Amazing.

Great work, man. :)

Nice end result, but would prefer to have seen breakdowns to see the component aspect of your input.

Well its a Animation reel so all character movements except in one shot where an other animator did the character in the background. in many of the shots i did the rigs as well but theres no point to mention that in a Animation reel.
If you have any questions regarded a specific shot I'll be happy to answer you.

Now do a Quake one.

Excellent work! How many people did it take to create the showreel? Is it contract work that the company does?

Well its a collection of many projects so i would have no idea to be honest :) but on a average we might scale up to 10-15 on a project when its the most hectic of times.

We often work whit a commercial agency that has a client or we work directly whit the client. and sometimes companies need help whit animation so they rent me for a period of time :)

nice

woah. I'm afraid of the day when it becomes impossible to distinguish between animated and filmed. Watching stuff like this suggests it's not long now...

Yeah and i think now when more and more companies use unbiased render engines it will happen faster then we think.

rendering technique that does not introduce any systematic error

So normal rendering techniques obviously make approximations, and unbiased rendering must work out every pixel correctly?

Look at the example pixture on wikipedia (german road). That's scary good...if I looked at it quickly...

Yeah, it simulates how a real camera acts and takes no shortcuts like you say.
pros of using an unbiased rendering technique is that you get a actual beauty pass immediately instead of renderings tons of layers that you have to later comp together in a editing software.
The only thing we really do in comp is adding 2D elements such as smoke etc if needed or simple color correction.
and other pro is how easy it is, you don't need to "turn on" stuff like GI and fiddle with the settings it just works straight away and the materials acts like real life materials as well.

The cons is the flexibility and of course the speed.
its easy to just add a rim light effect to the head or what ever in other render engines by just faking it but Maxwell calculates everything correctly so you can't fake something like that as easily.
Realism is what you get so doing a 2D style or something ells odd you should be using Renderman or similar engines and not Maxwell, it only does one thing :)
Speed, it is slow as hell since it doesn't cheat but then again you don't need comp as heavily but its still not its not time effective. But as computers get cheaper and faster everyday we here at Meindbender think Unbiased render engines like Maxwell is the future for realism but there will of course always be a place for Renderman.
Then again I'm no expert i just repeat what our render guy says :)

So the unbiased render literally creates a 3D environment and calculates all the lighting dynamics (reflection etc) itself? Definitely sounds like it would require some serious processing...but also produce some serious results.

Cool stuff, cheers for the info!

Well no. it doesn't create the 3D environment such as the models like a chair or a character, it just calculates the light/shadow and how the materials react and act like in real life. so to get really good results you need good models as well.

No problem :)

And a render farm....

yes that as well :)

See for yourself, I did some tests last year.

Maxwell unbiased render 30 mins



Vray 13 mins for below image quality


You'll see the first image is really grainy but you can see the obvious potential for improved visuals under the hood (lighthing is much more progressive), however, to get rid of the grain you would probably need to render it for another 6-7 hours per frame which can be a killer as one second = 30x7 hours on somethign like i7 2600k.

But those two images demonstrate the differences, unbiased is obviously better, but at a cost.

If you can afford it then good for you, for me it was not practical for anything beyond static images (unless exterior with lots of ambient), as for unbiased, lot of people use fake methods to speed up maxwell so its not as accurate as it marketing blurb makes out.

For me, you should learn several renderers, someone who knows vray or mental ray can pickup maxwell in a day, but not the other way around and you can get superb quality out of vray mental ray if you're a complete rendering junky at a fraction of the render time.

You'll see the second image is really grainy

haha yeah I thought the first image was better too! lol'd at this =D

The other mind blowing part is that people had to create these tools to allow others to use them. That's just... wow, impressive.

Yeah true point, they don't just appear...

People always say maths is pointless in school...but I bet the teams that worked on developing that technique are now rolling in the $$£$

how am i supposed to troll this?

its good

You never know when dealing whit ESR :)

great