ZbornToy (Taronites)

[DigitalFreaky]

Hello Folks, this is a creature I built with XSI and Zbrush that's been rendered with only color map in less than 9 seconds by Taron with his new and Incredible After Effects plugin called ZbornToy. This plugin it's just amazing.
Enjoy ;) More tests to come.

Furious John_.jpg

[SolidSnakexxx]

Wow, hte result is just incredible.. very nice model and render.. You should write some tutorial for us :) to see. This image is definately worthy to be on top row! :tu: :tu:

[womball]

Really cool looking render! What exactly does this after effects plugin do? And how did you achieve the slimey effect?

[voodoomonkey]

I want to play too.
Please do tell us more.
Cesar Dacol Jr.
Aka, The Voodoo Monkey

[Firebert]

WTF!?!?!?!? I would be able to appease my boss and get an efing raise with that plug-in! 9 seconds!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'd have to see it to believe it, especially with all that is jammed into that model. Can you do DOF with it too?!? This render's DOF is fairly obsured, but iIf you can play with it with the plug-in then everyone is invited to the pants party, party, party with the pants...?

[smeagol]

agree with womball !

can you show us the diffrence ? i mean the picture before this special effect and after ? or small tutorial .

it looks look like ugly slimy creature ! awosome work !

thanks

[aurick]

Taron showed a preview of the plugin off at SIGGRAPH, so I can explain a little bit based on what I remember from his presentation. The plugin takes a very basic color render and depth grab from ZBrush. It then applies a wide variety of effects including lighting, specular highlights, etc. in AfterEffects. It really is pretty cool. :)

[DigitalFreaky]

Thank You very much for your comments. Here's the color map from zbrush and the plain model. It's really all about playing with the plugin's settings. Taron played like 10 minutes with the lights and added some specularity and translucency! As Aurick said, there's only the depth alpha grab and the flat color map PSD export. This is the site of the plugin "www.taronites.com", where you will find some astonishing page by page tutorials that Taron made for you! We are very happy for these results and I think that he will jump in here too to say something! He is surely not from this earth. More renderings and stuff coming before the week ends! Again, Thanks Everyone.

P.S. Without DOF it takes 6 secs to render
John zbrush_1.jpg
John color.jpg

[javierloredo]

I was there front row at the presentation taking notes! hehehe:D
I remember when he was explaining how use coustics in AfterEffects for the lighting.
I would love to learn more about this plug-in.
By the way, your 9 second render looks very nice! I thought it was one of the characters from Pirates of the Caribean

Anybody can post the link for the plug-in?
Thanks.

Javier Loredo

[Mr.Monster]

Wow!

Simply amazing!
Your charactor is very cool. It does look like it belongs on Pirates of the Carrabean. But that's a good thing.
Looking forward to more about this plug in as well.

~BW

[Scott Spencer]

Oh wow, that is very very cool!! Im with VoodooMonkey, I wanna play too : )

I remember seeing this at the second user group meeting. AMAZING stuff!

S

[Taron]

AHA! There it is!
Man it's gorgeous! I'm so proud of you Fabrizio! I had the privilege of running his maps through the ZbornToy and it's been such a blast. For almost a year now I've been testing it only with my own stuff and never got totally jaded (except renderingtimes). By now I can't handle anything that takes longer than 30sec. I've noticed that that's the maximum I can bare...hahahaha.

But Fab did these brutal details and beautiful color choices. When I ran it through after only a few minutes it looked like a perfect gem stone.

Anyway, yes, it's finally done and I will make a more appropriate post for the announcement, but I havn't slept in 26 hours now and wonder if I write coherendly right now?! ...AH, done, yes, not only the ZbornToy, but also the website is done and everything is in place to finally give it to you!
www.taronites.com (http://www.taronites.com)

That brings you to the starting page of this new branding. It's Taronite as in Parasite as in little thing that goes into your system and changes the way it used to run. Hehehehe.... ZbornToy is the first and most complex one, but there are more to come, quite a few more! This one is supposed to get you into a new mindset, so, when it comes to compositing, animation and design!

The website is rather wacky...lots of stuff that you need to explore! The Gallery will certainly be the highlight for you, because not only does it show a whole bunch of pretty pictures, it also explains a lot by showing the used elements as well as the final renders!
To view those, you'll see a little icon in the upper left corner of the preview frame. Loading might delay the response a little, but if you click on it, you will go through a set of images behind the front one. Some of them even have quicktimes. Once you see what you like, just click on the image and it will appear in the large frame.

Back to Fab for the finale of this way too big post: BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO!:tu: :tu: :tu:

Taron

[DigitalFreaky]

Taron...you made my face turn red! (shy boy here, lol)! But again, without your help, this creature wouldn't look how it looks now! And Thanks Everyone for the comments!

[Taron]

Oh, one more thing!

The image rendered in 10 seconds. The depth of field is done with Lenscare's Depth of Field (http://www.frischluft.com/lenscare/lenscare.php) after effects plugin.
Without it, the image renders in 6 seconds. The machine is an 2Ghz dual Opteron system...so nothing fancy by todays standarts. But it's plenty for me! h

Also, you can run the 'demo' version of the ZbornToy (http://www.taronites.com/zborntoy/zborntoy.php), if you download it. It will have a rather huge and red but pretty watermark (hahaha), but it should get you into the feel of it.


Taron

[womball]

Looking forward to when you get some sleep. The website just seems to be an image with nothing to click on right now.

This will work for animations? Is it free?

[Taron]

server acts a little slow outside of germany, i guess. Just hang in there! What browser are you using anyway? IE6 and 7 work fine, Firefox works fine and Opera does have slight issues, but still works.

So, just let it download a bit for a moment. It's not a quick site, that's for sure!

Thanx, though!

And, no, it's not for free, it's been almost 12 months of hard work and my hope to get back on track so that I can continue with more! I saw a power in the tool that was more important then to care about anything else for my life...including wealth (haha)...so now we can only hope that this gets recognized, but I'm so very confident it does. It's too good to be passed! You'll see. The demo is free, of course. But if you come across a crack or even get someone to crack it, please, know that you are hurting only two people and their families and your chance of getting a whole lot more from us.
We've kept the price at game rates, so you that it can be easily bought and enjoyed. Although everyone we've talked to, and it had been a lot of people already, guessed the price up to 9 times higher...hehe...(yeah, I particularely enjoyed that one!). We are also not competing, because there is no competition for our tool, yet. So we're not trying to underbeat anyone (is that the right word?). Oh, what's the price? $179. (almost forgot to mention!)

Well, just check out the website with some more patience. It's the first one I've partially written for almost 13 years now. My own website really doesn't count. If you had enough patience to read the first information on there all the way to the end (less than you had to read until you got here!) you'd read about our self-confidence with websites! ;)

Thanx, though!

Taron

[smeagol]

thanks a lot for the explanation Taron .

and for this plug in , its so cool !

[Frischluft]

Huhu guys, just a small update.

We forgot to exchange the placeholder on taronite.com (http://www.taronite.com) in time. That was the image you saw before. Now it automatically leads to taronites.com (http://www.taronites.com) where everything is at. Sorry for that!

Got to catch some sleep, too :) Later

[Frischluft]

There was a placeholder image on taronite.com. Now the domain correctly forwards to taronites.com where everything is at. Sorry for that. Lack of sleep i guess. ;)

[Mr.Monster]

TARON, Thanks for sharing this gem!

DigitalFreaky (http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/member.php?u=75345), Straight to the top...now wasn't that easy:D
That was a given the moment you posted it!

Your a bit of a monster guy yourself, arn't you?

Well done, and well deserved.
Do you have a website I can check out?

~BW

[womball]

Can this be used on a more complex character material setup? Say a character in a space suit, with refractive space helmut, metallic suit, and sss skin shading as well as a complex eye setup? And could an entire environement be rendered this way with characters as well? If so I might purchase it and use it for my senior thesis. Can more lights be added too?

I was using Safari, and Firefox on a Mac when I had the issues.

[Frenchy Pilou]

...for your new baby, it's a "Toy" if I have well understood :D

[Taron]

Hey Womball,

no worries, I realized, that I also first gave the old link, which actually did link to just an image (glglglglgl...that's what you're getting for not sleeping).

However, one of the reasons, that makes the ZbornToy a superior or maybe the superior rendering system of depth images is he fact that you can texture each and every aspect of it! Therefore you can alternate each material to be what ever you like it to be by simply painting a layer for each shading aspect.

Let's say you have a ball and a cone. You want the ball to be shiny and the cone to be dull. You what the ball to be very translucent and the cone to be just a little. Ball should be red and cone should be cyan. Then you'd want to make 4 images (brute force...you could do it more elegantly using after effects, but anyway):

image 1 - depth image (apply ZbornToy to it)
image 2 - grayscale where ball is white and cone is black (select this layer for glossiness texture)
image 3 - grayscale where ball is white and cone is 40% gray (select this layer for translucency texture)
image 4 - color image where ball is red and cone is cyan. (select this layer for surface color texture)

Now the ball and the cone will have a rather radically different shading!
Don't forget that you can still use all of the abilities of After Effects to adjust the textures/layers for these parameters! You can precomp them in subcomps and treat them with effects like procedurals and ramps and anything your heart contents! You can EVEN use After Effect's own PAINT to do all of that or parts of that without even leaving the software! Which is the other cool thing about ZbornToy: You can use it with material from anywhere, any software or scans or animated content. It's not limited in any way other than the fact that it's all "reliefs"! :cool:

[Greg Petchkovsky]

Nuts....
Totally amazing stuff.

[Daemon3d]

Yep Nuts...
So, Zbrush+AfterEffets+ZbornToy =taronites cool stuff.:lol:
Bravo Taron! I like this stuff.:tu:
I'll come back here for good news.

[Taron]

AfterEffects+RadicallyNewFocus+CreativeWildnessSim plified = taronites

Just add any software into the equasion, it'll work!

:D

[feureau]

Whoa! This is AE?!?!
To think I sinked all that money on rendering engines! :D
I must say I'm speechless. This deserves more praise than just a few lines. But, dang! Congratulations, Taron! Excellent!

And let's not forget the great model. Very Flying Dutchman-like. Top Row!! :tu: :tu: :tu:

[Halil]

Great Work!
Reminds me the sea guys from Pirates of Caribbean..

[Poe]

I am speechless.
Does this beauty of a plugin work with Discreet's Combustion:qu:

You guys rock! :cool:

Poe

[Taron]

It sure should! I don't know if combustion supports 16bit or higher in connection with after effects plugins, which would be the only question left, really. Other than that it should work for sure! Why don't you try the demo, it's free. Then contact us and tell us about it! ;)
We don't have combustion running so far. Once the ball starts getting into motion to a degree, where we can begin investing into all the packages, we'll be able to examine, adjust our plugins and support more of them.

I really hope it won't ever backfire, that I'm so open about all of this, but I figure, ultimatively I'm really just one of you guys, who happens to have the fortune to create tools to share with you and the proper Philipp so we can take it to the right level (haha...that does sound kinda funny, doesn't it?!)!:D

(i write too much...need restraints!):confused:

[Poe]

I will test the demo for sure and let you know how it went.
I wish you the best, you really deserve it.

Poe

[sirquadalot]

Well done Taron! I wish I could play to, but I don't have AE:cry: Maybe one day soon though.;)

[gega74]

WAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Beautiful! Very good work!

[lemonnado]

I noticed a total lack of AA around a lot of edges. Is there a way in AE to do AA? I'm not to familiar with AE...
Lemo

[frankino]

nice work Fabrisssio... shell beard want live...
AUHauhUHAUHAUHauhaUAUHaUHAUHAuhauhaUHA
but.. i've one question..

Taron... who are you?

frk

[Taron]

Although we did a few things to optimize the use of the depth images, we still have the same challenges, that zbrush has itself. But therefore the same solutions work just as well!
Prepare your source footage at twice the resolution and scale the resulting render back down to half. Works beautifully. BUT we have a few concepts waiting to be tackled by us, which could present a far nicer solution!

However, I feel so bad to hijack this thread. You should truely enjoy Fab's glorious piece and comment on it! It's his first time out here and you should continue to give him this great warm welcome!

Oh, and thanx everyone for the great reactions already. You've taught us something already. We have to present far more of the spectrum that the ZbornToy covers and I need to do it for all those, who don't enjoy reading, too! Hehehehe.... ;)

I'll prepare a post real soon, which will go as deep as possible into the ZbornToy to dig up all the things that should get you as excited as I've been for the last 11 months! Ah...well...maybe...tough to beat, though!

Thanx agian! :tu:

[crossbones]

Works in the latest version of combustion, that's a go.

[linograndi]

Great work Taron and Fabrizio! Really I have not enough words.

[Phoenyx]

Great Job Fabrizio!
The Details are crazy!The sculpting is perfectly!
Congratulations!
Taron,Great Plugin!!!!!It seems a very powerful software!

Grande!!!

[DigitalFreaky]

Thanks a lot for the comments guys! Taron, as usual makes our jaws drop, this time creating the AMAZING plugin I had the honour to try with my character! Hey Taron, are you sure you are from planet earth? Catch'ya later on skype!

Some quick facts about the model:

Mesh is 6 milion polys and color map is 6K entirely painted with the outstanding and insanely powerful tools of Zbrush.
Kind Regards to everyone!

Fabrizio

[freshdb]

This is beautiful work! He looks like he would fit right in the movie Pirates of the carribean 2. I look forward to seeing more work from you.

I took a few minutes to try your plugin Taron with my frog, it was easy to use and fun! I was able to come up with an image quickly.

[Taron]

SWEET, I LOVE that reply, haha! Fantastic. That hopefully encourages people to start playing with the demo already a bit more! If you like, don't hesitate to share your experiments with me. I'd almost be willing to make a tiny little mini contest to give away a free copy to the winner, hehe! :D

Just say a word and I'll start a thread with it! I mean, that should certainly involve Zbrush to a strong degree! For everything else, I'm pretty sure I couldn't hold it here, but I assume that most of you would do Zbrush stuff anyway! So it would be perfect! A little ZBrush ZbornToy contest! ...hmmm... just a little thing, really! So don't go all crazy. It's just $179 anyway, so well... let me know!:cool:

[Meats Meier]

Fabrizio (digitalfreaky) -

I love this image! It really got me pumped for the plug-in when Taron showed it to me (and got me jeoulous too).

As far as the plug-in, It took a little while for me to fully wrap my head around all the things that can be done with it. It really is a powerfull tool for compositing...I learn a little trick every day with it.


I noticed a total lack of AA around a lot of edges. Is there a way in AE to do AA? I'm not to familiar with AE...Hey Lemonado! You can easily get rid of the crisp edges using a matte choker in AE as well.....I forgot to do that in most of my tests.

[Vexona]

thats 6million polys of pure INSPIRATIOn. I have shown it to everyone at my college in my classes. Seeing a image on that in the day your having changes it drastically. You get this drive for 3D that is ultra inspiring.

5 stars

[Atwooki]

Fantastic model, render, comp DigitalFreaky :eek: :tu:

as for ZbornToy - Dll'ed your plugin Taron, and wiil definitely check it out when I get a minute or three... looks amazing!!

Chris

[UncleGut]

I made a PDF of the ZbornToy Tutorial if anyone is interested Click Here (http://s11.quicksharing.com/v/4433266/ZbornToy_Tutorial_01_Basic_Workflow.rar.html)

[-Nii-]

From the sounds of it, this ZBornToy is a plugin for aftereffects... that doesn't work as a normal renderer. For instance, bear with me here cause I'm somewhat confused, doesn't it merely work by compositing several passes from Zbrush together? Or does it actually work like a normal renderer? Right now it just sounds like it comps passes together and that's it...

[DigitalFreaky]

If you check the website, that's www.taronites.com, you will find answers to your questions. The website has a section that's very clear and easy to understand, where all the features and capabilities of the Plugin are explained.
Besides I encourage you to try it because it's just damn amazing.

To Meats Meier: I'm really honoured to receive these comments from you! I'm one of your fans! ;)

Gotta run now, girlfriend needs shopping:cry:

[Taron]

It's a full on rendering engine! It uses depth images as geometry! In principle that would make everything a 'relief', a height image, like a carving into a wall, if you know what i mean. But the featureset allows for some ingenuity to go beyond the appearance of a relief!

You have full on rendering of light, shadows, full on shading including actual translucency, refractions, caustix and even environment illumination! And all this as close to realtime as it gets. But you might want to just go ahead and try it out.

Why exactly am I explaining this again? Hmmm...maybe I'll just make a website and explain it there...hmm...oh wait!? I DID! ;)

[Taron]

By the way, I almost forgot, Great PDF, thanx!!! :tu:

[-Nii-]

Thanks for the explanation. I looked through your entire website, but it wasn't explained as well as you did just then =). Seriously. I say because I only asked my question up there just after reading through your site and not understanding exactly how it works.

Is there any plans for the plugin to be recompiled for a Digital Fusion version?

[Taron]

Download the plugin, it will run as demo with a watermark. Try it in Fusion. Fusion runs After Effects plugins and appearently it works fine in Fusion 5.x, not sure.

[monstermaker]

This looks cool. I say Taron demo this at a ZB users meeting and have been dying to play with it ever since

[wp_capozzi]

Exciting looking plugin. Will this work with images from other software, for instance if I want to output some fast color, transparency, and depth images from Lightwave or Vue, could I use those in the same way to render the sub surface stuff in After Effects? Along with the examples shown, I can see where it would be nice to use on large crowd scenes for skin and hair, and on environments for leaves and water and glass, or on things that would take other renderers a very long time to render, especially as an animation. I'm trying the demo and just grasping the concept here, it looks amazing. I'm hoping it can do the things I'm thinking about.

Regards,
Bill C.

[DigitalFreaky]

Hi again. Just wanted to post another render. 6 secs to render.
Have fun with the plugin!

Regards,

Fabrizio.

[smilegraphix]

Hi Fab!
Your model is outstanding!
you and Taron are crazy! really really insane work! so much details! i'm astonished!

ok Fab, now it's time to sleep i think :D
Catch up later mate!

Iacopo

[Taron]

HEY RICK! Oh, I should've made up a mailing list or so, it's so much to tackle. I'm sorry I didn't let you know right away! :o

Did you get to try it out already? There will be more tutorial clips up shortly, too!

There also will be a little update later today. Found a little something that kind of bothered me a bit for a while now and we fixed it. Caustics now react very natural behind stained (colorized) glas!

Also, Bill, yes you can totally import footage from anywhere you like. I've posted a really stupid little quick clip on the site that shows it. I'm a little ashamed it's so primitive, because you can make it as elaborate as you like with specular texture sequences and subdermal color sequences and so forth. This is just to get the idea across.

If somebody wants to provide me with cool footage, let me know! Just email to the support email for taronites!:cool:

[cannedmushrooms]

Very cool plugin.
After effects is rather expensive on top of the plugin going to get rather steep for an artist. Well worth the money if your in the industry. Though. Very quick render. Now if you can render out a sequence of alpha grabs in zbrush ;) Sort of scary where somthing like this would lead.

[billrobertson42]

Could you achieve the similar effects by applying an alpha as a displacement map to a plane?

[-Nii-]

The more I think about it actually, the more this plugin reminds me of Zbrush's native renderer, except in a superior way =P

[Taron]

Yes, if you would make a plan that has as many polygons as there are pixels in your image, then you could get such an effect with a subdivided plane. This would then render for 1 or 2 hours on any contemporary computer before you could get to see anything and made you question more than just why this appeared like an idea before, haha! ;)
In fact, if you had a 3d software, you'd really want to use it for all the advantages it represents over a relief (height render). Sure you won't see such a speed for another few years and even then, including all the things that the ZbornToy can handle so quickly, you might have to wait another 5 to 8 years, but you simply wouldn't work that way. Thinkable is what I had initially planned for this. That was to build this concept into messiah, so you could create your shading and lighting as fast as this, but then render the actual 3d content. :)

Entertainingly enough, Messiah is dirt cheap and one of the fastest renderers in his weightclass. Maybe the fastest subdiv&displacement capable Raytracer there is. I've written a bunch of the shading concepts I developed for the ZbornToy into Messiah. Like the glossiness logic, which is one of my favorite innovations to shading. (invader Zim would say:"praise me, praise me"...I apologize for my stupidity, haha, but I'm just waking up. I am rather proud of some of the things I've come up with. For the everything else I'm either proud of Fori or Phlipp or Dan and -if I go back in time- Lyle. Only to name a few!)

As for After Effects and its high price. Well, the ZbornToy runs on any version of AfterFX starting from 5.5 I believe or at least from 6.0. I'm almost certain, that you can get such old versions for a very slimm budget. It hast to be the pro version, however, because it needs to support 16Bit. You won't need float, which I never use myself, really, but if you had it, you'd obviously gained something for super deep and complicated content (mass scenes with little creatures until the horizion at 6k resolution might want to use floats).
We've most of all targeted artists, who already own After effects, of course. And I must admit, it must seem almost unfair, but definitely not so fantastically tempting, to someone, who'd have to get AE first.:confused:

[Taron]

The more I think about it actually, the more this plugin reminds me of Zbrush's native renderer, except in a superior way =P
That's exactly right! ... ... ... all the way! :lol:

There are very few things I did not build in at this point. One is the shadow length concept, to 'pretent' we're not working on a relief (but I will put it in later). And everything else is just so genuinely different, that it makes practically all of Zbrush's parameters hard to combat for coherend results. ZbornToy is made to leave the control in your hands and the care within the software! If that makes any sense? Like you won't have to care, you just design.

[billrobertson42]

Yes, if you would make a plan that has as many polygons as there are pixels in your image, then you could get such an effect with a subdivided plane. This would then render for 1 or 2 hours on any contemporary computer before you could get to see anything and made you question more than just why this appeared like an idea before, haha! ;)

Perhaps I don't understand what you're saying, but in Gelato, for example, when you tell the renderer to subdivide a mesh, it becomes a curved surface, so there isn't a need for heavy geometry, and you can apply a displacement map to a mesh and it renders rather quickly.

Nevertheless, it looks like ZBornToy has a lot of effort put into it to make it easy to use and I think is fantastic and worth a lot.

Good luck Taron. I hope that it's selling well, and continues to do so.

[Taron]

Well, you need to realize, with the ZbornToy you render every single pixel at exactly the location where you had it in your depth image. THAT means, that every detail you put into on pixel level will be there and stay there (if you like)!

If you use displacement and subdivisions, you always make a compromise, while even a highly desirable one, you often or actually always lose some of the finest details. Normal maps do help, yet they won't deliver you the actual geometry, for example and UVmapping does the rest to degrade the fidelity of the original pixel work!

Whereas, if you took an alpha grab and saved it out, you render perfectly that which you had made in Zbrush, in this case! Or actually Photoshop or Painter or anything else you would like to experiment with (it's A LOT of fun, actually, haha...my wife had to stop me saying: People might not want to see as many "photoshop scribbles transformed into artwork" as you might think! ( :o )).

Anyway, it's really somewhat of a different thing, that's all and you still won't get the speed not in many years, regardless as to how low you'd keep geometry. The procedure is radically different, while the data that gets generated at the end is frightningly similar!

Hope that was ok for reply? (I'm speaking out loudly again...:rolleyes: )

Thanx, though! Kinda fun to discuss that stuff!:D

I hope there will be plenty of sales, too, because the artists just don't know what they would miss out on, if they skipped this one. It's far more than just a little render tool. The things you can do with it are massive, different...so new. I could bang my head on the table for not being able of bringing that across. I so have to count on you to look at it, play with it and help communicate the real power of it. It's beyond me, really. But I really, really thank you for saying that!


Taron

[billrobertson42]

Thanks for the explaination of the differences. And once again, best of luck!

[-Nii-]

So how about support for animated depth maps and hence motion blur =P. I can't imagine Zborntoy supporting functionality to something that definitely requires raytracing such as motion blur... or does it?:)

[Taron]

Before I go on answering, I wanted to squeeze in this though...somehow it echoed in my head. I wouldn't want to say that ZbornToy is a "superior" renderer, but a different renderer. It sports features that are beyond the scope of Zbrush at this point, like the refractions and caustic projections for example.

Zbrush has it's very own charme and therefore it would be kind of inappropriate to really compare.

Anyway, of course the ZbornToy supports animated depth maps! You can load sequences to your hearts content...but just download the quicktimes on the website! Particularely the one labeled 'from 3dpackage into ZbornToy' (http://www.taronites.com/gallery/zborntoy/full/3d_package_2_zborntoy.mov):cool: !
It's really just a quicky, no textures or anything...just a plain animation. Some of you might recognize the character again! It's one of our "game" characters we made in an old post somewhere here!

I've also reorganized it a little bit and the gallery has an update!

www.taronites.com (http://www.taronites.com)

Reelsmart:Motionblur is one of my most favorite plugins out there for AfterFX and it does do a phenomenal job of motionblurring! I've used i on everything for the last 3 years at least, I think.:tu:

And to let you in on a little "probably", we are currently looking at Photoshop's new SDK! No promisses, yet, but we realize the genius of releasing it for Photoshop, toO!:idea:

Thanx again for the great reactions! :D


Taron

[womball]

That's really cool! The shadows are a bit harsh though. Can you control their transparency and softness? And can the lighting be controlled from a render pass with diffuse lighting info (I think this is the part that considers light and shadow of the objects, including light color)?

[-Nii-]

Good question actually. Assuming you are referring to image based lighting and using HDR images... I'm curious too...

[womball]

Not at all. That does work with the plugin. But what I'm trying to do is pull the lighting info from say XSI from a render pass. This would be for a multiple light setup.

[Taron]

Haha! Well, it's easy to forget, that it is a compositing plugin, which means, that it is in a compositing software! THat means not only that you can run multiple copies on top of eachother to add any number of light sources, you can also use other footage to mask, blend or manipulate in every way the ZbornToy output!

This is exactly one of those things, where I just know that people will need time to realize the potential and power in this!

ZbornToy itself features also rendermodi, which enable to compute only shadows, only highlights, only caustix, etc...etc.... therefore you can do nearly any conceivable combination to achieve probably just exactly what you want.

Normally rendersoftware would never be able to allow such a way of functioning. You basically create the layers you want directly as you go. Laughable waiting times, as well! My worst so far was 14 sec, but I seem to remember almost a minute when we were still debugging stuff...hehehe...but we're talking 4k renders.

Anyway, realize that it is a compositing plugin in a compositing environment. Little to know limit what you can do this way!:cool:

[FelixCat]

Very amazing plug in, Taron... do you have some ETA for the Mac version arribal? It seems very ineresting. I want to test it with my software too.
Good luck

FelixCat

[mauricio.blistered]

just, love it

[FelixCat]

I had just seen the videos (Treemare and Vector Paint)... amazing!!
Looks very promising, i´m not sure how fits in production but i can see very usefull probabilities. Can´t wait for the Mac demo!!

Great work, Taron

FelixCat

[impaler]

Simply incrediable, I got chills down my spine.
I showed this to a few people and it just looks too real to be true. Its going to be my new wallpaper for a while now ^_^ . The model is great, 6mill polys wow, my little laptop would die at that level.

As for the amazing ZbornToy plugin, well you are ahead of your time Taron, Cheers for giving it to the people that deserve it!!!! The price is more than fair.

Hey Taron you wouldnt have been involved in that amazing taron_people movie I saw in the messiah home page would ya???

ZbornToy plugin deserves a big space in the http://www.zbrush.info site!!!

[impaler]

.

[Taron]

Yes, People.mov is my clip. Funny enough I made it for pixologic as a little showcase. But it incidentally showcased messiah just as much. So eventually we decided to post it to. I also just uploaded it to youtube. Aside from that, Australia's public television had asked to air it, but I guess I kind of chased them away by revealing my unpredictable availability in case it needed adjustments of format!

Anyway, mac version is brewing right now! ETA is any day now!:cool:


As for Fabrizios render, which this thread is about after all! Man, I should put his render with the eye up! Philipp put it in his lenscare gallery, so at least we have the set secured, hahahaha! Delightful stuff those renders! Memorable images, too!

Taron

[lemonnado]

Taron, what about a version which fit's into the FX-Tree of XSI? THAT would be a screamer! ZBornToy Node.... I'd take two!
Lemo

[-Nii-]

AUSTRALIAN TV!?!? If you ever get ZBorntoy to show on there, you MUST let me know when it airs!!!

[impaler]

I see there is already a icon above the forum congrads DigitalFreaky~!!
Do you plan on animating this type of rendering, I mean have the mesh morph its structure, not just the lighting and fx which is crazy enough by itself mind you, is this even posible without having to go to Zbrush to genereate a depth map each frame?

[DigitalFreaky]

Hello impaler. I would love to animate this fella but I haven't got the time unfortunately.
Maybe I could try to play with some AE's Liquify but it would not be comparable to a facial rig animation obviously.
Maybe one day I'll think of it...I am open to any ideas! I just need more time and this period it's kinda heavy, cause I'm finishing my demoreel and working on some projects.
But hey, thanks for looking at it. I appreciate your interest ;)
I'll surely let you know if it will be animated.

All the best!

Fabrizio

P.S. Regarding Zbrush, sorry I didn't understand your question:p

[impaler]

Hey I know how ya feel there is never enough time you can have ideas in your head but bringing them into reality around your life is another thing. A demo reel hey, well this Zborntoy should give it and extra limb or two!!!:D:D:D Its much more interesting than the usual quick render fly arounds of models that are done :tu:

What I meant with Zbrush was if you were to animate the mesh in an animation app, you need based on the "from 3d package into ZbornToy (http://www.taronites.com/gallery/zborntoy/full/3d_package_2_zborntoy.mov)" movie a depth sequence, a normal sequence and a color sequence. How are these generated from an animation pakage. I guess you could could apply the normal map to the materials on the models as long as the uv maps are good "this is a guess". A depth sequence seems to be a flat alpha in zbrush, in an animation package how would you generate it? There is no forum on the taronites site lol.

Have fun with your demo reel DigitalFreaky!!! ^_^ :tu::tu:

[mocaw]

This looks awsome- and is a motion graphics dream!

Anyone have any clues on how to set it up in DF? I've installed it...dropped the node in...and "kind" of had it "sort" of starting to work. Anyone care to share a flow?

Thanks...

[ThaoLe]

hey Taron,
I love your ZbornToy.. thats awsome..just tried it out.. and loved it. however, i am running into one problem and have no idea if i did anything wrong..
i don't know what would control the light to make it cast the shaddow like the pic below. The first one is the current render in after effect with ZbornToy..The second one is the one i want to achieve.
Thanks for your help.
Thao
question.jpg

[Taron]

Woh, wohh, wooh...what's happening here! That's great!

Ohm...ThaoLe, this is one of the drawbacks of it's very nature. It's a relief renderer, therefore the ball does not really have a backside! You see, it's like a stonewall with carvings, but no backside. There's a way around it and I still have to hook it up. It will come in a future update in a moment, but even that will be not perfect for this kind of thing. I have however ONE idea, which is rather radical, but that one will have to wait for a few months. It's one of the far more revolutionary ones, really, and it will require a great deal of experimentation on my side, but the idea is really strong. A little proof of concept I have already done. Philipp added the idea of image-synthesis to make it even more crazy, but I have to leave it somewhat of a mystery right now.

So for now, you really have to work with the knowledge, that it's a relief (2.5d).
I'm preparing a series of little clips right now, which will explain the entire workings of the ZbornToy piece by piece. Part 1 is already done:

ZbornToy EXPLAINED part1.mov (http://www.frischluft.com/gallery/zborntoy/full/ZbornToy_EXPLAINED_part1.mov)

I hope that helps a little and I will certainly announce the update!

I'm really thrilled of all the great response! Thank you all and Fabrizio: YOU ROCK!:cool:

Taron

[Taron]

Impaler, we are working on putting up a forum soon! :)

Also, it is really easy to render depth sequences and normal sequences out of 3d packages, particularely out of messiah:Studio! Whereby that has the silly trouble to export real depth values on the image, which means it is inverted from how ZbT sees it and on top of that they are perspective and not orthographic.

What this means is that the normals were best taken from a normal sequence, because the generated normals really translate it as orthgraphic, while the images tell something different. Not the biggest trouble, but odd. But it's anyway more clever, when you do that, to generate normal sequence as well. Smooth normals have to get provided. Depth map is really the actual geometry and just as smooth as the amount of subdivisions used!

In Lightwave or Max or Maya or XSI you might just use a black fog on white luminous objects (without shading). That should give you perfect depth maps!

Taron

[lemonnado]

XSI has a button for a depth pass. Works like a charm... And there is also a shadow pass to overcome the limits of the relief principles.
Lemo

[DigitalFreaky]

Hi guys! Here I am again with a new render of my character. This time it's a close up. I added more surface details and zoomed on the face. Eye is painted in Photoshop.
What next? some sleep! girlfriend is pissed :D

John_2.jpg

[metamesh]

Hey man, great post dude! feels like a character from Pirates2! i saw Taron´s demo in Siggraph this year and it was as crazy as this post! gotta try the plugin man! keep posting!!

[Djampa]

Superb artwork !

Speechless, congratulations !
Thanks for sharing with us !

Cheers !

[CSeher]

This is really quite cool. Nice work!

[ThomasBernos]

hehe I just began yesterday using zbrush and I have a stupid question....how do you generate the z-buffer looking image in zbrush? Usually I try to find things by myself but here I'm stuck!:D
I show you my first zbrush WIP work ever> I would like to try it with zborntoy

viewportpower2rgb.jpg

[ThomasBernos]

and btw congrats for the great models, they inspired me for the colors of my character to come!

[Taron]

Hi Thomas,

sounds like you're looking for "grab alpha" under the alpha menu (top bar).
This will capture your entire image's z depth. You may then export it as PSD or TIF, whereby I recommend PSD if you want to use it with any Adobe Software, but with everything else I rather use Tif.

[ALPHA] [BRUSH] [COLOR] [.........
|
[grab alpha]

Your atomic mutation critter looks very cute.

[lemonnado]

You can also use the tool MRGBZ grabber which graps material, color map, and Depth map and stors them in the corresponding slots. Alpha and texture...
R

[ThomasBernos]

Wow thank you both for you super fast answer!

[hyper_z]

excuse the dig but dang this rox!!!