Last week we had a lot of fun producing various props for the movie, for example an assault rifle and grenades for Barley, hand gun tracking devices for the scientists, an eye patch for the captain and some other things. It was great fun to take a break from sitting in front of the computer and instead going out, hunting for props, assembling stuff and doing some real physical work.
Jeremy made us a kick-ass assault rifle out of a bunch of plastic nerf guns!
The modelling for the dome environment is proceding steadily, here’s a test render (from last week, actually) :
Light design and compositing are totally temp, the shaders will need lots more testing and you can easily spot some meshes that are still at previz-level-of-detail.
This week I was more focused on modelling details so that for the shooting (or right after it) shots can be framed and setup with a good idea of the final shapes and silhouettes (see renders at the end of post).
In physics simulations it’s very handy to make objects have a mass value based on their size. So for instance if you have one big and several small objects in a simulation(that are made of the same material) then the big object should be able to move and affect the smaller objects more then the other way around.
So we asked Sergey if he could write us a tool that works by checking the bounding box of the selected objects and gives them a mass value based on their size. And so he did! it didn’t take him long :)
Download the addon here:PhysicsTools.py
Are we having them? Eh, nothing unexpected! But somebody asked if we could do a blog post about things that can become complicated on the actual filming front (we do tend to be a bit Blender-cenctric). The differences between making a film and making an animation. These are some of the things we’ve been having to think about over the past (and rest of this) week.
It took a while to get everyone confirmed! Here’s the line-up:
Extra’s for scientists fighting with robots: Daan van ‘t Einde (Blenderhead audition), Keir Meirle (libmv dev), Campbell Barton (Blender dev). Hippie: Jeremy Davidson.
After having decided the locations to shoot on we now have to get our props ready for shooting next week.
We need guns, grenades, weird old tech stuff, buttons, cables and old crap. Well, everything you always need in a post-apocalyptic weird scifi story!
A good place for that is the famous freemarket in the Vondelpark, that takes place each year on Queensday. This year the Amsterdammers where really lucky to get the only day with beautiful weather, blue sky and warm sun for Queensday. So yesterday whole Amsterdam plus thousands of tourists was getting out, dressing orange, getting drunk and dancing on the street. And so where we! Well, not exactly, but at least we got out to go to the Vondelpark, where there is the traditional freemarket where kids and people sell their old stuff. Perfect place to get all kinds of old crap that we can use in the movie, for example old Super8 projectors, typewriters, grenade-belts, toy walkie-talkies etc.
Today Ian, Jeremy and Kjartan went to the toy store to buy nerf guns, that are now being disassembled and put together to form the badass hero rifle for our sniper Barley!
And if you happen to live around here and have a closet full of scifi stuff, grenades, rifles, or other interesting stuff, you can take a picture of it and post it here. We might need it! :)
