Mango - Open Movie project

Original footage, now with ACES gamut

ton — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:27:44 +0000

Brecht is checking on Open Color IO, he did a quick export which results in the jpgs below. Interesting but not sure if this is 100% correct, it feels too much contrasted. We keep digging :) This is what Brecht did:

setenv OCIO /path/to/ocio/aces/config_1_0_3.ocio
oiiotool –colorconvert aces rrt_srgb in.exr -o out.jpg

First original footage frames in 4k!

ton — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:30:00 +0000

Ian made a quick selection of frames, straight from the RAW files, unedited 4k originals in 32 bits float OpenEXR linear color. Just 5 frames is 250 MB. Oh yeah we have Terabytes! Click on image for 4k jpg, or download the zip with all frames below.

http://download.blender.org/mango/first-footage.zip

Everyone’s invited to unleash denoising, LUTs, graders and other fancy stuff on the material and show us something amazing!

Cycles Status

brecht — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:42:54 +0000

Here’s an updates on what we’re working on in Cycles. Up to now, the features that we’ve added for the 2.64 release are BVH build time optimizations, exclude layers, motion/UV passes, filter glossy option, a light falloff node, a fisheye lens (by Dalai Felinto), ray length access (by Agustin Benavidez), and some other small things.

There’s also now a page in the Cycles manual about Reducing Noise in renders. All of these tricks are used in production with other render engines and should apply to path tracers in general.

Currently there’s still three major features on my list to implement: motion blur, volumetric rendering and a contribution pass. We already have a vector pass now for doing motion blur in compositing, but real raytraced motion blur would be nice as well. The code for this is mostly written but work is needed to make this faster, currently it’s slowing down our raytracing kernel even if the there are no motion blurred objects.

Volumetrics should be a target for 2.65, so the release after the one we’re working on now. There’s already a developer who has patches to add volumetrics to Cycles, we’ll need to review the design and add support for rendering smoke and point cloud datasets. Currently volumetrics are being rendered with Blender Internal, and probably in production they end up in separate layers anyway, but it’s not very convenient to mix render engines and have to switch back and forth.

The idea for the contribution pass is that’s it’s like the only shadow material in Blender Internal, but more flexible and interacting with indirect light, to help compositing objects into footage. How this will work exactly is unsure still.

Everything else is related to optimizing performance in one way or another, either by making things simply render faster, reducing noise levels or adding tricks to avoid noise. Baking light to textures for static backgrounds may be added too, but if at all possible I’d like to avoid this. Most of the optimizations we are looking at will be CPU only, on the GPU there’s not as much that we can do due to hardware restrictions. Some directions we will look in:

Improving core raytracing performance (SIMD, spatial splits, build parameters).
Decoupling AA sample and light sample numbers. Currently one path is traced for each sample, but depending on the scene it might be less noisy to distribute samples in another way.
Better texture filtering and use of OpenImageIO for tiled image cache on the CPU, so we can use more textures than fit in memory.
Texture blurring behind glossy/diffuse bounces. Like the Filter Glossy option, this can help reduce noise at the cost of some accuracy, especially useful for environment maps or high frequency noise textures.
Non-progressive tile based rendering, to increase memory locality, which should avoid cache misses for main memory and the image cache.
Adaptive sampling, to render more samples in regions with more noise.
Better sampling patterns. I’ve been testing a few different ones but they couldn’t beat the Sobol patterns we use yet when using many samples (> 16), still hope we can find something here.
Reducing memory usage for meshes (vertices, normals, texture coordinates, ..).
Improve sampling for scenes with many light sources (just rough ideas here, not sure it will work).

Hopefully these changes together with careful scene setups will be sufficient to keep render times within reason, but beyond that we can still look at things like irradiance caching or other caching type tricks. I hope to avoid these because they don’t extend to glossy reflections well, I’d like to try to keep things unbiased-ish, it seems to be the direction many render engines are moving in, and it’s easier to control, maintain and parallelize over many cores.

Filming in Amsterdam

ian — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:28:39 +0000

Welcome to the Netherlands… :P

The day after

ton — Sat, 12 May 2012 08:57:51 +0000

Half of it is random stuff from the sets. Don’t worry, we rescued the more exciting props like Sebastian’s trackers and Jeremy’s gun! We’ll enjoy a couple of slower days here during weekend, monday kickoff of the 2nd half of Mango: make the vfx :)

Time Lapse – Day 4

jeremy — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:52:21 +0000

Last day of filming. On location at the bridge, moved a couple of times from inside cars to under tarp shade thingys. Playing back at 3fps this time to show it off a little more (plus we were sillier with it because it was in our faces!)

Filmed with my trusty GoPro taking a photo each minute. Played at 3fps.

Filming day 4, Ton’s gallery

ton — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:40:42 +0000

It’s over! It’s been a blast! Amazing! I’ll be writing production experience reports later, here’s the (probably randomized) list of snapshots from my phone!

Perfect filming weather sofar!

ton — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:46:03 +0000

Day started wet, but as predicted it got dry around 11. We film for 3 hours until lunch 14h. Then some rain might fall, rest of day is good again.

Mango set streaming day 4. On location!

francesco — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:14:23 +0000

There might be some issues during the streaming, in that case we will update this page. Please spread the news as it is not always possible to peek at the backstage of a movie :)

Filming day 3, Ton’s gallery

ton — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:44:00 +0000

Today we had the scenes with Derek de Lint and Sergio Hasselbaink. Great actors to work with! We also had to decide whether or not to film outside tomorrow… and decided to take the risk :) It might rain all day, but the predictions give enough dry periods to do have all shots filmed.

That also wraped up the studio days of filming today. In just a little over an hour the studio was empty again. Ian was watching footage in the meantime and enjoying tremendously what a really (*really*) great job the light & camera team has done. Shots might at first appear a bit overlit bright and flat, but that’s just to get the full range… playing with color sliders reveals new worlds in the pictures. Amazing :) We’ll come back to the work of the crew here later. Just for now, kudos for Joris Kerbosch & Eugene Sprik & their teams!

(Not to forget: also kudos to Pablo Londono Sarria’s costumes and Sanne Kiwitz’ make-up. Sergio’s looks today was flabbergasting!)