Cambrand Designs

Battlefield 4 teasers

Daniel Cambrand — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 00:29:14 +0000

So we’re teasing with some BF4 content as we speak. Check out what’s available and check out what’s to come Big stuff coming this next week!

Quick Career Update – Battlefield 4!

Daniel Cambrand — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:04:04 +0000

Working on Battlefield 4

I’ve been working at Dice for 2 months now, and I’m very happy to announce that I am working on Battlefield 4.

Sadly I can’t share any details about the project right now, but the closer we get to release, the more I can reveal.

Regards

Working for DICE!

Daniel Cambrand — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 18:23:35 +0000

Good times – they are here!

It is my great pleasure to announce that I am soon a Technical Artist working at DICE in Stockholm, Sweden! As you may know, DICE is the studio behind such massive games as the Battlefield series, Bad Company 1 & 2 and many other games.

My new career starts off in early August 2012 and I cannot wait to settle in and start working on the new projects.

Linear Workflow Tutorial

Daniel Cambrand — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:12:08 +0000

Easy Linear Workflow in Maya Tutorial

The idea of Linear workflow (LWF) has been around for quite a long time, as it started out as a discussion among people who were thinking about the mathematics of CG rendering. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that it became obvious to alot of users that the scenes they have lit and rendered for many years, was set up in a physically incorrect way. Anyone that studies how a computer monitor works and how it outputs images, will realize that something between input and output is being done in order for our eyes to perceive the image the way we see it. This topic can be quite exotic depending on how deep you go, and I will refer you to some links at the bottom if you want to know more.

A or B? If you answer incorrectly, you shall not pass Go, nor collect 200$

In this video tutorial I will show you all you need to do to start using Linear Workflow in Maya, and the method I’m about to show is the method “officially supported” by Autodesk. If you don’t want to sit through the whole video which will also cover bit depth, combining LWF and Physical Sun & Sky + IBL usage, check the short summary below.

A summary of how to set up a proper Linear Workflow within Maya:

Enable Color Management under Common in the Mental Ray global settings. (Input: sRGB – Output: Linear sRGB)
Right click in the Render View -Display -Color Management: Set Image Color Profile to Linear sRGB, while keeping Display Color Profile as sRGB.
Also when right clicking in the Render View, make sure the display is set to show 32-bit floating point HDR.
In the Mental Ray globals, go to Quality and open up Frambuffer at the bottom. Switch to at least RGBA 16-bit.
(Optional) Render to .EXR format using 32-bit float as your framebuffer type. 32-bit is required for some passes anyway, and the depth allows great editing capabilities in post-production.

Before you start:

Always start a new project by doing the above steps. Never start lighting your scene before you have enabled your linear workflow, simply because you will have to redo all the lights when you find out that you have been lighting too aggressively to compensate for the image appearing “too dark”.

Linear Workflow so far isn’t a unified practice across different platforms, such as Maya, 3ds Max, XSI etc. The methods accomplishing it tends to change between different software and their releases, but the idea is the same. The only thing that differs is the method made available from different tools, and the conclusion of pros and cons that pile up on forums. If you feel like you would like to read more about this, make sure to check out my fellow countryman Master Zap‘s awesome blog. Master Zap is an Autodesk employee and runs a blog about his work and he shares his inside tips & tricks. He’s covered Linear Workflow to some degree and a while ago he sat down with Mike Seymore at FxGuide.com for a 50 minute long podcast, discussing Linear Workflow. Listen to the podcast.

For compositing 32-bit linear renders coming out of your 3D software, you might need some plugins:

Additional links covering Linear Workflow:

Master Zap’s Mental Ray blog - Autodesk employee and Mental Ray guru.
Linear-Space Lighting @ Filmic Games.com - In-depth guide
Gamma Correction @ Broadcast Engineering.com - Advanced but useful information

I hope this tutorial has sparked your interest. Let the discussion begin.

Autodesk now shipping their 2013 product line.

Daniel Cambrand — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 02:40:15 +0000

The Autodesk 2013 product line is here.

As an Autodesk Maya user, I’ve been hoping for some extraordinary news for the 2013 release. I’ve often found myself feeling slightly handicapped during projects because of crashes or other documented bugs. Especially when working with Mia_Materials, there’s a chance that something will go wrong when you’re trying to build custom shaders using nodes that were originally built for standard materials. Maya 2013 comes with updated, yet only a few new features. So far the information about the release is quite scarce so this post should not be seen in any way as a review.

The features being presented in Maya 2013 are:

Heat Map Skinning
Enjoy a more accurate initial binding of geometry to skeletons in Maya 2013, thanks to a new Heat Map Skinning method that:

Is better able to assign skin to the intended bone as opposed to an adjacent but unrelated one.
Requires less manual refinement.

Trax Clip Matching
Visualize how Trax clips overlap in Maya 2013 to build complete character performances from individual animations.Clip Ghosts enable you to view the start and end frames of clips as skeletal wireframes in the 3D view. Match clips with the help of these visual cues, or automatically, using a choice of options for translation and rotation.

Atom Animation Transfer
Transfer animation between characters via the new ATOM (Animation Transfer Object Model) offline file format, in order to repurpose existing animation data as new characters are created. ATOM natively supports keyframes, constraints, animation layers, and Set Driven Keys.

Maya nHair
Create stunning, highly realistic hair and other curve-based dynamics with the new Maya® nHair module for the Maya® Nucleus unified simulation framework.

Create complex simulations with multiple dynamic entities all working together, with the ability to interact bidirectionally with both Maya® nCloth and Maya® nParticles.
Use a common system of fields, forces, and constraints for all Nucleus modules.

Bullet Physics
Simulate both soft and rigid bodies in a single system, with the high-performance, open source AMD Bullet Physics engine.

Create highly realistic simulations of cloth, rope, deformable objects, and ragdoll skeletons.
Take advantage of discrete and continuous 3D collision detection.

Alembic Caching
Read and write the Alembic open source computer graphics interchange framework format, initially developed in 2010 by teams from Sony Pictures Imageworks and Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd.

Distill complex animated and simulated data into application-independent baked geometry.
Reduce the overhead and loss of interactivity associated with transferring fully editable scene data between disciplines.

New Node Editor
Create, edit, and debug node networks more easily with the new Node Editor.

Choose from three levels of detail.
Rewire nodes in a more intuitive environment than the Connection Editor with drag-and-drop connection editing.
Distinguish different data types at a glance through color coding.

Viewport 2.0 Enhancements
Evaluate your work in a higher fidelity interactive environment in order to make better creative decisions. Viewport 2.0 now offers a more functionally complete high-performance, high-quality viewport, featuring:

High-quality depth sorting
Support for image planes and animation ghosting
The ability to use the same hardware rendering technology to batch render larger-than-screen-size frames, producing high-quality animatics and previsualizations in less time.

Some other things that have received updates are:

Graph Editor Enhancements – Retime Tool, stepped preview for Pose to Pose animation.
Human IK Enhancements
Data & Scene Management Tools

Autodesk has published a few videos to their Youtube channel to demonstrate some of these features:

Just as for the release of Maya 2012, I feel that the ones that will benefit as an individual from upgrading, are TD’s, animators and dynamic/fluid simulators. Just as last year, only minor things were done to satisfy a customer whose focus lies within modeling, texturing or rendering. I can think of multiple features that other 3D applications such as Max and Softimage have received during the years that are conspicuously missing from Maya. And as for rendering, what is the official status of iRay rendering? As much as I love Maya and can’t think of any reason to switch to 3ds Max or Softimage [yet], I can’t help but feel that they are putting all energy into developing new things when they should be fixing what is broken and enhancing existing tools. Increased Mia_Material node compability would be a good place to start. Right now the only thing that really makes me excited about Maya 2013 is the new Node Editor/Hypershade. I’m hoping that additional good stuff will surface as Autodesk starts telling us more.

Time will tell if this is another Maya 2012 or not.

Welcome to the new Cambrand Designs website!

Daniel Cambrand — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:18:54 +0000

Fixing the new Cambrand Designs website was long overdue, so I really knuckled down and made this happen. The site is still being updated with contact and “about me”-stuff so basic layout changes may occur.

This blog will mainly contain:

3D / CGI-related posts such as what I’m currently working on or news about this business in general.
Tutorials: if I feel I’ve got something to share that I’ve learned along the way that people seem to struggle with or aren’t even aware of, I might post a video tutorial or quick screenshots.
Showing work in progress-media that doesn’t look good enough to go on the front page.

I wish whoever is here welcome, and suggest that you make good use of the Blog Categories located on the right side on this page to more easily find the content you might want.