Weekly – April 13

by - 2012/04/14 48 Comments Artwork, Production



This week was spent on a lot of modeling and testing efficient ways to recreate photo-realistic parts of Amsterdam. How much to do with photo/footage projection? How much is real modeling here? A lot depends on the final shots of course, but it’s crucial to master the art of recreating realism in Blender asap, before actual filming. The tests I’ve copied above are just first trials, it’s research in progress. As soon as good results or conclusions can be shown it’ll be here on the blog within a day. :)

We’re also very happy to have the help from production designer Romke Faber for the sets! Ian produced an extensive briefing. Together we should visit the studio asap to inspect the possibilities there.

For next week the main question to answer is “Are we going to film the bridge breakup scene in Amsterdam on location, or in a studio with greenscreen?”. Lots of factors to weight here, including financial ones!

Oh: anyone knows where to get the best quality chrome balls to photograph reflection maps?

-Ton-

Netherlands Film Fund and Cinegrid support Mango!

by - 2012/04/13 36 Comments Production

This week we received two times great news!

1) The Amsterdam Cinegrid consortium – researching 4k media distribution and creation – grants us support of 20k euro. That’s to encourage us to at least use a 4k pipeline for filming, storage and conversion, tracking and keying in our studio. This makes it possible we deliver (parts of) the film in 4k, but this depends on factors we will only know in a few months.

2) The Netherlands Film Fund today confirmed we get a wonderful grant of 30k to support the filming process, and another 30k for the animation/CG side of our project.

With both subsidies, our current sponsors, and the ongoing DVD sales (yes, we still need you!), it means our project now is financially being covered in a decent way; allowing us to hire a good film crew, good hardware, great artists, and of course development time!

-Ton-

Online casting for Mango

by - 2012/04/11 73 Comments Filming

We are working with Kemna Casting for finding us the right people for roles, they’re awesome and for sure they can get us the right people. For the five older roles we will do a casting based on their portfolios, for the two young characters – Thom and Celia – they’ll organize a casting this week for us.

Chances are very high they’ll find us the awesome  actors, but we shouldn’t rule out the chance something magic happens online as well. So, here’s your chance if you want to become a movie star! Rules to participate:

0) You have to be available in Amsterdam Studios on one day, either 7-8-9-10 or 11 May.
1) Pick a character from below’s list
2) Record yourself acting out at least the lines of text, upload it to YouTube/Vimeo as Creative Commons
3) Paste here the link to the video
4) We pay in eternal fame; lots of fun and a great movie credit.

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Dome blockout, bridge detailing

by - 2012/04/10 12 Comments Artwork

The dome environment is currently at the end of the design/previz stage and at the beginning of the detailing / actual modelling.

Just a few minor props left to block out , but everything still needing many, many polies to look anything like a final…

Here are some shots of the dome and church sets : (still animatic level , materials and lights are totally temp ! )

Rendered in Cycles with the Tesla, 3-4 mins per frame is still too much for an animatic – and indeed we’ll probably use OpenGL render for it- unless we want to design/previz lighting already.




Then some detailing for the bridge and roads : i’m trying different combinations of shrinkwraps , solidify , particle scattering to organize these for  close-up (bridge) and mid-ground (rest of the dome) views.

After a few tests , it seems promising :  the risk is to rely too much on ‘heavy’ meshes for these tiny greeble details, but seems to be flexible enough for different situations.

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Rig Detail

by - 2012/04/10 36 Comments Rigging

As promised, here is a shortish video showing off a bit of the detail in the rig as it stands thus far. As you’ll see, there are still holes in the model and intersections that need to be fixed, this is just how it is at the moment.

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Weekly – April 6

by - 2012/04/07 11 Comments Artwork



Here’s a selection of images I copied from the weekly presentation. As usual a lot more went on, but presenting it all online shouldn’t take us away from working. We do our best! :) Right now everyone’s enjoying an extra long easter weekend! Back in 2 days, have fun too! :)

Quadbot Rigtest – Walkcycle

by - 2012/04/06 23 Comments Animation, Rigging

The detail in the Quadbot is starting to get a little crazy. With each step up in the model’s detail, the rigging has to be matched. With the rig getting up towards almost 800 bones, its starting to show, and the model isn’t even finished yet. I also set myself a challenge of trying to keep away from major mesh deformation (apart from the pipes).

There isn’t a single Armature modifier on this yet.

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Format Woes

by - 2012/04/04 36 Comments Filming, Production

Yesterday we had the chance to test the Sony F65 at Camalot (who were very nice and helpful). It was very exciting to see such an enormous camera in the hands of our DP. But even though the whole process is digital all the way, getting hold of the data is not as easy as you might think (see yesterday’s post).

So, after getting the data out of the camera, safely transferring it to the Blender Institute and plugging it into the computer, the question is: Now what? We have been shooting in Sony F65 Raw format (.mxf), which generates enormous files. 10 seconds footage are 2.68GB of raw data, unreadable unless you install the Sony F65 viewer app (of course only possible after the annoying registration of all your data!)  (Plus a not very user friendly interface. But hey, you can even write emails with it!).

From this app, for which I wasn’t able to find any documentation, you can export to EXR, DPX and MXF (again, this would not be readable for FOSS). The DPX are also for some reason un-readable, so we go to openEXR, as planned. (Just in case someone is interested in that, here’s a patch for DPX. http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?group_id=9&atid=127&func=detail&aid=27397. Any developer willing to have a look into it?)

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