Talkin' TERD (Waterworks Breakdown/Ramblings)

He just did it from when he was a kid and got better that way. Watch tutorials, do it a lot, get your friends together to make videos.

Lukas Sprehn

Insane man. Just amazing!

Heph Ed

Did you go to college for learning CGI, compositing, modeling, filmmaking, computer science etc.?

ez

Nice.

Wow 😳

Ry Ken

This is very cool PS: if you need help rendering stuff in cycles, I may be able to help. I've bending a lot of experimenting with network rendering (kind of networking (haven't found a reliable network add-on yet and they removed the network renderer from blender a few versions ago, so it's more like splitting up the total length manually to a few virtual servers with lots and lots of opus)

Awesome work!

I loved that aspect ratio

insanely cool. amazing

Michael Steinheiser

wow! this is some super impressive stuff man

Looks really good! and it is really enjoyable to watch the progress!

Sérgio Merêces

Speechless... awesome! I wish i had 1/1000 of your talent

Michele Coser

god I want to be you when I grow up, lol, just beautiful work, as always

Robert Singler Jr

I think I found a way, but it’s going to double the render time, and I need to select the gloss-indirect light in the channel, render it twice, and then synthesize it

Looks bangin'. Love it!

I know Ian typically tries to line-up his images so these surfaces match up, giving that grime, but I also saw this trick in a Blender Guru video once, but this video also details it much faster and as a standalone vid which is great! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM59HtNlPyU It's basically using a small node thing that uses the AO of an object to put some grime onto

Ozzie

I think it's great that most of the scenes are CG, because the world has a more cohesive, coherent look than if you had mostly live footage with CG elements added. It all holds together really well, and the detail you've crammed in there is incredible!

Pete Burges

I love the verisimilitude in all these scenes, so delightfully layered! I noticed when photographing the local back alleys that there is significant build up of grime and stuff around floor intersections, like around pipes and table legs. Is there an easy way to accumulate stuff around these corners? I guess GI is usually used to fake in grime but that only works when its a single object and material :(

David McSween

If using a phone beware of leaving the stabilze feature turned on, it makes the optical center of the frame drift around. This is a problem for Blender's tracker which expects the camera to be a fixed position in space.

David McSween

Seeing these shots makes me want to pick up a camera and shoot some stuff!! ...But I lent my camera out. Maybe I'll use my phone.

Tyler Adams

Beautiful!

Stellar stuff, keep em comin.

Jimmy Deface

whooo , your render quality is disturbing , i follow every of yours tuto about render / light . But right now its look like a magic secret sauce ') much love ian thank you for

This is great! I wonder how are you texturing these things. Recently I've been modeling stuff and I saw that I'm really bad at texturing them . Could you do a tutorial, please.

Hey,lan!Can you come up with a tutorial on how real ground or water, tiles, and pavement water reflect CG objects.

masterpiece

I'm curious, in the arch scene with the vendors, is there any real footage or only cgi? For me (assuming it's the latter) this is the perfect example of great use of cgi: allows you to convey a mood and perform a storytelling that would be too costly with practical shots, and doesn't throw you off the scene at any time. Congrats and thank you for letting us witness this greatness :)

Mornarion

Definitely inspired by the same stuff as Mo (basically every weird beige computer in the 90s) :D Actually, that was almost exactly what I liked about the design- I was thinking the AI/personality aspect was down to a science, basically just a chip they can drop in there, so it's this really advanced AI chip but in a body with only like 1 degree of rotation- I kind of liked the mismatch in tech (and I like utilizing folk's inclination to anthropomorphize) And yes! His neck! I thought a lot about it and still don't have it totally figured out. As you pointed out, I ended up adding another degree of rotation so he could nod a little, because my first animation pass wasn't really able to convey anything (his head rotation swiveling back-and-forth looked just kind of random), but adding the additional axis made it JUST anthropomorphic enough to work. I thought I'd done it really subtle, but seeing the animation, it's actually fairly pronounced (and introduces a ton of geometry clipping, hahaha)- my friend wants to take another attempt at animating that shot in particular- I'll probably end up raising the head just a little bit like you're talking about :D

Ian Hubert

We should make up a new word for this kind of content: Iansane!

Mornarion

I'm going to cry myself to sleep tonight.

Erich Stenzel

what if you could take some intern blender artists to finish up the episode faster.....what would be your actually costing per episode if you take a few inter artists.....

shonal bose

Wow! Every aspect of these shots is so beautiful to watch!

Greg DiGenti

Incredible stuff! 😍

Jan van den Hemel

Nice bot, inspired by Mo from Wall-E. :-) What I would change here is to add either neck as Mo has or put some sort of sphere on neck, so then all-direction head movement is justified. Right now it supposed to turn head like a tank's turret: only horisontally, but yet it does also slight vertical moves, which adds "oh, whaat?" feeling. It also makes no sense to build a bot with a so huge body and little turret-head and then add a complex mechanism/programming to all that and yet it has max only like 1-2 degree freedom. Either add more sensors to it or just lift up his head so the vertical movements makes sense. My two cents. :-)

Looks so very complicated and a lot of work. And doing these "just last night" blows my mind. You must save clients a hell of a lot of money... you can up your rate :) :)

Doug Brown

I see you put that neon sign uv controller to use here. Honestly your work gets crazier with each shot.

Ed Leszczynski

Amazing!!

Mario Taylor

Woooowwww 😮

your ability to get such high production value out of so little is truly an inspiration and makes me feel like there's always more possible and few excuses. Love you man!

Justin

Ahaha I honestly only made the video because I was excited to show the scenes, so that works out great.

Ian Hubert

At a loss of words, but so inspired. Amazing, Ian!

Arturo J. Real

Oh, yeah! I use a Sony A73 and Reality Capture for my workflow, but you can also use a phone camera and meshroom (which is free/open source!) if you're on a tight budget. I talk about it a bit in these posts: https://www.patreon.com/posts/turning-people-36836508 https://www.patreon.com/posts/making-burger-w-37969016

Ian Hubert

Amazing work Ian. So inspiring to see. Can you please clarify what you're doing/mean when you say "photo scan humans, plants"? Is it a photogrammetry app on a phone or something else? Thanks.

Lawrence Whiteside

Cycles for all of these! It just feels a bit more textural to me in general, and there's never a shot that won't finish overnight. I expect with new virtual-production realtime stuff Eevee's going to continue being super useful, though :D

Ian Hubert

How did a flying fax machine named TERD make my jaw drop to the floor?

Kyle Gallagher

This is amazing stuff. Are these rendered with Cycles, EEVEE, or a bit of both?

Kays Al-Atrakchi

Thanks, John! I ended up going in and hand-placing the bricks for that back wall (wasn't too hard, since it's pretty tessellated), and I'm really glad I did. When you compare that back wall to the image texture on the arch, suddenly the arch bit looks really flat/2d. It's also the first idea I had for the shot (while laying awake in bed at 5am :/), as if they were in an old factory that's been converted into a market, and maybe 50 years before there were big generators there, but now they're crammed full of stalls.

Ian Hubert

I'm SUPER pleased with how well they turned out! I love having a good greenscreen element, but there's something about having a fully 3d asset in a 3d environment that's really nice, too.

Ian Hubert

Ah thanks Kai!! I think I have a tendency to underestimate how much work I put into stuff, though. Like, I *assembled* that shot yesterday, but almost all of the pieces are projects I spent days on (the mechanical bits, the plant photoscans, the vendor photoscans, TERD, the steam elements, the scanners, the neon, the additional human photoscans and the mocap and all that), and I should probably keep that in mind when I say stuff like, 'I made this yesterday!', haha

Ian Hubert

That looks insane Ian, INSANE

Nicolas

I'm gonna make a whole sub-episode of TERD getting up in the morning. And then I'll add flashbacks to the assembly line where he was first made. Then an episode about the guy who decided to invent him, "Pierre T. Wholewagon", and explore Pierre's convoluted love life, and the childhood of his second wife Theresa Calbot, and the relationship she had with her parents out in the dustlands, and the life-changing experience they had when they encountered Russboy, the King of the Freeway Pirates (played by Nathan Vegdahl).

Ian Hubert

This is crazy

Man, that bricked-up environment with the vendors in those arched cubbies looks so good.

John Zwick

Ian. Ian, Ian, Ian. You do *not* have enough introduction shots for TERD yet. TERD deserves more than this! Stop skimping!

Nathan Vegdahl

Love how casually you talk about the mind-boggling shots on screen you made all like “oh, yeah, did that one yesterday after lunch” and it’s like 10 million dollar Hollywood piece. Love it Ian, super stoked to watch Dyanamo Dream the moment it comes out!!!!

Kai Christensen

the photoscans look sooo good!!.

Tommy Shades

Me too! It's been lost for a couple years, now!

Ian Hubert

So fun to see these update videos, would love more

William Landgren

AAAAAHH I LOVE TERD. And I hope they find that cat. And oh my god it’s all so beautiful and inspiring. So excited!!!

Blake Rizzo

Just incredible, wow man!

I'm sorry I wasn't honestly listening to you. Was just staring at the scenes. 😍

Just WOW! :O

Dyrgrip FX

everything just looks so good i love it

sofia

Man, I will never get tired of listening to you talk about CG or animation, and those shots are just so beautiful!

ian you are the coolest i aspire to be like you and i really wish you made more tutorials so i can make my own cyberpunk distopian worlds like you you are just my absolute idle

After you post these videos I have to pick up brain pieces because my mind is always blown