Category Archives: Production

A Tale of Teslas

by - 2012/03/31 28 Comments Production, Random

Yesterday the courier arrived and we received the two – sponsored by Nvidia – Tesla computing units we’ve been waiting for days! It’s been a nice afternoon at the institute, with Sergey configuring the correct drivers in order to unleash the power of two cards and Ian making fruit smoothies to relieve the tension. More interesting information comes after the documentary “A Tale of Teslas”.

If you skipped the video, here the render time for the BMW benchmark file:

  • 1 Tesla: 1 min 4 secs
  • 2 Tesla: 34 secs

Although this result is not really comparable to the one obtainable with a GTX 580 (23 secs),  there is a main difference: Tesla cards have 6GB of memory, each. This means that in the dual configuration we could render a test scene (the bridge scene) with several GB worth of textures and data (otherwise impossible on a GTX).
The time for rendering such scene was:

  • Dual Tesla config: 5 mins
  • Dual Xeon rendernode: 15 mins

We are going to get Brecht over here very soon to see if he can improve the performances of Cycles on this cards. Will we eventually be able to replace the whole renderfarm with a GPU-based solution? We don’t know yet!

Currently we’ve put the cards next to more humble GTX 260’s in two workstations, this will help designing a lot. Special thanks to Nvidia for giving us these cards to test!

Open Street Maps import

by - 2012/03/30 14 Comments Development, Production

Campbell Barton ported the OpenStreetMap import script to 2.6 for us !

And it’s now in trunk.

The script loads XML files saved from the OpenStreetMap website (http://www.openstreetmap.org) into Blender (as edges).

This was quite helpful in blocking out the Oude Kerk area for mango (to correctly place the church and the buildings around)

Now, we’re integrating these maps with more detailed infos (necessary for the final models but also for animatic / previz purpose)

The the finer measurements will come from survey or more accurate plans  : city planning maps can be very useful in these situations (especially roads height measures)

We haven’t got those yet but we might be able to get all needed data from tracking (Sebastian is testing that on the ground surfaces  just now)

Tracking de Oude Kerk

by - 2012/03/29 13 Comments Development, Production

After finishing the Track, Match, Blend DVD this week I could finally start doing something more useful for the production.

In order to help with the reconstruction of the set at the Oude Kerk I have started tracking various shots that I took there, getting a more or less good geometry reconstruction out of that. But there is always a slight error margin in these tracks, so the resulting geometry is never 100% perfect. Still, it is very useful to get a sense of scale and proportion with some actual footage. The nice thing about Blender’s tracking system is the flexibility to link in several shots at once and align the cameras manually, to get multiple views aligned, and thereby getting a pretty big point-cloud reconstruction of the scene.

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Production update: Composer Joram Letwory

by - 2012/03/29 11 Comments Production

March is nearly over, the filming dates (around May 10) are getting closer every day! So much todo :)

Here’s some news tidbits from the production department:

  • Composer & sound designer: Joram Letwory
    I’m already following Joram’s work a couple of years – yes he’s the brother of Blender developer Nathan “Jesterking” Letwory – and I’ve always been impressed with this work. More over, he’s not only a great composer and sound designer but even doing film and hiphop & dance clips! I’m very happy he accepted to help us with music and sound! It’ll be a tough job to work in the shadow of the great Jan Morgenstern, but it’s time to give a new talent a chance to get a public portfolio with a film soundtrack!
  • Ian and me had a meeting with production designer Romke Faber to go over a lot of practical filming details. He already did film design for several blockbusters here in the Netherlands. Needless to say – good quality films have production designers involved from the very beginning! For Mango, we have a lot of great artists on board already though, under Ian Hubert’s creative direction. For the filming itself however we can really use Romke’s help here. We’ll only have a week to film and we better make our sets & props work out perfect!
  • Rob Tuytel arranged us a surprise visitor next week: monday the famous director Dick Maas will be coming over for a studio visit! Dick is the renowned (and and first!) action & horror director we have in the Netherlands. His films usually give a nice level of controversy – with as many haters as lovers. His somewhat cheesy Dutch style is definitely well aligned with Ian’s American cheddar approach! It’ll be a fun visit ;)
  • Joris Kerbosch (DP) has already found us his crucial buddies for on the set; a Key Grip, a Focus Puller and a Gaffer! I need to settle deals with them first, then we’ll talk more about it.
  • Sebastian – finally done with dvd duties – now is refining our breakdown spreadsheet into fine detail for sets, props, etc. He’ll be doing preparations & tests for us as some kinda mix of assistant director & production designer. That’s what vfx supervisors do!

(Image: Joram)

-Ton-

Studio Hardware

by - 2012/03/25 34 Comments Development, Production

Hello everyone,

Apparently you can’t do a computer graphics without using computers. But which exactly computers and how much of them we’re using?

Couple of different hardware configurations are used in the studio by artists and by renderfarm and this short post is devoted to describe which exactly hardware configurations we’re using for Mango project. As an addition there’re benchmark result of CPU and GPU rendering on that systems provided at the end of this post.

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Weekly – March 23

by - 2012/03/24 29 Comments Artwork, Production

This is only the 2nd weekly presentation of the team, and we’re already getting glimpses of how the film will look like! Ian and Jeremy have been doing crazy stuff on animatics already! The whole team’s been working great last week; concepts, training dvd work, animation tests, modeling, and even work on an auto-run Blender demoloop for HP (Francesco will post this soon).

As usual I’ll just grab from the weekly presentation folder. The artists themselves will update with more elabortated posts here.




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Production update & HP sponsor!

by - 2012/03/22 15 Comments Artwork, Production

Everyone’s busy, no blog posts is always good news (unfortunately for you guys out there!). The team spirit is awesome amazing, very inspiring, it tops any project before! It’s probably a bit thanks to the kick-off workshop, but also because we have an amazing talented and well fitting team together.

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Amsterdam photo refs

by - 2012/03/21 7 Comments Production, Random

Here’s a small selection of the thousands reference photos shot during the last weekends.

Boats, bridges, canals and the Oude Kerk, of course. but also many refs from the architecture and design of the Amsterdamse School (1910-1930~)

Especially interesting are the street furniture pieces (like the electrics box and the street-lamp in these pictures ) partly used directly as typical dutch environment props , but also as a base to build sci-fi and tech pieces (some of those shapes and geometries seems made just for that !)

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Editing the Storyboard

by - 2012/03/19 8 Comments Artwork, Directing & writing, Production

The video has nothing to do with the rest of this post :P. I was sketching “defensive tombstones”, and Sebastian walked by and said, “I have the perfect shot tracked for that!” so I threw some in! I’ll wait to develop them until we know if we have a specific place for them, though.

It’s also the first video on our new Mango-Specific YouTube channel. There are some videos we want to post, but aren’t really deserving of the massive traffic the BlenderFoundation channel gets, so it’s more for scraps and the like. If that’s your thing, though, feel free to subscribe-or-whatever.

Anyway! Anyways? Anywaying?

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