Category Archives: Uncategorized

Chinese Version of Tears of Steel

by - 2013/09/13 5 Comments Random, Uncategorized

Here’s a great story of the fun and success of the Open Movie’s Creative Commons Licences and the creative freedom that they allow. Because now there is also a chinese Version of Tears of Steel! They had their own actors, reshot the entire movie and combined it with the CG assets of Tears of Steel. It’s so cool to see them reenact all these scenes from our movie. And their Techhead is at least as crazy as ours! :)

Apparently it was a project from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation (http://english.ia.cas.cn) with the goal to build a team and explore the pipeline and workflow for future commercial projects. Further down Ethan Luo from the chinese Blender community shares some infos about this remarkable remake. Check it out!

Here’s a splitscreen version that reveals a bit more how they created this epic version of Tears of Steel!

It’s always great to see people using the open movie assets in their own projects, but seeing the love and detail that went into this one is simply awesome. Having worked on the original Tears of Steel myself I know what a pain greenscreen keying, rotoscoping and sometimes object tracking can be, but these guys did a great job, especially since they didn’t have access to a high end Sony F65 camera that produces supercrisp footage nor a luxurious giant well-lit greenscreen studio, so they probably had to deal with a lot more problems with keying and tracking.
So hats off to the creators of this “Tears of Steal”! I think it’s a great encouragement for everyone to actually use the open movie assets, use them for your own creations and learn from them!
:)

Here’s what Ethan writes:

 

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Popular use of Open Movies: tradeshows!

by - 2012/09/08 10 Comments Production, Random, Uncategorized

Hi everyone,

It was time for the annual IBC Conference in Amsterdam. It’s the largest Broadcasting/TV show outside of NAB Las Vegas. Always very cool to walk around and see some new development. I’ve been staring at an 8K tv showing Olympics footage… amazing.

Another fun thing to do at IBC is to spot our movies! This is a great example that illustrates the need for free and open content. It’s just a sample, in the 3 hours I was at the (only parts of the) tradeshow I saw many more. (The pics at QT and Fraunhofer show Sintel too, but not well visible).





Color Spaces

by - 2012/05/23 29 Comments Uncategorized

There’s now a page with some basic explanation about Mango color spaces on the wiki, and a package of frames in 2K in a few different color spaces (about 250MB). There are linear EXR’s with ACES, S-Gamut and Rec. 709 chromaticities, and sRGB PNG images with and without the ACES RRT (film like look) applied.

If you want to try grading in a current version of Blender, the linear Rec. 709 EXR files are the ones to use, since those are in the color space Blender expects. the same usually goes for other applications without ACES support. Below are some images without any film like look, and without tone mapping applied to deal with bright colors, just the result you see when loading the Rec. 709 EXR files in Blender.



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Cycles Status

by - 2012/05/14 37 Comments Uncategorized

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.

Cycles Motion Blur

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Filming day 3, Ton’s gallery

by - 2012/05/09 12 Comments Uncategorized

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.

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Anyone Good at making Maps/Blueprints?

by - 2012/04/26 15 Comments Uncategorized

EDIT: Got what we needed! THANKS! If anyone else has been working on stuff, feel free to still send it in! I’m sure we’ll still have a great use for it. We’re going to have diagrams/blueprints everywhere. But don’t start if you haven’t already. 

This entire film takes place in one location, presenting us with a lot of interesting opportunities. We already have a blend file representing the entire place, meaning that I can just sit back and fly around the scene to identify possible shot angles and stuff like that- perspectives that would never occur to us thinking about the scene just our heads. Since the entire set up is actually all planned out in physical space, I’d love to take as much advantage of that as possible.

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April 20th Animatic

by - 2012/04/22 18 Comments Uncategorized

Here’s the current state of the animatic. Getting increasingly flushed out with the camera moves we’ll probably be using on set. We have a lot of planning with the production team this week- all this stuff is finally coming together!

Really Far Behind the Scenes

by - 2012/03/26 29 Comments Uncategorized

Can I in good conscience suggest you watch this video? No. And yet- it is here.

13 minutes of almost completely unedited Mango action; mostly filmed during times that have almost nothing to do with mango, and featuring an absurdly disproportionate amount of Ian’s face.

May I present:

Really Far Behind the Scenes

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