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-
Today will be live on twitcam for our weekly meeting. Drop by at 6:00 and get the latest news about project mango!
My first blogpost as a mango artist; I really like to show everyone the development of the making process.
I started the mango project as a production assistant helping Ton with some production stuff for the shooting days. After that I started modeling. I have been doing this for a long time for myself and now I really like being part of the mango project as an artist.
Down here you can see the development of a couple of parts I’m working on. It’s not finished yet, but I’m happy to share it with you. I’m only doing the modeling and texturing as my specialty is environment development. Today I started working on the city skyline; I wonder if it is possible to make it look photorealistic.
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.
Hello everyone!
A few weeks ago I posted about the Blender Demoloop. I gathered all the feedback, polished the files further and worked together with Campbell and Brecht to solve a few issues. A short summary of what we did:
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 :)
I flew to Amsterdam the other week to hang out at the Blender institute writing some code and maybe get a second or two of screen time. We decided that one of the most useful features I could add for Mango was planar tracking. Over the last week, this is what I wrote. The video below shows the new Ceres-based planar tracker. This is on the Tomato branch and is not ready for trunk yet.
Note: this planar tracking is not as sophisticated as some of the other planar tracker packages, but give it time.
Special thanks to Sergey for integrating Ceres into Blender’s build and fixing some UI issues.
It’s texturing time for the dome , except for the scientist boat and a few props still needing more polies (the silos and boxes in a corner), I’m now setting up textures : a first pass tells me if the object is detailed enough and whether it needs more mesh detail or more refined textures.
An example is the bridge , right now it’s quite low poly for being in the center of the set , but textures are going a long way , and right now it doesn’t seem to require crazy high-poly sculpting , but rather a solid material and some greeble models as filler (cables, lamps, and misc. tech probably)
So here’s some individual renders dome props , you can see some of the nodes used : they are just groups (made using trunk cycles, no custom or secret code :D ) .
I’m really excited about the current texturing/shading possibilities: thanks to batchbake, vertex color channels, blended box mapping, nice tileable textures and the flexibility of Cycles nodes … you can get really nice materials, really quick.
Hopefully this will work nicely (as in technically stable and manageable) and make lighters/shaders happy (using groups heavily is now making these materials way more readable !)
