Photorealism in TD

Hi guys, I’m currently working under realtime audioviz project and the client want visuals to be as photorealistic as possible. They want a lot of light, shadows, gloss and so on. They have in mind something as cool as this vimeo.com/94447521

I’m not from 3d world so I know only basics of rendering. My question kinda is: “Where is the checkbox for realistic look?” :slight_smile:

But anyway, knowing all of TD limitations let’s make a list of all techniques and settings you can use to make your render as juicy as possible?

Hi Devy,

I think this question is bit too broad to answer. You say the client wants photorealism, but in the example video I see a cartoony/cellshaded style which is not photorealistic at all.

Maybe it’s easier to get an answer from anybody if you describe a single specific effect you want to create in TD.

cheers,
Idzard

Yes, I agree about the mismatch of my question and the link.

For one thing I would love to get some tips on how to set up lights and shadows in your setup to achieve result similar to one on the video.

I think what makes this video, and some of the other videos of this artist ‘photorealistic’ is a very precise artistic work, depth of field, and nice shadows. Search for depth of field or DOF on these forums for how to achieve this, try out soft shadows in the light comp.
That being said, this guy is a pro. I think he is working in vvvv and I think, he’s using some custom rendering mechanisms. I guess achieving something like this in TD(or vvvv or jitter or what have you) in realtime without 'knowing 3d’ or writing GLSL is not possible. But you can get close with a lot of situation specific trickery.
sorry if that doesn’t help :slight_smile:

The attached toe contains depth of field, environment maps and shadows.

This is just hashed together but with some time and dedication it can look really nice.

Also look into the SSAO TOP.
depthexample.toe (2.65 MB)

Wow this is really helpful!
Thank you big time!!!

If everyone would post a single toe here with something similar we can have a library
Of tasty TD setups and community will benefit from it greatly!

Hi all,
I’m passing a bit from vvvv to touch designer to improve my knowledge. About the video above, I was trained by the guy who made it. His name is Natan sinigalia, from Italy (like me).
he is absolutly a Genius. He knows a lot of matemathic and uses vvvv in a crazy- super high level combining coding of Hlsl with vvvv nodes. Anyway to create this piece of art, you have no idea about how many hours you have to spend on the programming and debugging part, and how many years on vvvv to become so good also.

ciaoo

Tom

I come from a 3D background, I’m actually diving heavily into 3D “realism” within Touch currently and wanted to give my 2 cents.

Regarding the video you showed: the “realism” you are probably referring to is the ambient lighting effects he’s got on the geo (not mentioning the obvious drop-shadows). See how his geometry looks very well-lit almost like its being lit from the sun, the bright parts are “bloomy” and bright, while the nooks and crany’s in between all the instances are dark/shadowy these are signs of some sort of “ambient occlusion” effect[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion[/url] which I would say is one of those “checkboxes” in 3D rendering for realism you speak of. I would say though quite simply the artist just has a great sense of light and balance in general, always making sure to have good distribution of bright brights and dark darks in general which will also help achieve realism i think…

aversis.be/tutorials/vray/im … ods_00.jpg

the image above shows the basic idea of ambient lighting. Notice how the tiny area where the sphere meets the ground-plane is super dark, and the shaded side of the sphere and even inside the drop-shadow there is bounced light keeping everything illuminated.

You can paint your own “static” hilights/shadows to replicate AO into your textures in your scene in touch as one limited option, but to have particles and instanced geo lit like that, you will need to find a way to get simple ambient occlusion effect in touch which I would LOVE to know how to do myself! [edit: DUH touch already has SSAO top!!! YES!]

Another option is to play with the point sprite shader and phong shader in touch… I have got some interesting results using texture maps for emit and diffuse in combination with color. Personally, I would try lighting my scene with the ambient light comp choosing a brighter warm color - your scene will look very flat BUT very bright. Then see if you can add a directional light that only produces a drop shadow and no light, THEN play with the shaders until you find a way to make it dark and contrasty when particles overlap. The key will be to maintain good balance of brights/mids/darks keeping it mostly well-lit.

Good luck:)

2 Likes

The lighting on the video is not AMbient Occlussion. AO only fakes shadow/dirt between normals facing surfaces. Global Illumination is what brings photo realism, I.e. Bouncing light around which picks up colour from surfaces and carries this to the next surface and so on in the physical world.

Yes your right, but for the purposes of touch and real time I don’t know of any way to have true global illumination other than with a combination of ssao, baked textures and/or good hack-lighting. It’s just how I would personally approach it, which is by ambient occlusion and good lighting:)

I also agree with what was said about depth of field, and adding a blur to it is cheap and easy and looks great. Also in some cases environment fog can help with realism, you can use a combination of the depth fog setting on cameras plus a 2D semi-transparent animated cloud layer to simulate environment fog.

Heres a video of me playing with those effects plus using textured geometry with phong and particle sprite materials only. It’s very easy to set up most of these effects - most of what I used were from here on the forums and were easily plugged right in to my render network.

youtube.com/watch?v=kOhlaxEBc_E

heres the animated fog example (3 noise tops comped together each with animated translation slow/medium/fast to simulate parallax effect. Then, the alpha of this fog is set to a depth top
youtube.com/watch?v=TJB8nzA04PM

Thank you guys! Every post here is very helpful!

I made an example for Depth of Field Effect as this is something i was trying to achieve early in learning Touchdesigner. After two months i revisited the problem and came up with the following.
DOF Depth passes.toe (6.24 KB)