Hello All,
After many many sleepless nights we finished the Raging Rhino Charge project. The WIP thread is here.
The final composite video is here.
And here is a list of the team and what each did:
William Atkin: HDRI Lighting, Rendering, Compositing
Josh Burton: Animation
Jon Campbell: Camera Tracking, Particle FX, Marker Removal, Rigging
Scott Spencer: Modeling, Texturing, Rigging
Thanks for the support everyone. We hope you enjoy the video!
Great Composite
foufff! nothing to say except that it s totally cool 
I give you an A+
Great teamwork very nice.
Great team, great modeller. Congratulations for a professional work scott
Interesting. Now, can you give me feedback on what you would do different if you had more time, or the opportunity for a complete redo? (Why you say? Because I use this board and others to evaluate people for opportunities.)
Nice! Cool team effort! It would have been awesome if the gate would have popped up in the last couple of seconds when the rhino attempted to strike the rear.
small_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamond
Lemmo
well done final looks great. enjoy your ZZZZs
johnny blaze:
DktrHeadache:
Gling-Glo:
ilusiondigital: Thanks! Im glad you like the modeling : ) I was very lucky to be invloved with the rest of the team. I really think they are all some amazing artists.
lemonnado:
Thanks guys! its so rewarding to be at the end of the project and be able to share it with everyone here. Thanks so much for looking and Im glad you guys like it. I was very lucky to again be involved with a great team. My thanks go to them as well.
Matt: thanks bro! Let me tell you as soon as I finish this demo reel I am hittin the futon HARD! In the mean time we are getting inflatable rafts to use as beds in the computer lab! : )
Jason Belec:
Thanks for asking! Wow, more time is always nice: ) I cannot speak definitively for everyone but from my end there are a few things I would like to have done. As mentioned before having the pickup truck bed flap react to the rhino would have been a nice. Some more time to work with Renderman and the displacement maps as well. I was in the middle of a shading network to set driven keys on wrinkle group maps driven by the joints but time ran out on me and I had to save it for next project.
As for the rig I wanted to complete a dynamic rig expanding on the processes I used for my previous elephant with nurbs Spheres as influence objects bound to the skeleton with pin and spring constraints, acting as “fatty tissue” and “muscle” as the rhino moved adding an extra dimension of secondary motion.
thanks again everyone!
Scott
I think it looks great the way it is. I like the way the rhino arrives in the scene and also the rhino movement/animation.
Since you ask for feedback I’d say an alternative ending could have him catch up to the rear gate, move his head down and ‘horn’ the door from underneath.
The horn could stick through the top of the door and drag the rhino for several yards (you’d see the top of the horn through the door and the body being dragged behind). Quickly the rhino could get back on his feet(horn still stuck but not being dragged) and keep pace with the truck long enough to shake his horn free…and abruptly fall behind as he becomes free and falls back and tumbles in a pile of dust.
There are infinate ways to go and I like it how it is.
Hi Jason-
Camera tracker, FX guy here. One thing that we wished we could have done, like what Scott mentioned before, was having the rhino hit the track. This came down to a tracking issue. Unfortunately time was not on our side to figure out a solution, however when school is over, I will definately be revisiting that problem for future projects.
If we had the opportunity for a complete redo, the first thing is a reshoot with a better camera. We used a panasonic DVX100 (hend held option) for the shot, but we could have used a DVCPro50. Unfortunately again time was not on our side and because the DVCPro 50 is a larger camera (shoulder mounted), we would had to have figured out a different way to safely secure the camera man into the back of the truck and limit the camera shaking. The DVCPro50 would allow greater image quality and color quality.
On the particles side, have the rhino actually step into the puddle after the slide and emit water and ripple effects.
Can you send me an email with some info about ur company? I couldnt find it on-line.
Scott did a great job on the model and displacements/textures. Amazing seeing where he started with the rhino and how it finally ended up. Such a difference it makes when u actually put an awesome hires model into action!
Cheers!
-jon
…that the Rhino can’t climb on the car 
Cool animation
Pilou
OK vrljc.
Hello everyone,
Time for the lighter/compositer to chime in. This piece was great to work on, and i’m glad that there has been such a great response. It’s great to be able to work with such talented team-mates.
Jason,
I wanted to respond to your query as well. As far as what I would have done differently… quite alot comes down to time and not enough of it.
On the lighting/rendering side, I had spent some time building in a gobo setup to mimic the shadows cast by the trees on the left side. The rhino passes throught them at times and although I got the system working, in comp most people thought they were render errors… so I would have liked to flesh that out more. Rendering went easily enough, although I still am not familiar enough with Renderman to output all my passes as AOV’s. I had to do separate renders for each pass, which took valuable time. I know its possible and since I was using Nuke, which has the ability to read multi-channel exrs, the AOV pipeline would work well together.
On comping, the footage was really bad, but workable. Using a better format would have helped getting some good keys for color correcting. On the sky replacement I would have liked to have worked out a way to add a spherical background element using Nukes 3D pipeline. In intial tests, we worked out how to get camera track data from Maya to Houdini to Nuke, but time hindered us putting it into action. A more enticing sky would have added some. I’ve also reworked this piece beyond what you see here a bit. Warming up the colors, adding more contrast and grain. It has the same feel, but a bit more polished.
Hope that helps,
I’d certainly like to hear more about your evaulation practices
William Atkin
Digital Effects Artist
www.william-atkin.com
You can email me if you wanna talk specifics.
I can help you with the Renderman and lighting issues, as those are pretty common things.
Since these areas aren’t Zbrush related, it probably isn’t appropriate here.
I don’t use Nuke, nor do I know anyone who does, however I’m sure what you want is doable (we use Shake).
I do think you guys/gals should post up some steps/details for the Rhino to give other users some help.
Excellent work Scott
Nice to see a well thought out and executed project reach it’s final fruition 
Thanks also for the very helpful ‘ZB to Maya’ video tuts
Chris
Atwooki: Thanks! Im glad you enjoyed both the video and the tuts. I am in the process of updating that tutorial as well as making a new short video on getting diffuse maps from zbrush.
Jason: Thats a great idea. I want to do a process page on the Rhino since we each overcame som einteresting problems in each of our areas. Hopefully there will be some more time next week after we walk graduation : ) I have some noes I am going to post in the near future.
Thanks again,
Scott