but here it is in a stand-alone version for you to use for free.
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The tool looks really interesting, I'd like to follow up on the development. Had a similar idea a couple of years ago but it lead to nothing. So keep up the good work, it really peaked my curiosity. :)
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thanks ikercito. why did it not lead to anything? why did you stop developing?
Here is our first HDRI. I shot it yesterday after heavy rainfall.
it is color corrected, has correct light output and does not requier any adjustments regarding gamma/contrast (If you would do that It would actually end up beeing less realistic)... just put it in an CoronaOutput and check Affected by CVFB tone mapping, thats it.
its not perfect yet, I know, but for the first one It's kinda nice I think.
(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=16661.0;attach=70671;image)
(https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=16661.0;attach=70673;image)
https://eveimages.wetransfer.com/downloads/02d7247fda7cb42982074a3512c6716e20170915142318/d05d1a (https://eveimages.wetransfer.com/downloads/02d7247fda7cb42982074a3512c6716e20170915142318/d05d1a)
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It simply got lost down in memory lane... (and I'm completely unable to code!)
Just downloaded your HDRI, will check it out as soon as i finish a couple of renders. I've been long time looking for enviro maps taken from a higher position (not at ground level), so kudos for you! ;)
Thanks, and keep up the good work.
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any feedback regarding the HDRI? what would you change?
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Ok. no feedback. I testet a lot for myself now.
I am pretty much done with the whole system and I want at least show you some kind of end result.
here is a testscene with a lot of different Light situations:
http://eyedea3d.com/Renderings/all_together.jpg
and attached is another shot I liked and rendered in 4k... I might Post it again here in the gallery
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and attached is another shot I liked and rendered in 4k... I might Post it again here in the gallery
Wow, super cools shot and mood. Where did you get your vegetation? Trees and ground cover look really, really good to my eye.
Interesting thread!
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Thanks!
Ground Plants are from various sources, can't tell exactly, but I used my special green shader on all of them. So every green you see is all one shader. It is also super simpel without any map...
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Thanks!
Ground Plants are from various sources, can't tell exactly, but I used my special green shader on all of them. So every green you see is all one shader. It is also super simpel without any map...
Interesting! They have a nice look and feel to them, maybe it's the lighting and color grading that does the magic. Feel free to share your green shader settings though :-D :-D
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i think its the lighting (full real world dynamic range) and the capturing (simulating a camera as close as possible)
this is without grading/post
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i think its the lighting (full real world dynamic range) and the capturing (simulating a camera as close as possible)
this is without grading/post
Oh yep, not quite as compelling but still really nice. I think I might also be having a positive reaction to the homogeneous nature of the greens. Lots of times I'll tweak each tree\plant a little and end up with a bit TOO much variation. I should try the approach of everything gets the same diffuse and translucency maps.
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At our office - we have a lot problems regarding the greens. In the past we tried to adjust the shaders/diffuse colors again and again for the plants in our library but as we did not have a standard in lighting they were not consistend and broke in different scenes with different lighting. This was one reason I started developing this Lumiére thing. I think it was the right decision.