Topics

1

Gallery / The Surfing Mini Superhero

« on: 2018-08-30, 21:53:32 »

During the summer, I started on this little project in my spare time. What was supposed to be a short project, turned out to take much more time than I anticipated.
The biggest challenge was to make the wave and water fx to loop.
After a lot of trial and error trying to simulate the wave, I ended up basically faking the whole thing. The wave motions turned out pretty alright I think :)

Strangely, it took forever to render certain frames so my guess is that I must have done something horrible with the way I configured my materials and shaders.
80% of the scene is just SSS and volumetrics though so I do expect it to take some time. But if anyone has some good pointers of good practices to keep these kind of shaders optimal, I'm all ears :)

Hope you like the result :)

2

[Max] General Discussion / DR Rendering sequences

« on: 2018-08-09, 14:36:46 »

Hi!
I'm currently rendering a sequence of one of my animations and I've had some issues with network rendering.
Originally I was using backburner to render the scene, but for some strange reason I've been stuck on a loop of 6 frames the past 2 days. Considering it takes like 10h per frame on 1 PC I decided to change tactics and use the DR server instead so the frames render faster (The total time it will take is the same though) outside of the backburner setup.
At least this time I could make sure the rendering doesn't get stuck on 6 frames and at least can advance.
I've set up all the DR servers and the first frame rendered with all DR servers actively working but when the master PC has continued to the next frame, the slaves don't seem to be working with it. Their status still says "Waiting for render to start" and it shows on the CPU activity as well.
I'm using Noise limit settings instead of pass limit in case this is useful info.

Does anyone who have an idea of how to fix this?

3

Gallery / Q Meieriene Ultimoo Commercials

« on: 2018-07-12, 10:17:23 »

Credits

Produced for Q-meieriene by MYREZE

Creative Director: Björn Myreze
Project Manager: Luciana Thunem
Moodboards: Bendikt Myklebust
Art Director / Storyboard: Kent Løset
Concept / Ideas: Mats Hope & Martin Lavik Nygaard
Head of 3D / Animation: Remi Vaage
Modeling / Gaming scene: Øyvind Engevik
Food scene / Travel scene: Daniel Liljar
Gym scene / Music scene: Karoline Holm
Motion graphics / Design: Mathias Birkeland
Grading / Audio: Christoffer Møgster


About the process

The ultimate chocolate milk Ultimoo is changing its packaging from carton to bottle and MYREZE was hired to make 5 commercials at 5 seconds each to show it.

Each of the different versions is targeted to different types of audiences. As the chocolate milk is more healthy than its competitors, we made one for the active viewers with a set designs of a gym wardrobe. And because it tastes much better than their competitors, we also made one for gamers, food lovers and for those who like something sweet when traveling, working or studying.

What they all have in common is that the new bottle is more sexy, it looks larger and is recyclable with delicious chocolate milk inside. In other words, it is the ultimate choice.

Everything is rendered with Corona for 3ds Max and final comp with Nuke.



Storyboards






City ad posters

4

Gallery / The superheroes

« on: 2018-05-13, 18:05:22 »

I decided to do a small personal project during the weekend a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to make myself a new cover photo for my facebook page.
I wanted to practice my realistic rendering skills as well as practice my lighting skills without the use of HDRi. At the same time, I wanted to use this project to also explore the latest features of Corona which I haven't gotten to use that much lately; the new hair and skin shaders.

I had an idea of the concept on friday and in order to save time and be able to complete it by sunday, I downloaded free models of man and woman and modeled the suits on top of that. The suits and skin were then textured using Substance Painter as well as preparing the Hair and Fur density and length maps (Especially for the beard on the guy in the back).
I really wanted to get another pass at the hair for the girl but I had to leave it if I wanted to keep my deadline of finishing at the end of the weekend (This was kind of my own little challenge)

The concept itself comes from the company I work for; MYREZE, where we brand ourselves as Superheroes and I wanted to make a picture to reflect that. It sure is a funny pitch for a new work uniform :-P

The render is almost untouched from Corona except from a few fixes with clone stamp in Photoshop.
I even rendered out a 16K version so it's possible to really zoom in and see the details. Hope you enjoy it :-)



For the past months, MYREZE has moved into a new era, with brand new offices at Media City Bergen. Even though there's been, a lot of big changes; we are still Superheroes!
When you need the best visuals, even the ones that run Real-Time; Call a Superhero ;-)

5

Gallery / Lost in Time Opener - By Myreze & The Future Group

« on: 2017-06-21, 14:56:02 »

One year ago, the brilliant team at The Future Group asked us to join in on a cutting edge project.
Little did we know about their plans for an ambitious TV-show entirely done in CG. This is by far the most fun project we've ever done, where the opener was among the things we cooperated on.

The idea behind the opener, is that the dragonfly represents "Eve", the female voiceover on the show.
In the opener, she introduces the different worlds to the viewers. Along the way we'll see that this is not an ordinary dragonfly, as it suddenly transforms into a mechanical dragonfly. We also learn that the Lost in Time worlds are all built from cogwheels and mechanics.

Except from a few effects, the entire opener is rendered with our beloved render engine of choice for most projects; Corona ;-)

CREDITS

Client
The Future Group

Project Owner
The Future Group
Bård Anders Kasin / Stig Olav Kasin

Creative Director
Björn Myreze

Director
Christoffer Møgster

Concept
Anja-Helen Fagerli
Martin Lavik Nygaard

Storyboard
Alexandra Hasfjord
Mats Hope
Kent Løset
Sandra Pilny-Lockertsen

Head of 3D
Remi Vaage

3D Team
Jo Christian Figenschou
Martin Reed
Tom Riise
Henning Tvedten
Stefan Björn
Anders Borg
Mathias Birkeland

Previs
Ole Martin Volle

Compositor
Bendikt Myklebust
Per Viggo Bergsvik

Music
Kurder King

Below are some still renders of the different worlds :-)

6

[Max] Bug Reporting / CMasking adds child objects of selected object

« on: 2017-03-09, 12:07:04 »

We came across an issue yesterday which seems like a bug to us. When we added a CMasking render element in RGB mode and added 3 separate objects (by object selection mode), we ended up with 2 of them appearing yellow. We tried separating it up into 3 monochromatic elements instead to then notice more objects appeared in the mask (objects linked to the selected object) that's not part of our selection.

The problem resolved itself by unlinking the objects as we did not need them to be parented in this particular scene but we can see this can cause an issue with other projects where the link is necessary due to rigging etc. 

7

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Bloom and Glare renders on all render elements

« on: 2017-03-09, 12:00:09 »

Is it a default setting to add bloom and glare to the render element passes such as Reflect and Emission passes?

We shipped a scene to render yesterday and when it came back, we found bloom and glare on our reflect and emission render elements, despite us rendering out the bloom and glare as a separate render element.

Bloom and glare is basically a post effect so should it even be present in the essential render elements? Or is it a bug?

8

[Max] I need help! / Rendering inside Fog, dust and clouds using Corona Volume Mtl

« on: 2017-03-03, 12:19:10 »

Hi!
We're working on a scene where we want to add fog, dust and other atmospheric effects using the corona volume mtl as it looks absolutely awesome and gives really nice volumetric effects.

But here is the kind of scenario:
Our scene contains of a sandy landscape made up of dust haze and sand blowing in the wind.
I have found some creative ways to use meshes to function as dust clouds and so on and the all render very nicely when the camera is outside the mesh.
Please see attached example file for illustration.

But what if there was a dust cloud moving towards the camera, making the camera pass through the volume? This is where I'm struggling as once the camera is inside the volume it renders not as I would expect it to look. Please see attached picture for illustration

It's ofc possible to do dust and all the "old fashioned" way with PFlow and camera facing planes but I don't think this renders as nicely and does not give the beautiful volumetric scattering of the light (how could it? as it's all fake).

Maybe someone has encountered a similar issue and knows a work around?

Thanks in advance :)

9

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Problems with Texture Baking

« on: 2016-08-29, 16:50:18 »

We have come across some strange issues when doing texture baking using 3ds max 2017 SP2 and Corona 1.4 (hotfix 1).

In some scenes the objects work fine and all is good while if we merge in the exact same object to a different scene, texture baking crashes 3ds max almost instantly when we hit "render". Using scanline does not crash 3ds max which is why we suspect it's an issue related to Corona.

The texture baker also seems to sometimes place the rendered files on random locations on the HDD and not where specified. We are unsure if this is a Corona issue or 3ds Max issue.

10

[Max] General Discussion / About IES lights and reflections

« on: 2016-07-29, 11:14:50 »

When using IES lights, we still get the same reflections from the light based on the shape. Shouldn't Corona make use of the IES file to define a shape in reflections?

11

[Max] Resolved Bugs / Hair and fur not rendering

« on: 2016-06-09, 12:20:32 »

We might have found a bug when it comes to rendering Hair and Fur.

We have set our settings to render as geometry but in our scene we have 3 different spline objects with Hair and Fur modifier attached and mostly only 1 of them render at a time randomly. Sometimes none of these objects render at all.

We think this might be a bug but we could be wrong?

12

[Max] General Discussion / Denoise and post production

« on: 2016-06-01, 11:05:21 »

The new denoiser is really a great tool which can save a lot of time. But so far this only works for the beauty pass as far as we have understood or have we missed something?

In terms of shortening the render times using the denoiser, we do meet a challenge as our pipeline consists of using the render elements and comping back the beauty in post. Since the render elements don't seem to get denoised, we have to keep rendering the needed passes in order to get rid of noise in our renderings.

Have we missed something or is this still not a feature?