ELECTRO GIG

Article TV PRO October 1995

Working in a 3D world Ben Liebrand already had a very successful career in the music industry before he entered the world of 3D modeling and animation. Ben has done productions and remixes on tracks of Sting, Phil Collins, Art of Noise, TLC, Four Seasons and was also the man behind the renewed success of Salt'N'Pepa with remixes of "Let's talk about sex" , "Expression", You showed me" and "Do you really want me". After playing, recording, producing and mixing his solo album Styles in 1989 Ben finally ended up doing the artwork too. What followed was a journey through PhotoShop, Illustrator and Infini-D for 3D modeling. Ben's music was a hobby and became a full time profession. Now the moment came for a new hobby which very soon turned into creating 3D artwork on a professional level for record companies (cover artwork), commercials and video clips. Ben is now working on silicon graphics workstations with ElectroGIG 3D-GO as his main 3D modeling and animation tool. So does it take to create real cool 3D stuff ? Ben believes in a certain feeling you get when you experience something beautiful and or impressive. As with music which should have a drive and a richness in sound, a 3D image should have that same kind of feel and sense of dynamics to it. Brilliance, contrast and most important, the power to convince. That what makes a 3D image photo realistic, are the imperfections as they also appear in the real world. Dirt smudge and a certain randomness ensure that a scene doesn't have that typical artificial look that is so common in a lot of 3D productions. Also the consistency in detail through-out an image or animation greatly enhances the "credibility-factor". And last but not least a great idea and a sense of humor are essential for creating the best work possible. Why ElectroGIG ? ElectroGIG is a solid modeler. Although a polygon modeler has advantages in certain fields, the perfection of working with solids is a pleasure considering you never have to worry about facets or curves which appear dented due to lack of resolution in the number of polygons. A surface , a sphere or a curve is always smooth no matter how far you zoom into your scene. The possibility to not only use Boolean operations, but also to animate them is another advantage. When conventional primitives,rotations,extrusions or patches don't do the trick, there are several alternatives. First of all, NURBS modeling (Non Uniform Rational B-Splines). Than there is Sculpt which is a sort of Meta-blob-form modeler, with an important difference to other similar "blob-modelers" in the fact that apart from spheres you also can use other primitives like cubes,cylinders,cones,and toruses to model with. Organics rounds the modeler section of with the possibility to model and animate all those forms which you'd describe as... well... you know..... Organic !! Particles are included. So are force fields in the form of "flowmotion". All different forms of modeling have the possibilities of performing Boolean operations on each other, and import of dxf eps obj iges and other formats are supported. All these goodies are when combined in a scene then ray-traced. This method is on the one hand time-consuming, but on the other hand delivers the best quality possible. ElectroGIG excels when it comes to materials like metal and glass. Reflections can be created through tricks and look OK, but here comes the credibility-factor sneaking back in. Although an image created with fake reflections (yes you are right, all 3D images are fake, and so are the reflections) might look OK, it still lacks that certain something which makes it convincing. And although your regular average viewer in front of a TV-set probably can't pinpoint what's wrong, he (or she) will have that uncertain feeling nevertheless. The bad lighting trap Working as a music producer for more than 13 years often sessions where recorded using expensive string or horn sections. Brilliant solos where recorded and during many expensive hours in de studio lots of tracks where filled with loads of riffs and melodies. However, if a certain solo riff, or complete section doesn't really work or add to the final "picture", they are muted and thus never heard again. If the 4 minute $ 4000 string section works best if only used in a small 15 second section and in the background, than that's the way it should be used. The point I'm trying to make is that a lot of 3D artwork is ruined by improper lighting caused by the fact that people are afraid that some detail in an image or some part of their hard modeling work might be overlooked. If getting the right atmosphere means that considerable portions of the image are close to black or in the fog or hardly visible at all, than so be it! Using a general ambient light to enhance the dark portions in an image is about the worst you can do. It makes all shadows flat and causes an image to loose a lot of it's dynamics. What are the tricks ? When lighting a scene with a single light source as shown in fig. "shadows 1" you see that the areas where shadows are cast, the image is virtually black. When you add ambient light as shown in fig. "shadows 2" you notice that although the shadow area is brighter, all detail is lost on the cylinder. A nice solution is emulating the real world by using one light source as the sun and the other as light coming from the sky. Off course the sun should be slightly yellow in color and casting shadows while the "sky" light source should be slightly blue and positioned straight overhead or slightly opposite to the sun. The effect is that the shadow areas still have detail and a slight blue cast. Areas which are equally effected by both light sources will produce the same color as if they were lit by a white light source. And the "sunny side of things" will have that slight yellow cast. The effect is shown in fig. "shadows 3". Adding a little specular and some amount of reflection results in fig. "shadows 4" which although no colors or textures are used, already has a sense of realism to it. Doing a paint job on a fish Rob Marinissen, award winning Dutch photographer told me he was going to do a photoshooting with fish mounted in a treadmill. The location was going to be in the desert. After the initial "say what" reaction on my behalf, I went to work as I had to generate a similar image using my 3D visualization tools. Having no time to loose, I started of with a dxf model of a fish, added the head which in real life was made of lead, with a bolt in the position of the eyes to be able to mount the fish to the treadmill. The figures "fish" show the build up, starting with the model fig. "fish 1", adding basic colors to fish, head and bolt in fig. "fish 2" . The texture on the lead head received an intensity variation through a noise map making it less regular as shown in fig. "fish 3". The bolt received some dirt through an intensity map and the body got a synthetic generated texture made on a Macintosh. Realism is already greatly improved by the specular highlights in fig. "fish 4", which by the way also can have their own color, ambient and intensity values controlled by maps, mathematics or sequences of images. Fig. "fish 5" shows the final version with bump maps on the lead part to give it a brushed look and scales on the body combined with some reflection to make it nice and shiny. When the normal tools aren't sufficient , there's also a complete texture editor which is way past cybercity, across the universe, take a sharp left and enjoy. So where does TV come in ? Doing artwork for record companies is big fun because if it is good enough, the still on the sleeve will be come the theme for the video or the commercial. This is the moment where the still comes a live. The original models are loaded back in the computer, and animation can begin. Story boards often only consist of a couple of lines roughly outlining the basic idea and leaving lots of room to experiment and simply be creative. Working without a detailed does have it's own problems however, because calculating a budget becomes much more difficult. It comes down to your style basically. If people like the stuff you do , you'll be given more creative input in the process. It's basically the same situation as with the music industry where producers and mixers are chosen for their style and particular views. Everyone can make a logo fly. So why do you get that job ? Because you don't give the client what he wants, you give him what he needs. You give the full value for money and that special something extra which makes him go "YESSSS!!" instead of "OK this will do". Know your client, know his business, and if a job would benefit more from an approach other than 3D-animation , then tell the client. You might miss out on a job but it'll pay back in the end being professional. So, back to the technical stuff. The animation is on the way. In ElectroGIG movements are as smooth as silk or as sharp as you can handle it. Curves are as bezier as you can get them and points can be edited until your fantasy ride is as you imagined it. Camera movements are related to the real world. Track moves you back and forth along your "track". Pan pans the way a pan should pan. Always relative to the position your in. If you already happen to fly on your side through your favorite maze,pan will still work as you would expect it to. ElectroGIG will recalculate for you the actual amounts in roll tilt and pan. Ready in the animation layout for you to keep or edit. Tilt , roll and zoom work in the same units as a real camera would. Fisheye, panoramic, 360°,or your basic "let's pull the universe inside out" views are also available. Choose your resolution, choose what quality you'd like and render with or without matte, to targa or tiff LZW if you need that extra space on your harddisc. Utilities are supplied for file conversion, renumbering and renaming of batches and viewers for stills and animation's. How was it made ? The image "Soul Detective" is a nice example of photo realistic rendering. This image was made as artwork for an album cover for Bernard Oattes (shown in the picture frame). The entire image is modeled in 3D only 2 photographs were used. On e in the picture frame and another as "cardboard cut-out" behind the glass in the corridor. Doors, walls cabinets and desk are made from primitives. The newspaper is a patch. The fan on the file cabinet as well as the fan on the ceiling are made with NURBS and rotational objects. The heater again is NURBS-city, along with the light on the desk and the wings of the air plane. The trail behind the plane starting at the stand on the desk was made with particles. 5 Light sources were used. One in the corridor, one on the ceiling over the desk. One spotlight in the desk light, and 2 fill-in lights one the newspaper and the picture frame. Great effort was made in creating the right atmosphere. although you can hardly see the coat stand behind the plane, it does add to the realism of the scene. Details like door handles, the grips on the file cabinet and even dirty hinges on the door help together with the smudged look of the walls and door panels. The paper already gives you a preview of where it is the plane went of to. The full color version of this image is used for the last page of the CD-booklet shown here as "Birdplane". Blurring the background makes the image even stronger.