All attention went to the teaser and new website, but we also had a weekly again! Here’s interesting files I copied for you here!
Animated by Jeremy, cleaning/render/composite by Sebastian:
“Tears of Steel” – Teaser
An epic teaser deserves an epic blogpost.
So here it is:
TEARS OF STEEL
HD mp4 download/play: tears-of-steel_teaser.mp4
Also cheers to Francesco for our new website!
Tracking, Keying and Layout. Workflow Demo.
Here’s a little timelapse of the general workflow for our keying shots.
First we track the camera and save that as a blendfile. From that file we generate a new file that is then used as base for masking and keying. The tracking markers can often be re-used as a way to mask out stuff from the footage.
The cleaned footage is then saved as 4k openEXR files with premultiplied alpha channel.
A third blendfile is created as a base for that layout, swapping the footage for the clean plates and setting up the final shot dimensions (1920×800). That file is then handed over to the person that is then doing the layout for it. The scene layout for this scene was originally done by Andy.
Usually after the main composite is done I fix some alpha-blending issues that cannot be solved in the pre-key outside the main composite.
The key that you see here is still a little but too harsh on the one side of the head, but for the demo I didn’t want to tweak it too long.
Dailies
Very cool to see the crew doing dailies now (not every day but alas… :). Doing art crits and reviews is a great added value of being in one studio together.
timelapse: cleaning background plate (WIP)
for a wide angle shot we needed a clean plate that’s going to be mixed with holographic effects of Amsterdam. unfortunately there was no clean plate shot, that’s why we had to clean it up by hand in gimp. for the scale to look more correct, a lamp had to be removed. also the shadows had to match the footage shot on that day and people on boats and in the street had to be erased.
this is a timelapse recorded during the photo touchup process. there’re still some obvious mistakes, but since this is only the base of the background for that particular shot I hope they will not draw any attention.
The Dome!
Dome view on bridge with captured robot. Central set in our movie. Dome environment by Nicoló, Robot by Kjartan and Matte rendering by Andy.
Weekly – July 6
Here’s some picks of last friday’s weekly. Ian’s already having fun with playing with color spaces and tonemaps. “Film shit” he calls it!
(Actor credits: Jody Bhe, Derek de Lint, Vanja Rukavina, Sergio Hasselbaink, Rogier Schippers)
environment art videos : materials shaders presets
Here’s a first tutorial/log about environment modelling and texturing.
It’s about materials in cycles, shaders-preset nodegroups in particular , next videos will be more strictly about modelling and texturing, but i’m starting with this because .. it’s just such a cool topic: while setting up textures for the dome it was necessary to organize them in a way that lighting and shading artists could make sense of it, tweak it or rearrange the material for the final shot .
So i started using nodegroups for organization… But it’s more than just keeping the node-tree tidy and readable, it speeds up material creation, keeps things consistent and allows to refactor and do quick ‘global’ changes on materials.
It’s also a good starting point to just discuss best-practices for texturing and shading in Cycles, so i’m looking forward to comments, and the presets you see in this video could be expanded with more types and variants (there’s quite a few threads on BlenderArtists i need to dig through :)
More to come, I’m still tuning the audio recording quality (I removed noise and normalized in Audacity, but my new soundcard is still misbehaving. It’s also tricky to find the right balance between doing many takes and editing more, to make the speech more fluid)
Weekly Meeting 06.07.2012
This week’s weekly, again via YouTube.
“Make Stuff More Real”
AndysInspirationalPosters.com
(Not a real site. But it should be.)
So!
Sooo……..
We’re making a movie. And it has a lot of VFX shots in it (110ish?). And they were not photo-real enough. So now we’re making everything more realistic! And keeping up with our quote of 50 seconds per week.*
You want to know what’s tricky? Staring at a picture that looks pretty good, but not entirely realistic, and trying to figure out what exactly is off about it.
