This sharing is collected by the TPN-Accredited cloud render farm, Fox Renderfarm. We hope that can help you in learning knowledge in Film and TV production. Virtual Production is an emerging film and TV production system, including a variety of computer-aided film production methods designed to enhance innovation and time-saving. With the help of real-time software such as Unreal Engine, traditional linear processes can be transformed into parallel processes, blurring the boundaries between pre-production, production, and post-production, making the entire process more fluid and collaborative. Virtual production in real-time LED video wall Since Avatar released in 2009, virtual production emerged as a new field from the digital revolution of the film industry, bringing a new perspective to viewers and professionals. The virtual production of Avatar The large-scale use of green screen（or blue screen） filmmaking has made it more and more important for directors to see the real-time composition of performance and virtual space. As directors could implement instant guidance on live shooting by virtual production, the technology is gradually applied to production. Real-time combination in the green screen The Definition of Virtual Production Let’s describe virtual production simply. When the actor performs in front of the green screen (or blue screen), the screen is directly replaced by the virtual scene made in advance. Then the director’s monitor is presented with scenes in real-time composition which can only see in the late stage of the production process. This is called virtual production. Virtual production sets and motion capture environments The History of Virtual Production The development of virtual production is inseparable from the progress of computer technology. In the 1940s and 1950s, computers were in the mainframe stage. In the 1960s and 1970s, they gradually transformed into small computers. Owing to the limitations of the hardware, software, and talent base, virtual production carried forward slowly during this period. IBM-PC launched by IBM Microsoft was founded in 1975, and later developed the Windows operating system; Apple was established in 1976, using Apple's own System x.xx/Mac OS operating system; in 1981, IBM introduced IBM-PC, which greatly simplified the hardware architecture and oriented ordinary people. Because the development of the operating system is still in the DOS stage at this time, the speed of popularization is still very slow. Spielberg on the monitor to view the virtual production effect of Number One Player In 1982, SGI was established in the United States. Jurassic Park, Titanic, Toy Story, The Lord of the Rings, and others are all having a close connection with it. The Lord of the Rings set & VFX compositing In 1995, SGI acquired Alias Wavefront, which is the predecessor of MAYA software. In 1991, Microsoft introduced the Windows 3.0 multi-language version of the operating system. A few years later, Win95 was launched, realizing a real graphical operating interface. Hence, the development of computers entered the fast lane.

Next, we will share the production process of two other materials: Making wood material Pay attention to the following points when making wooden materials: • When you split the UV, try to place the squares as much as possible to ensure that the post-texture image will not be distorted. • It is also necessary to consider the utilization rate of UV space and try to give priority to the things you can see, which can improve the quality of the material. • The texture of the wooden structure is simple to produce, and it is necessary to find a lot of references that combine with the situation of the scene. For example, what does the wooden structure look like in an underground wet environment for a long time? Or the wood in this environment is more corroded? So to make such a feeling, a lot of references is very important. Substance Painter wood texture production • Import the baked Normal stickers and prepared materials into Substance Painter. Before creating something, create two fill layers, leaving only the Color option. One layer puts the AO diagram on the Color and adjusts to a positive overlay, which is used to improve the dark color. Another layer puts the Curvature map on Color and adjusts to Overlay, which is used to improve the bright color of the edge. After these operations are completed, the production of the texture begins. Pay attention to the production of wooden texture: Consider the actual situation of the scene. Take the scene we made (spy house) as an example. For a long time in a dark and humid environment, the corrosion will be relatively serious. Afterward, it should be noted that the edges of the wood will not be particularly bright. The bright edges of the wear marks will also be darker, and then the scratches and the wear of the places where they are often used. A little brightness is needed here. Finally, there is dust accumulation and stains in places that are not often encountered. After these things are done, you can basically get a good real texture. The material for making paper and book When making a single-page paper with no thickness, please pay attention to the following points: 1. When you split the UV, try to place the square as far as possible to ensure that the textures in the later period will not be distorted. 2. The texture of the paper is simple to produce, without Hight Polygon, just baking Low Polygon Normal. How to make paper in Substance Painter: Import the baked Normal map and prepared materials into Substance Painter. Create a layer (unfilled layer), select Color for the material and put the material in Base Color, and select None for UV Wrap. In F1 3D/2D mode, place the picture material in the corresponding position. Just pay attention to the book texture production: from the beginning, it is necessary to distinguish between the shell and the content. If it is made into one, it will not be easy to separate when making the texture. Marmoset Toolbag 3 rendering Finally imported into Marmoset Toolbag 3 for rendering, the first is to layout the light source, choose to add an HDR suitable for the scene, adjust the Child Light to the appropriate position to make the model produce a 45-degree shadow. Because the scene is larger, more lights are added, but when rendering, pay attention to adjusting the size and illumination range of those fill lights to prevent the mutual influence of light. I hope our learning and sharing can help you, thank you.

Material production After baking all normals, AO, and curvature, import Substance Painter to make materials. It is worth noting that the normals baked in Marmoset Toolbag 3 and Maya use OpenGL mode in Substance Painter, and the normals baked in 3ds Max use DirectX mode. The first step after successfully importing the model must be to check whether the normal direction is correct. After successful import, the remaining textures are baked in the texture set-baking model texture. The following uses the sofa leather material to share the basic process of the material: the production of sofa leather material. Inherent color of the leather Choose a suitable material map and paste it in the color channel, adjust other parameters appropriately to make the effect more natural Bump height Create a new fill layer to keep the height channel, paste the height map corresponding to the background color layer, and add Level to adjust the height. At the same time, add anchor points to ensure that the color changes with the height. AO layer The AO diagram of the model pasted in the AO channel is that the dark parts of the edges are deepened, and the bumps are more three-dimensional. Roughness Adjust the roughness of the sofa surface. Frequent contact with objects will wear more, such as the edge of the cushion, the inner and upper sides of the armrest, the bottom of the sofa, the top of the backrest, etc. Grunge textures can be added to make the effect more natural. The edge fades Create a fill layer and add a generator to produce a faded edge wear effect. Adding only one generator effect will be very stiff. Add a few more layers to interrupt the continuous effect to make the wear more natural, and finally, add hand-painted details. Details added Use the Grunge map to add scratches, stains, and other details to the surface. Dust There are two kinds of dust: dust accumulated in corners and trace dust on the surface. Create a fill layer to leave the color, roughness, and height, and then use the generator to calculate the dust position adjustment parameters to make the effect natural, and you can appropriately add hand-painted details. Gap treatment Manually add black to deal with gaps and other details.

This is a sharing of making a spy house with 3ds Max, provided by your TPN-Accredited 3ds Max render farm. The main software used in this article is ZBrush, Marmoset Toolbag 3. The following is the final effect display, then share the overall production process. Goal setting First of all, this project uses the standard game production process, using 3ds Max to complete the basic Polygon construction, and part of the production of Hight Polygons， and ZBrush completes the carving of local Hight Polygons, Marmoset Toolbag 3 baking, Substance Painter, complete the production of the PBR material, and finally use Marmoset Toolbag for rendering. After the above process is established, production begins, In the Low Polygons stage, Polygon is started according to the angle of the original painting, which is convenient for establishing the scale of the model. After the Low Polygons are completed, in order to facilitate the unification of the material style, the production of the Middle Polygons, High Polygons is completed according to the material. Production process - Modeling - Material production - Marmoset Toolbag rendering Modeling First of all, there is an iron table in the center of the scene, so we first set the height of this table as the scene height reference, the table height is set to 1.3m, and then complete the Low Polygons in 3ds Max. After Low Polygons is completed, put the models together, and adjust the size and distribution of each model. It is established that the proportion position of each part of Low Polygons is correct, and some details can be added to the model. There are a lot of reusable objects, we have added different details to them so that the repetition is not too high. Taking these metal boxes as an example, adding different details to them can better reduce visual duplication. Here takes one of the metals as an example to share the production process: After Low Polygon was completed, it began to add details, and then the model was UVS split: Points to note: We made the prototype groove on the surface so that when making materials, we can use the intelligent mask to calculate the paint and stains, reducing the workload. When making circular grooves, pay attention to controlling the number of lines according to the size of the circle, and try to make Low Polygons and High Polygons match each other when baking to produce a good normal map. When making the lampshade, the glass cover is a Geosphere, to avoid a strange texture when the glass cover reflects. After selecting the sphere, click Hemisphere to get a hemisphere, so as to avoid the generation of strange textures, and then use the zoom tool to adjust the size ratio. The edges of the sphere need to add lines to avoid the deformation of the model and check for useless points or lines. High Polygon Production It is not difficult to make the metal part Hight Polygons. The edge position needs to add lines to avoid model deformation. Add a turbo smooth modifier to check if there is any deformation. If there is any adjustment, adjust it again. Low Polygon Production Directly use the Hight Polygons made by Turbo Smooth, directly reduce the surface based on the model with added details, delete the lines that do not affect the structure, and use the options in the graphite tool to check whether there are polygons. Make the Low Polygons of the sofa, make the basic shape of the sofa in max, and then sculpt the High Polygon in ZBrush, and then use the topology tool to complete the Low Polygon. Note that the place close to the 90-degree angle must distinguish between the smooth group and the cut-off UV. The sofa Hight Polygon is completed in ZBrush. When sculpting, different wrinkle effects should be added according to the different materials finally presented. As shown below: a relatively hard leather sofa, the folds are mainly distributed at the stitches, and there will be no large and wide folds. The surface of the seat cushion will be slightly concave and convex due to long-term use, and the foot cushion and the bottom of the armrest near the place will be slightly slack. The stitching of the sofa is not easy to be too neat, and a little curvature will appear more natural. Baking normal Baking uses Marmoset Toolbag 3, of course, there are many other ways, you can also use Substance Painter and ZBrush baking normal. But the advantage of choosing Marmoset Toolbag 3 is because we intuitively modify the normal. The following figure is a basic introduction to the baking normal of Marmoset Toolbag 3: Next is the normal modification panel:

This article is a 3ds Max tutorial about how to set a realistic interior lighting shared by the powerful but affordable 3ds Max render farm, Fox Renderfarm. We hope that can help you with 3ds Max learning. For interior designers, to make a good work rendering includes many aspects, such as modeling, color matching, lighting atmosphere, composition angle, and so on. In this 3ds Max tutorial, I will discuss with you the lighting layout of the 3ds Max scene. Taking the bedroom space as an example, there is a set of small principles on how to arrange the lights, that is, the order of placing the lights: ambient light → main light source → supplementary light. This time I will show you the lighting layout process of the Bedroom. This kind of effect is different from the general rendering. It is based on the demonstration of hotel space lighting technology. The purpose is to let everyone know more about the backlighting indoor space and indoor lighting design. Let's take a look at a few photos first, you can watch and observe at the same time, The above figures have one thing in common, that is, the lighting atmosphere is relatively strong, and the key places are particularly bright, such as pillows, decorations, and dining tables, from which conclusions are drawn. Taking commercial pictures as an example, you don't need to blindly follow the trend to make photo grades. What you want to do is to combine realism and art. The following uses a set of models as examples. The first step is to add a VRaySky to add ambient light. The rendering setup parameters are shown in the figure, the settings of the image sampler and color map. Adaptive DMC → Mitchell-Netravali → Type: Exponential. Then open Indirect illumination and check on, set Irradiance map and Light cache, the parameters are as follows, Test rendering， It looks very dark right now, yes, only by reducing the darkness of the space can the light atmosphere be shown! So I decided to increase some ambient light, it can be imagined that there is no feeling of turning on the lights during the day. Two VR surface lights are added, the indoor VR lights are to strengthen the effect of the skylight on the interior, Lighting parameter value, Rendering test results: Although it will not be so dark in reality when the lights are not turned on, the lights cannot be so bright in the 3D software, which will dilute the performance of indoor lights. In the second step, the ceiling hidden lights are lit according to the area of the square light troughs on the ceiling. Such ceilings are more common. If you find it troublesome, you can look for some plugins to make. In order to save time and have a contrast effect, you can choose the area rendering test to see, After placing the ceiling wall lamp, you can see the effect of the background wall around the top, which is the effect of the hidden lamp. The third step is to add the lights of the bedside table lamp and place a VR ball lamp inside the lampshade of the table lamp. The fourth step is to make the effect of the tube-shaped lamp, and the brightness of the key positions is improved. This makes the space more important. The fifth step is to add fill light. Test to see the effect after fill light, it can be clearly seen that the side of the bed and the ground are not too dark. Finally, all the lights have been arranged. You can also add a light to decorate. At this time, you can choose a smaller IES optical domain network to place the decorations on the bed. This can not only improve the details, but also enrich the shadows on the bed, and finally the post-production effect. (The previously adjusted parameters have not been changed. The parameters can be adjusted higher when the final picture is produced, so the effect is even better.)

Fox Renderfarm, the best render farm in the CG industry, will bring you sharing about character model making process and ideas. Many people will encounter a lot of problems when they first come into contact with CG character art. For example, there is now a new character model that needs to be designed. Where should I start? What should it be made of? Even if there are very powerful artists to teach the experience, they will still find it impossible to start. So how should this situation be resolved? We take the role of Vesemir in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as an example. Why choose this role? Because Vesemir's body shape, material, clothing, hair, etc. contain many types. The entire case contains a complete process from reference to a complete production process, which can fully meet all project production. Reference Before production, it is necessary to clarify the production goals: such as the model style, the details of the model, and what kind of quality to achieve in the end, these are very important. Taking the character of Vesemir in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as an example, you need to find references before making, such as armor reference, material texture reference, etc., even the style of clothing, sewing method, etc., all the things that need to be model need a detailed reference. Modeling The basic structure of the model is very important. Although the character has clothing to cover the body, the structure of the body cannot be ignored. Be sure to ensure the correct body structure. (In the production of other projects, some basic body models can be saved, and some time can be saved here). The same clothes are worn on different people, and the feeling of dressing is different. The part of the red line is to outline the outline of the desired character and then modify the model. This is also the most critical step in making a model. If the shape is inaccurate or not correct enough, even if you put on clothes, the model will look fake and the whole will be very uncoordinated. The picture above is the wrong case! For example, cloth, different materials in different parts, and different thicknesses, the wrinkle direction is different. The model should also consider the volume and structure of those things when making the model. UVs Regarding topology and UV, the focus is on low polygons. Especially for the human body, reasonable lines and surfaces conform to the direction of muscles and bones. For example, an accessory with a complicated shape, but it is extremely small, so you should not give too many polygons. Compared with the high polygon, the low polygon will always lose little things, so it is necessary to balance between the two. Texture The production of textures is a very important part. It is necessary to correctly analyze the changes in the real world and then restore them with layers, and understand how the texture controls different attribute nodes of the object. Substance Painter is very easy to use in texture production. Then according to different production processes, they correspond to the normal, color, highlight, glossiness, normal, color, metallicity, roughness, and other attributes of the object. Make the basic texture in Substance Painter, and then added different details according to different props, such as broken and worn out. And distinguish the texture of props: metal, leather, weapons, etc.. The lighting used a set of previously made lights (which can save some time), and the texture can be produced while testing and observing the effect. If the final rendering effect is more realistic, then the details are very important.

Fox Renderfarm, as your TPN-Accredited 3ds Max render farm, brings you this sharing from 3d artist Sqyxart about using 3ds Max and ZBrush to create a stylized female warrior. With the development of the game, the character art of the game style has always been a very popular type. Then the game's requirements for character models are getting higher and higher, also more and more difficult. So what kind of knowledge and skills should I learn to model the character of a game? In this article, we demonstrated the production process of the entire game model with examples, and discussed each step of character production, share some problems encountered in the production process, the total production time of the entire project is 34 days. Production process The character reference comes from a pair of conceptual design drawings, but it is a very difficult process to completely convert the design drawings into 3D characters. 1. Create a low polygon according to the design drawing in 3ds Max. This process only needs to build a rough shape and structure to observe the proportion of the body. 2. After confirming the structure of the body, some large accessories such as clothing and armor can be made. Detail After the overall model is confirmed, more structure can be added to the body and armor and other accessories. Because we need to sculpt afterward, this part only needs to add structure without adding too much detail. Sculpture Import the adjusted model into ZBrush for sculpting. This step of engraving takes the most time, and it is also the part that requires the most patience. For the final quality, repeated modifications are inevitable. Topology The number of faces of the sculpted characters is very high, and the model of this number of faces cannot be directly imported into the game engine, so it is necessary to topology a low-polygon model on the carved high-face polygon Import game engine to use. There are two methods for topology. You can use a special topology software such as TopoGun, or you can use the automatic topology function that comes with Maya or ZBrush. Although the method of use is different, the final results are the same. UVs Topologically low polygons need to be split into UVs before making textures, so that they can be used to bake normals, make material textures, etc. For UV expansion, you can use the 3ds Max plug-in, or use some special UV expansion software. Baking The baking process is to map the details of the high polygon to the low polygon, such as normal map (with bump information), color map, metal map, roughness, and other maps. Baking is generated and exported in Substance Painter or Toolbag to get textures with high polygon details, Texture In Substance Painter, paste the baked texture on the low polygon, make materials, adjust the parameters of various materials, add some dirt, wear, scratches and other details to the texture, showing a more realistic effect. The final effect is shown below,

Fox Renderfarm, a powerful but affordable Blender render farm. This article is compiled from 3D artist Leroy's sharing of Cycles for Blender to create pixel style. The focus of the pixel style performance is on the coloring, that is, to extract the required pixels from a delicate picture and make it with a pixelated style. Although in Cinema 4D, the coloring using MotionGraph can be quickly completed, but Leroy wants to achieve it in Blender. And Blender's Cycles renderer is very powerful. Since Cycles comes with a mapping sampling node, making pixel-style things is also very simple. The mapping sampling of the material uses the From Dupli function of the UV Map node. As for production, there are two ways to achieve: 1. Use parent copy, 2. Use particle copy; Two ways, the controllability of particles More, it can simply produce more complex and many effects of changes. The production steps are as follows: Method 1 Create a new plane in the scene, magnify it 5 times, and enter the edit mode for the third subdivision. Return to the object level, create a new plane (the default state is selected after new creation), hold down Shift to select the plane just now, and select Object from the menu, that is, set the large plane as the parent object of the small plane. Select the parent object, in the object properties of the properties panel, set the copy mode to Faces, check Scale, and set the zoom value to 0.4, as shown in the following figure， Select the parent object and keep it selected by default in edit mode, then select Unwrap on the menu. If the model is relatively simple, just use auto split UV, The production of the model is almost complete. The texture part will be started below. Next, you need to select the sub-object, click New in the material node to create a new texture, delete the default diffuse shading, and add a self-illuminating shading. Create a new image texture node (here you need to use the image material to be pixelated), add a UV texture node, check the From Dupli option, and connect it to the texture node, Shift + R preview rendering in 3D view, the effect is as follows, Is it very simple? Of course, you can also use video animation and other materials to create pixel animation. Next, let's look at the method of making particles, or use the above scene and material. Method 2 Select the child object of the scene, then add the parent object, select clear parent in the pop-up menu, and set the copy in the parent object attribute to None, select the child object, G10 will move it to the side, as shown in the figure below, Select a large plane, in the particle properties panel properties, click New, create a new particle system, set the particle type to Hair, and set it to Object in the Render tab, select the small plane, uncheck Emitter, as the picture shows, Turn on the advanced hair, and set the initial orientation to None in the spin tab. The preview effect is as follows, The next step is to adjust the particles: size, distribution, number, etc. Only some important operations are demonstrated below. The default particle distribution is messy and needs to be adjusted neatly. In the emitter, cancel randomization and set the particle/face to 1, so that only one particle is generated on each face, and finally adjust the size of the particles as needed. The plasticity of the particles is very strong. Although the pixels in the above case are all square, they can be made into various shapes such as triangles, quadrilaterals, and circles after adjustment, and they can also increase in size, rotation, and random distribution particle. In addition to using UV map nodes for texture mapping, texture coordinate nodes can also be used, and there are also options from the copy. When copying particles, in order to avoid overlapping of particles, it is best to set the number of particles emitted to the number of faces of the mesh emitter (in edit mode, you can see in the information panel).

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Fox Renderfarm is known as a powerful but affordable render farm in the CG industry. Fox Renderfarm supports most mainstream software, Renderers, and Plugins, including Maya and Arnold. This article is about the knowledge of ice cube material in the basic material related learning in the Arnold tutorial. I hope it can be helpful for your learning of Arnold. In all kinds of texture making, ice cubes are a special kind. The overall texture of the ice cube is transparent, and has high specularity and refraction, as well as a certain caustics. Although the ice cubes are smooth, fine particles can still be seen at a certain angle. These particles are actually some small white bubbles generated during the ice-making process. There are many ways to achieve this effect. Today we will share a method of making ice cubes. Production First create a block to serve as the main body of ice. Then create an Arnold base shader and modify some of the settings. Because the ice cube material is transparent. There is no color, so there is no surface color. In Diffuse, set Color to black. Increase the Weight value in Specular. Because the surface of ice has no roughness and is very smooth, you need to open Fresnel to simulate this effect. Set the refraction, the value of Weight also needs to be adjusted up, the value of IOR is set to 1.33, and then check Fresnel, also need to check Caustics. Now the basic texture of the ice cube has been set. Now you need to add a small bubble effect to the ice cube. First create an Arnold 3D texture material, give the model, the following dialog box appears, just close it. After jumping out of the Aibump3d1sg node, you just need to drag the created Arnold texture to the Surface Shader in Arnold of Aibump3d1sg, then the model will appear small bubbles of bump effect. Next, place the ice texture made in the Shader of Aibump3d1 in the texture. Next, you need to add a Stucco texture map to the Bump Map in the 3D node, and then change the Bump Height to 0.5. Now that the material part is complete, the rest needs to add an HDRI. Open the material editor, create an aiSky environment ball map in Arnold, and paste an HDR environment map in Color. Change the value of Intensity to 2. Some settings are required before rendering. Click the Background link in the Environment to create the aiSky texture that was just created, so that the lights in the scene are set up. The sampling value of Cameraca is increased to 5 (the higher the value, the slower the rendering speed). Refraction value is set to 4. Set the Refraction value to 4 in Ray depth. Create a sphere as an environment and check Visibe in Refiections in Render Stats. Then conduct a rendering test. Rendering In 3D texture mapping, Maya's own 3D texture mapping can achieve many different effects (turn off the highlighter and refraction of the shader, and the following effects appear, The highlight and refraction of the shader are turned on, rendering: