Speed Rendering

I've been interested in the concept of Speed Renders for some time now. I recently downloaded some great Speed Painting tutorials and they've helped me start to shape a 3D version of the same sort of thing. Speed Rendering is like Speed Painting, only using 3D software instead of Photoshop or Painter. The idea is to be able to quickly create a 3D image as a concept development tool.

David Levy is one great Speed Painter. His portfolio is pretty awesome. My last two renders, Cloud Carrier and Entrance to Syntron were created using very fast techniques, fully composed and rendered in only a few hours.

A key component in Speed Renders is the appearance of very small details, which fool the eye into thinking there is more there than appears. Transparency helps. I used GridModeler to create most all the transparent maps for these scenes.

Levy has a great render called "Gallactic Worm" which is wonderful. IMO, it's a prime candidate for a 3D Speed Render, so I knocked out a Vue7 version of it last evening to learn more about what it takes to do a Speed Render. It's shown here. Please know mine is not original material, but a copy done in 3D-- all the composition, lighting and concept credit is Davids. I just tried to see if I could copy it and come close to a 'speed' feel. Not sure I succeeded.

Some notes: All background terrains are very small 128x128 resolution. The water and roads are alpha planes with quick scribbles for the features, floating slightly above the ground plane, and with cast shadows turned off. This uses a standard atmosphere (more control over color) and GI. There's a large mountain off screen to the left to cast the foreground shadow.

I'm not too happy with the foreground building complex, so I know I need more work there. But overall, for a quickie, it's a start.

Decal Materials

Adding decals to models can be a bit tricky in Vue, especially if you want to add them to the front, back, or sides. 

So, I've created some decal material layers. I have ones for Left, Right, Top, Bottom, Front and Back. They are simple to use and understand-- just 'add layer' to existing material.

You can download them at:
http://www.gadgetplugins.com/chippstuff/DecalMaps.zip

A quick tutorial on how to use these can be found HERE.

One thing I don't mention in the tutorial, is the decal bitmap you use must be a 100% white on 100% black image (jpg,png,bmp,...) with no transparency channel.

Change the decal layer color to whatever color you want the decal to be (currently it's red).

Entrance to Syntron

Still playing around with 'Speed Renders' -- loosely based on Speed Painting. All modeled in Vue, only levels and title in Pshop. More good Vue 7 clouds!

Inspired by Syd Mead's "Disaster to Syntron" and David Levy's "Newarchi_A".

Cloud Carrier

Here's a new image I whipped up last evening. I've recently been watching some speed painting training vids and it inspired me to create some new techniques for creating models extremely fast. All the models in this image were created in one evening in Vue 7 Infinite (not including the people). 

I used ecoSystems to populate a standard plane with 60-80 random primitives, then I 'de-instanced' and grouped them in sets of about 3-6 prims each. 

Next I created metablobs for each group, using VueTools when necessary to create symmetry. 

Then I duplicated the metablob, un-blobbed it to it's constituent forms, grouped them and added a different texture. By scaling the un-blobbed hard prim group and moving it a bit, I was able to create a very complex shape quickly.

Typically, these vehicle models took less than 5 minutes each to create.

Rendered in the new Vue 7 Infinite with those magnificent clouds!

Vista 64 patch for Rev 3.0

Up to now, running the Revolution IDE on a Vista 64-bit OS was most problematic-- if you could run it at all. I spent a number of hours chasing down the various issues and have fixed all of them I could find. Those with Rev 3.0 and Vista 64 can download my Vista 64 patch at:

http://www.gadgetplugins.com/altplugins/Vista64Patch.rev

Basically, the main issue has to do with 'the globalnames' where there are two environment globals which are problematic:

$ProgramFiles(x86)
$CommonProgramFiles(x86)

I've tracked down both the message box bug and the script editor bug to this problem and have created a patch which writes to and saves the Message Box stack and the revDebugger stack. As with all my patches, you can revert to a previous state.

This patch will not run on anything but Vista 64. Even if a mac or other pc were patched, things will work as they should. I suspect this patch will be in an upcoming version of Rev. AFAICT, there are no other outstanding issues with running Rev 3.0 in Vista 64 versus running Rev 3.0 in Vista.