Last week we’ve captured for everyone in the studio for a whole week every minute a screenshot! That’s going to be a great video! Needs time to process, so it’ll be published later (or as DVD extra ;)
Just for fun, here’s the capture of today 18.00. From left to right, top to bottom: Sebastian, Jeremy, Campbell, Ian, Andy, Roman, Francesco and Kjartan.
Author Archives: ton
Weekly – June 8
The previous blog posts already show our weekly progress well, so here’s some additions to this – like an evidence we have a full shotlist now!
This weekly I spoiled the fun a bit by ringing the alarm bells; if we want 9 minutes of film to be done in 10 weeks, we need to start delivering finals now… and not only a few shots, but more like 10-15 shots per week, 50 seconds every week! The two main bottlenecks to overcome urgently;
Weekly – June 1
Not much new to show. Most of the weekly stuff already ended up in a blog post here! There’s also the new masking tools we’ll post about next week. Last week’s pipeline test (full pipeline from footage to render) didn’t go too smooth yet, but that was the purpose of testing! The little bits are coming together now. I also promise to get a full pipeline posting here on the blog, once it’s been proven to work :)
Production update – halfway!
Tomorrow is June 1st, the start of the second 3 month period, aimed at completing this film. Looking back on the past months I can be very happy already, it’s been a blast and I think we’ll survive well, especially because two new team members are going to strengthen our work force!
Andy Goralczyk: lighting design & compositing
Roman Volodin: vfx artist and animator
We’ll say goodbye this weekend to one team member who’s 3 month period ended:
Nicolo Zubbini: 3d modeling
Nicolo has been modeling and texturing tremendous amounts of environments and 3d models, he’s been great! I’m happy that we can afford him to continue work from home an extra month on finishing more props especially.
Last 10 days we’ve been testing our pipeline on a number of shots (the scientist shooting scene). That’s been extremely useful! And as expected, it didn’t go half as good as we expected even! :) Main bottleneck still is masking and keying (and other tools for cleaning footage). Slightly holding us back is the new compositor and Cycles – but that’s being worked hard on.
We also found out today that the preferred pipeline for linking/sharing data among Blender files won’t work without bad hacks. That went back to the drawing table as well – mostly because you cannot localize (“proxy”) efficiently yet.
The image here is the proposed rough scene planning now. In five big categories we’ll complete this film. Individual scenes/shots and tasks get added next week. I need Ian to return from his break in Seattle to confirm the final edit! Laters :)
-Ton-
Weekly – May 25
Here’s my random pick from last week’s ‘weekly folder’.
Here’s one of the shots we’re currently working on; tracking, keying, cleaning, masking, adding 3d environment & props, add guns, light bolts, robots, light design, composite and final grade! Hopefully that’s something we can show next week.
-Ton-
Venom’s Lab 2: new training DVD!
Pablo “venomgfx” Vazquez is working here in Blender Institute on a new training DVD; episode two of “Venom’s Lab”. It’s aimed at people who know Blender’s basics and who want to learn al the techniques to create wonderful characters in Blender.
Here’s the trailer:
The DVD is going to be finished in 3 weeks, pre-orders are being accepted via the Blender e-store now! The profits of our training DVD series goes directly to making project Mango possible :)
Weekly May 19
Original footage, now with ACES gamut
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:
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setenv OCIO /path/to/ocio/aces/config_1_0_3.ocio
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oiiotool –colorconvert aces rrt_srgb in.exr -o out.jpg
First original footage frames in 4k!
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.
https://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!
The day after
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 :)
