Scientist Shootout Allabouts.

by - 2012/06/08 22 Comments Artwork

The biggest focus this week was trying to get the shootout scene in the scientist’s tunnel completed. As with everything, it was a crazy balancing act of figuring out the right ratios of feasible render times to sample rates to noise reduction.

Just figuring out how to light realistically in cycles has been one of the biggest challenges. Cycles is incredible for smaller stuff, but once you get up into massively complex environments, it starts to slow way down, and you have to start throwing more and more cheats in there to make things really work. We know what we’re going for, but sometimes it’s a bit like learning a new language to figure out how to make the tools do what we want.

That said, we must be learning or something, because everything is looking better and better.

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Old and new shiny things

by - 2012/06/07 25 Comments Artwork

Hello Mango!

border rendering in viewport

My first week was focused on getting familiar with the production pipeline and structure. I also worked on lighting the amazing dome environment. Starting out a bit slow at first, thanks to a few great additions to Cycles by Brecht things were picking up speed! Spot lights were added to Cycles: and thanks to border rendering in Camera View we can now quickly render portions of our viewport at a higher sample rate.

Further, I started working on the holographic bubble of science-ness:

  

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Holographic Domestic

by - 2012/06/06 10 Comments Animation

At some point we’re going to be switching between the live footage and some holographic representations of the scene.

So nice and quickly, using the footage as a background, I animated our old holo blockheads to match the acting as well as needed. As the actors didn’t really move from the spot and and the camera was (mostly) static, it was nice and easy, and I didn’t need any help from the tracking software.
(this isn’t the camera angle we will be using, this was just to get the acting matched up)


And again without the backplate

A little later Andy will work his magic and make the characters look awesome and holographicy.

Who needs mo-cap :)

Masking in Blender

by - 2012/06/05 36 Comments Production

This is a first demo of the current status of the masking tools in Blender, that are currently being developed. Since we need it desperately for the work on Mango, we are all very happy to be able to use these tools.

But be aware that the development is still in progress, so you can expect some changes and improvements.
These tools have been merged to the main development version of Blender, so if you want to use them, either build trunk (SVN), or go to graphicall.org and download the latest version there.

Thanks to Sergey Sharybin, Pete Larabell and Campbell Barton for their work!

Weekly – June 1

by - 2012/06/02 11 Comments Weekly meeting



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!

by - 2012/05/31 17 Comments Production

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-

Robot Arm Spin #2

by - 2012/05/30 25 Comments Rigging

Been a while since I’ve posted stuff for you all. So here’s the robot arm as it is at the moment. Made a few changes since last time, notably the arm attachment and the new chain saw. Also filled in a few gaps where there was empty space. There’s even the first bit of weight painting I’ve done on this project :P

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