Textures .. there’s never enough of them (especially tileable , equalized , easily reusable ones)
While modelling stuff for the dome i’ve been doing some tileable textures kits, still lots to model, but some assets already need to be tested with materials to define the pipeline (.. or simply to check if modelled detail is enough :D)
Today we had a near-complete film crew meeting on location and studio with Merle Bos (Assistant Director), Joris Kerbosch (Director of Photography), Eugene Sprik (Gaffer – Light), Romke Faber (Production Design) and Victor Dekker (Sound recording). We will do another meeting with the Grip (crane, dolly) later. Of course Ian (Director) and Sebastian (Match Mover) were there too.
Biggest outcome of the discussion on the bridge was that this location would have a lot of practical issues to solve; we should carefully weight if that’s worth the efforts (and money!).
Tomorrow another exciting visit will be to the former energy museum. I really hope the location is usable for us.
Later more!
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!
This weekly was even streamed live via Google Plus! We have already like 700 followers there. Will do that next time again!
Further; just enjoy the pictures! A full animatic (minus last minute) should have been online already too.
A very important aspect in daily production, is to keep assets organized and easily accessible. We needed some system to link complex environments into a scene and being able to toggle the visibility and complexity or their components.
With the vital contribution of Olivier Amrein (oenvoyage) we realized an addon called Powerlib, that allows toggling visibility and level of detail (high and low resolution) of subgroups contained in a linked group.
I’ve been doing some tests with smoke simulation lately, and I met an interesting case I’d like to share. After doing some simple smoke emissions, I tried to get smoke trails. For unknown reasons a flickering was ruining the shading, no matter which resolution I was baking the simulation.
I showed the file to Daniel Genrich (Genscher) and Miika Hämäläinen (MiikaH) who provided a fix and a simple explanation.
The flow object Absolute Density had to be turned off and the Density parameter had to be turned down from 1 to 0.3: this prevented emitted particles to overlap in space and generate part of the flickering effect.
For the Domain object, the “color” texture had to be tweaked so that in the Voxel Data panel the source appeared to be Heat instead of Velocity.
Man o man, so much coolness is happening and I can’t talk about it in detail yet :) Here’s some stuff:
Picture: I found a great store in Amsterdam where they sell or lend the craziest things. Might come in handy for the props department!
During these weeks before the filming and the actual work on the shots starts we are doing several tests to check out the production tools. One of them is obviously Cycles. In this particular test we wanted to see how far we can go with the integration of the robot hand in a shot.
Of course it is obvious that the hand is fake, after all it’s a robot hand, so we also put in objects that could in theory be actually standing on the table. We went for a mirror ball (because there was an actual mirror ball in the scene, so, easy to compare) and a plastic toy.
Currently the animatic is set up a little weird!
We’ve linked in scenes from every blend file into a master timeline in the video sequence editor (making significant use of the mapping cameras to timeline markers)- which is both cool and not-so-cool. On the plus side, it gives immediate updates. Whenever anyone updates an animation or a model, all we have to do is update SVN and bam! It’s in the animatic.
One of the things we learned from the kickoff project was that animating the parameters of modifiers for a bunch of objects can be very, very time consuming. So we asked Sergey if he could make a button that copied the animated parameters of the actively selected object to the whole selection. 5 minutes later he had fully working feature that did exactly that :)
And here it is!: ModifierTools.py
In the image above you can see an example of how I am using the script to make fractured shards look more organic (less straight). This is good for mid ground fragments.
