Creating a background... could use some opinions...

[Anonymous]

Alrighty...bear with me as I explain a bit of this. Also please know that while I'm not total newbie to Maya, I'm no expert either and this is VERY much a learning experience for me....really trying to feel my way thru most of this stuff.

Essentially I'm doing a short video of a 50's style diner I've created...very inspired by the likes of American Grafitti, Happy Days, etc..  I'm doing this project basically for -hits and giggles...had done something similar for my class final back in 2011 when I took 3D Modelling & Animation in college.  For the opening shot, the camera flies around the curb diner sign, with a '50 Ford Club Coupe pulling into a Texaco station and a bus flying past on the road, after which the camera comes in over the parking lot to the front of the diner...with 2 roller skating waitresses going thru the parking lot and a '57 Chevy Bel Air pulling into the lot...then the camera finally goes in the door of the diner.  So far, so good.  The problem is that as the camera is flying around the outside, I have quite a bit of apparent "empty space" - I need a background and some "enviroment".  Thinking this place is kind of out in the middle of nowhere...think roadside diner out in the middle of Nevada or Arizona somewhere (ala Rt. 66...very Americana).  Need kind of a rocky terrain with a bit of greenery, maybe a mountain or two WAY off in the background, etc..  In my first video back in 2011 I had just slapped a couple of city-like background images on a couple of planes...wasn't great, but as it was a night scene, it was acceptable....really want to do something MUCH better with this one.  BTW...this is a sunset/dusk scene.   Soooooooo.....

For the moment I'm thinking of trying this Vue Pioneer for creating this background and environment.  I've been playing with it a little bit...my sample renders so far are truly impressive, however the render time is...well...REALLY horrendous (about 45 minutes for one stinkin' still)!  The render times in Vue make Mental Ray look REALLY FAST.   There's also the issue of learning another piece of software and whether or not it will even work reasonably well with Maya.  One the one hand, we're only talking about a 7 second cut (with 2 or 3 more of the same length later in the vid).  And again the preliminary results from Vue Pioneer look really fantastic...a couple of my former professors were just stunned by the quality...for this project I could live with the render times if need be.  On the other hand, there's still that whole learning new software, let alone doing it mid-project, not to mention the concerns as to whether or not this will even work with Maya, at least without some major teeth pulling (not to mention how). Which brings me to the forum here and my question for those more experienced than myself...

Has anyone here used Vue Pioneer for doing something like this...and if so could you give me any pointers or push me towards a decent tut or two?  Is this really the best way to do this?  What other options are there?  I'm almost thinking it might be better to do the terrain in Maya (although how is a different matter as this scene is already REALLY loaded) then do the atmosphere in Vue...no clue how to get that all to work together though (particularly regarding camera moves).

Suggestions/comments/opinions???

Thanks!

[damaggio]

I think that if your camera is not really going to be flying around outside the contained Texaco station all you really need is a IBL node with a nice spherical HDR image that you can purchase or even if lucky find it for free.

Vue is really usefull when is a fly thru the environment.... and yes ,it takes long to render.

[damaggio]

...and if you need a montain range nearby to add more depth you could either model and texture it or use a DEM file from even an Arizona mountain range you can download from http://www.geocomm.com/ and then grab the Google texture file and displace at render time in Mental Ray.....

[Anonymous]

Putting the environment (sky and such) on the inside of a large sphear.....hhhhmmmmmm....hadn't thought of that.  I'll chew on that a bit, but the first question that comes to mind is "vanishing point"...not quite sure how I'd deal with that (yet).

I may play around with that a bit....still open to other suggestions.

Thanks!

[damaggio]

The vanishing point can be easily matched  , often if the scene is at center of world the IBl sphere will work just right.

[Anonymous]

Ok...after fiddling with this for an hour or so, the results look promising.  Still working on the sky texture for inside the sphear but I think I have most of that covered.  Also created a pretty nice terrain using some Google Satellite images of Arizona, with a bit of help from a good sculpting geometry tut on Youtube.  Here's the snag...  I haven't looked at this in my crane shot yet (working on it in a different scene at the moment) however I can already see the road is gonna be a problem...that vanishing point thing.  Yea, the terrain itself looks good on the horizon, the road however...welll...looks like it's coming right out of the edge of the sky (not in a good way...a rather obvious way).

I'd kind of like that road to really just looks like it "goes on forever" in each direction as the camera swings around.  I have an idea or two of how to deal with this in post processing (will likely comp this together in post), however any suggestions that may help? 

[Anonymous]

Also...

Ok...while the terrain itself does look very promising and encouraging, it does look a tad baren...almost lunar-like.  It could really use a couple of cactus plants and maybe a pine tree or palm tree or 3.  Something to break up the monatany in the background a little.  My first impulse is to put a couple of png's in there with transparent backgrounds, but previous experience has taught me that the transparencies tend to leave a bit of an outline or "ghost" around the edges.

I don't think I really need any geometry here...not like I need highly detailed models of a cactus or anything.  They just need to look like they are there.   Any quick and dirty suggestions for this?

Thanks!

[damaggio]

You could use small trees and bushes with a transparency card, if they shader is done correctly it should not have any problem, you could also download some free trees from Xfrog to place near camera.

If needed you can use thousands of proxies of vegetations at render time as an alternative.

[Anonymous]

Ok...it's the "doing it right" part that I seem to be having a problem with (LOL!).  Got a lot of trees into the scene now (as well as some cactus, grass, etc).  Basically found a number of transparent pngs that look pretty decent (although probably not geographically accurate...oak trees in an Arizona desert....oh well). With a basic light (either directional or point), it looks decent enough, however when I go to turn shadows on, that is where I'm having some issues.  Basically I've slapped these pngs on basic poly planes, so the shadows cast by the light aren't of the "tree" but the square/rectangular shape of the plane.

Any way to fix that?

[Anonymous]

Ok...never mind that last one...didn't have Ray Tracing fully turned on yet.

That said, could still use some suggestions for this road that seems to just come out of the sunset.....

Thanks

[damaggio]

Don't forget to turn on the shader "Shadow attenuation" from 500 to 0..otherwise transparency won't be fully transparent on the shadows.

You need to post a picture of the road problem....with the sky dome.