Kannonbal in the house
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HAHAHA, sweet movie! Last time I had a camera pointed at me, my dirt bike ended up under my pickup
Those super motards sure look like a ton of fun. I had my EXC set up with a Scott's steering stabilizer, FMF pipe, it was bored over a touch, and that bike was awesome. In the super technical rides around Crested Butte, though, I found myself wanting a four stroke because I didn't necessarily have the 'stones' to stay on the pipe enough to keep from stalling. I am dreaming about getting a new bike, though, I don't ride the one I have enough. You need to take the dirt bike out to Delta sometimes. That place is like the ultimate playground! Tight technical rocky lines, wide open sand, steep spines, drainages, you name it. And it is pretty much ridable all year, more or less.
My bike needs shocks in a bad way. I have a certain fondness for running hard into turns in fourth, pop two gears, hard on the front break before entry and let second gear squirm the back tire into the lean. To say that I notice that my back shock is shot is an understatement. The mack daddy front and rear setup is like $1600 though!!! Might be a while........The CBR sure sounds like a sweet ride. I really have very little seat time in sport bikes, but the GS will rally the whee out of the twisties; it just tops out at about 128, which I guess is just as well.
I'll see if I can dig up a picture or two.....
Cheers, mayng, good luck on the animation troubleshooting.
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Chuck,
I just had a look over your website again man. I really liked your straight SU output stuff, and some of your exteriors are fantastic! A little piece of critiscism though, I didn't really like most of the renders, I think that the materials need to be explored a little more with highlights, reflections, bump and diffusion/absorbing qualities. I did like the overhead kitchen view though and will likely rip you off on that!!! (if that is okay) something about a perspective like that that just seemed exiting. That is something I noticed right away looking at your stuff this time, was your eye for perspective. PS filters after are a great way to bring even a not-so nice render up to snuff... One of my fav's right now is OpticVerve Labs Virtual Photographer...I'll post a link tonight after I play with your render on that other post!The photomontages also were AWESOME... I haven't tried anything like that yet.. so I guess I should get on 'er I didn't check out your animations, but I'm sure that they are pretty cool.. all in all a really cool site and it gives me some motivation to get mine going...
again - I'm glad that you are here and we can all keep in touch and in community - I was also glad to see your KAAAANNNNNOONNNBALLLL! in the pool - you soaked me!
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Hey Shaun, thanks for the kind words! I really appreciate you taking the time to post your reactions and thoughts about my images. I couldn't agree with you more about my renderings; I am still way coming to grips with learning Cheetah and the whole materials setup thing. I guess Martin, Cheetah's developer, is completely reworking the materials part of the software, as well as greatly enhancing the quality of various soft shadow producing lights. This is very exciting, though some guys are really generating awesome renders now. It seems that there is agreement that interiors are pretty difficult to set up correctly, so I am am excited about having a lot to learn.
I am glad you are liking the photo montage work! I have been doing a lot of experimenting with QTVR (thanks wehby for cubic pano out!!) and I have been playing around with stitching models into existing photos and then turning them into virtual tours. It is pretty cool when it all works right, though it takes a bunch of time in photoshop. Clients really like them, and I like that QTVR makes way smaller files than animations, which is great for web use. I am interested in hearing what you think about them.
I would love to check out OpticVerve; I'd like to see how your experiments work out with one of my images (thanks for taking the time, too). It sounds like a really interesting plugin and could help me out a bunch. Speaking of photoshop, have you upgraded to CS3 yet? I am holding out until the Premium Production suite is out but Photoshop Extended looks awesome.
I am off to the pool to see if there is any 'talent' around, hehehehehhe (lecherous old man cackle)
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Chuck,
I didn't get time to play with your images last night - video conversion got the best of me.. I finally got my animation married with sound, converted and then uploaded to youtube last night though - glad that's done! I just checked out OpticVerve - and shoot wouldn't you know it - only for PC... sorry bud. I might have a quick peek tonight, but we'll see. As far as Photoshop.. well I'm still using Photoshop elements actually - I got it with my (now ancient) Nikon Coolpix 5000 when I bought it, and I've never had the priority to pick up CS3. The only time it crossed my mind is with "the worncall" technique - Marc Day if I'm not mistaken. That is a cool rendering technique, and I can't do every step in PS elements, but I didn't break down.. I have other stuff on the burner! (like trying to amass computers for my renderfarm!). Talent.. good on ya... I saw Ross scopin a couple babes the other day at the outdoor bean shaped pool. -
figures, PC only......... Oh well, I'd still like to see what sort of results are possible with it, if you happen to have the time and motivation.
Congrats on getting your video up and running! Video conversions and all can be a pain. What video editing software do you use? I am currently trying to decide if I want to go the Adobe Premier route or the Final Cut Pro route. I am tending towards Adobe just because I can get an upgrade price for the Production premium suite.
Yeah, I downloaded the Worncall technique off of Pushpullbar; there really is a ton of good stuff in there. I guess the new Photoshop CS3 will allow you to open, manipulate, and even measure (!?!) fbx and obj files. It sounds like photomatching with steroids and I am definitely going to check it out. I have been running PS7 on my Intel Mac and it runs like a dog; some of my 1.5 gig, 67 picture panos can pretty much bring it to a halt.
Are really putting a render farm together? That is sick! Will you take jobs from others or is this going to be just inhouse? I just finished a 35 hour Sketchup animation export, and some Cheetah rendered animations can go multi day, which I have not attempted yet.
Late,
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Chuck,
Yep. I've got a farm homey! - I would probably do renders for people, but I only run VUE5i and SU. Here is a pic. My farm isn't too hot yet - but here's what I have:
My machine Opteron 170 dual core - a beast
My wife's old computer - Celeron 2800 - a real pig
Beside that a P3 550 that I "won" at work (too old to sell)
The stack of machines are Dell's and IBM's The IBM's are 1Ghz and the Dells are 1.6Ghz and 1 is a 1.59Ghz But I'm always on the lookout.
The Laptop is a 1.66 Ghz Dual Core HP Pavillion.
The results with all this beastly equipment? A render that would take my machine 30 hours, now takes 12. These aren't wonderful machines by any sense, but I'm impressed that I was able to link them all, run virtual desktops so I didn't have to have a tonne of monitors and it all works pretty decent.Looking forward to hearing what you think of this!
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Shaun, you are an animal!! That all sure makes my one laptop seem, ah, a little, ah, shall we say, small.
So, you link them all together with usb 2? Or, do you take a SU animation, break it into a bunch of pieces and load each piece into a separate computer and then stitch them all back together again? I was just telling my wife that it is going to be rendering that forces me to get another computer, so I can work and render at the same time. I am not a patient man and 12-30 hour renders are driving me nuts. I guess I could dump some of it on her computer and.........well, that would just get me in trouble.
I can hardly wait to see your website; you got to get on that! I have looked at Vue before, but after seeing some of what you are doing, I may have to take another look. Does it run on Macs?
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Chuck,
is the diminutive size of your laptop making you feel less "manly"? Keep in mind that these are slow, plodding beasts. It's not the size of your machine, it's the speed (or what you do with it) - uh, okay enough...
I haven't tried an animation from SU yet, I think that would require another license for each machine - unless someone came up with some way to use the comps as a cluster or something.. but SU wouldn't support that - (multi core).
I just realised that I suggested someone should have 2 SU's open on 1 computer today to utilise both cores for rendering (splitting up the animation pages between each instance) but I hope that I didn't counsel an illegal behaviour - I often open a couple instances to copy/paste.
I have this set up for VUE, the animations take for fricking ever. I have them set up on a simple network, nothing installed on the dells and ibms except the VUE render cow (node) and then they are controlled by a "head" computer that has VNC viewer, the rest are VNC servers so that you don't have to have a keyboard, mouse and monitor for each. I can then pick which ones I want to use for rendering and I can have my computer free for more work if I want!
Why don't you come over and check it out?
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Hey, thanks for the invite! I'd love to ride the bike up there one of the weekends. Maybe make the big loop through Banff and Golden. I have never been further north than Calgary and I am dying to get up there.
Have you skied Kicking Horse? I hear it is awesome, though sometimes hurting for snow.
I didn't even think that you would need multiple licenses for SU; that is a drag. I am pretty intimidated by rendering times for ray trace stuff and I have yet to jump off the edge and start one. I don't know if you've been following the threads over in the dead forums, but SU6 animation export is still fubared. CraigD has been busting his nut trying to help me out, but it seems to be quite the problem. So I am having to model in 6, save out to 5, and then export from 5. Talk about twiddling your thumbs while 200MB SU files open and close, and of course orbiting and panning is brutal, too, especially in version 5. Can you guess that I am setting up an animation export right now
. At least it isn't 12:30. And I often have both version 5 and 6 open at the same time. If I could actually get decent exports out of 6, then perhaps doing two exports at once would speed things up, though why do I have the sneaking suspicion that they would just each render at 1/2 speed.And what are you doing up right now?
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Hello Kannonbal,
I just checked out your site and am very impressed by your QTVR work. I'm trying to start doing this and I'm wondering if you could share some info on how you created the hotspots within the files. Also, how did you add a map button that allowed for quick jumping from hotspot to hotspot. That was too cool!
Is there some software that I should pick up that creates these easily? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks and keep up the great work.
Dan
poster-gustone81
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Hi dan, thanks for the kind words.
I have really gotten into using panoramas and QTVR for displaying my models on the web. You really can't beat the amount of information you can provide without compressing a full motion animation to within an inch of it's life. Plus, having something on the site that surfers can manipulate keeps them there longer, which is a good thing.
As far as hotspots and the map go, I would highly suggest you check out Cubic Converter (to make each node from a pano) and Cubic Connector (to make the multinode movie, with hotspots and the map overlay). You can find them both here: http://www.clickheredesign.com.au/software/ I absolutely love these two pieces of software and use them exclusively for making my QTVR's.
The hard part of the whole thing is getting a SketchUp model into a photographed background while maintaining a level of believability when users zoom in super close. Hours of Photoshop and SketchUp exporting await you if you decide to start experimenting with this.
Good luck, and thanks again for taking the time to peruse my site!
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Thanks a lot for the tips!
I'll post something when I finish my first attempts at this.
Dan
poster-gustone81
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I'd love to see what you come up with.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
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Nice website Chuck. The QTVR's are a very good idea.
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Thanks!
It is definitely getting to be time to update some of my still imagery, though. I have been spending so much time working with panos and QTVR that I really have let some things go for the moment.
When I bought the most recent Photoshop (CS3), I received a month of free access to a video tutorial site (Lynda.com, which is awesome) so I have been going to school on advanced PS techniques for the last month, too.
One of these days....... and I really need to work on my watercolor technique, too........
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Chuck.... Chuck.... Chuck!!! Good to see you around!
Toddd
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Hey Chuck,
Didn't realize that you were in Whitefish?! That is by far my favourite town south of the border! (although I haven't visited many lol) My Uncle has a cabin just in between Kalisbel and Whitefish that I frequent for golf during the summer and the amazing snowboarding on big mountain during the winter! great place to be! If you're on your way to Edmonton, may I suggest a stopover in good ol' Calgary (The hockey is better here anyways! lol jk)
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Hi Todd, good to see you here, too. By the way, your scene rename script is an excellent addition to my plugin arsenal; thanks for that!
Hi will!
My wife and I have been in Whitefish for almost three years now and we really like it here. We actually moved here for the skiing, as Whitefish gets a lot more snow, usually, than Crested Butte, Colorado, where we lived for 9 years. We also love to ski Fernie, and I have been meaning to get up to Castle mountain one of these days (I hear it is really fantastic). We have just suffered through a vicious heat wave and now there are forest fires all around us. Town has been so choked with smoke that you can't even see Big Mountain sometimes. It is really quite miserable. I have been up to Calgary a few times and we always have a great time up there. We have a couple of good friends who live there so it is nice to have a place to stay. We should grab a beer, or two, next time we are in each other's neck of the woods.
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