Monthly Archives: February 2012

Storyboarding!

by - 2012/02/20 22 Comments Artwork, Production

David and Ian sotryboarding

David (arrived saturday!) surprised us this morning with a complete storyboard of the first three scenes. It’s A_M_A_Z_I_N_G! Here you see Ian and David going over the shots. It’s so much fun :)

The script in its core (premise) is still the same, but it has been condensed to be more centered on events in future Amsterdam; removing the scene in space with a battle fleet. More you won’t hear from me now :) This week David and Ian get full freedom – just make it awesome! Next week we’ll get real and will start planning.

-Ton-

Ian Hubert arrived in Amsterdam

by - 2012/02/17 12 Comments Directing & writing, Production

Just a quick post! today Ian arrived safely from Seattle. I have installed him in his (awesome!) apartment now , where he probably collapsed in bed to recover from jetlag. Tomorrow evening David Revoy arrives, and then we have two weeks to get story and storyboards final :-)

Shading tests – Dirtmaps

by - 2012/02/08 26 Comments Artwork

With the production start of project Mango getting close it’s a good idea to test your own workflow a bit … because when instead you’re swamped with tons of work you can’t spend time thinking how to make things smarter and faster. So I tried to put together some questions and topics that always bothered me when I do environment models and shaders. Nothing amazing or innovative, but hopefully good for speeding up work, here’s what I came up with:

You got to love a carefully painted custom texture map, with all those subtle (or strong) weathering effects placed in the right spots just for that object.

Only issue: painting textures takes a lot of time! :)

Speaking of environments, that’s a real issue: your environment is often made of tons of different pieces, all quite detailed as models but not that important by themselves to afford the time for accurate custom painting. In my experience, in arch.viz. you only can afford tileable textures and no custom painting, in games you have to custom paint, and in movies you ‘simply’ need the best quality and realism…

Still, in any case it could be handy to have some kind of automation to get some weathering effects (based on the shape of the object) without custom painting, and keeping the unwrap phase reasonably fast. ‘Automation’ for this stuff won’t help quality much, but speeds things up. So it’s good for minor objects or as a base for important ‘hero’ pieces.

 

That’s the idea behind the tests below, dealing with: batch-bake of AO/dirtmaps, unwrapping multiple objects together, node shaders (cycles in particular)

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Camalot sponsors Red Epic for Mango!

by - 2012/02/07 35 Comments Production

Camalot AV Facilties is Netherland’s most renowned digital film camera rental and servicing business. One of the owners – Philippe Vié – today confirmed we’ll get their full support for equipment and services. Having worked with our Director of Photography Joris Kerbosch before, they’re confident we’ll make a good use of their Red Epic cameras :) (same camera as being used by Peter Jackson for the Hobbit, delivers 5k)!

http://www.camalot.nl/

Thanks guys, this helps us tremendously!

Fashion designer Pablo Londono Sarria for costume design

by - 2012/02/04 4 Comments Artwork, Production

I’m really proud to have triggered the enthusiast interest of the top fashion graduate of last year’s Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Pablo is currently doing his Masters in London and will be meeting with us second week of March to discuss clothing and costume design.

Pablo Londono Sarria - blue - picture (C) Peter Stigter
Pablo Londono Sarria - red - picture (C) Peter Stigter
Pablo Londono Sarria - wine - picture (C) Peter Stigter

He’s been showing us artwork he did for post-apocalyptic comic book as well. His style is amazing, and will add a lot of credibility to our project. Maybe he can do some virtual robot fashion for us too! :)

Rietveld graduation website

http://pablolondonosarria.com

(Images: copyright Peter Stigter)

Development Targets

by - 2012/02/02 51 Comments Development

As you all know, Mango is not only meant to create an awesome short film, but also a way to focus and improve Blender development. We already have great new tools, but for a real open source VFX pipeline we need a lot more!

Here are the main categories for development targets we like to work on the next 6 months (in random order):

  1. Camera and motion tracking
  2. Photo-realistic rendering – Cycles
  3. Compositing
  4. Masking
  5. Green screen keying
  6. Color pipeline and Grading tools
  7. Fire/smoke/volumetrics & explosions
  8. Fix the Blender deps-graph
  9. Asset management / Library linking

How far we can bring everything is quite unknown as usual, typically the deadline stress will take over at some moment – forcing developers to just work on what’s essential – and not on what’s nice to have or had been planned. Getting more sponsors and donations will definitely help though! :)

Below is per category notes that have been gathered by me during the VFX roundtable at Blender Conference 2011, and in discussions with other artists like Francois Tarlier, Troy Sobotka, Francesco Paglia, Bartek Skorupa and many others, and some of my own favorites.
I have to warn you. This post is looong. :)

Camera and Motion Tracking

Even though the tracker is aleady totally usable, including object tracking and auto-refinement, there can be some improvements too.
One major feature that we are waiting for to be included is planar tracking. Some of you might know Mocha, a planar tracker widely used in the industry, with which you can do fast and easy masking, digital makeup, patching etc. In a lot of situations you don’t really need a full-fledged 3d track just to manipulate certain areas of your footage. All you need is a tracker that can take into account rotation, translation and scale of the tracked feature in 2d space, for example in order to generate a mask that automatically follows the movements and transformations of the side of a car as it drives by.

Keir Mierle has something in the works that would allow such workflows. Obviously that would be tremendously helpful for masking and rotoscoping as well.

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