This is only the 2nd weekly presentation of the team, and we’re already getting glimpses of how the film will look like! Ian and Jeremy have been doing crazy stuff on animatics already! The whole team’s been working great last week; concepts, training dvd work, animation tests, modeling, and even work on an auto-run Blender demoloop for HP (Francesco will post this soon).
As usual I’ll just grab from the weekly presentation folder. The artists themselves will update with more elabortated posts here.
Great job guys, can’t wait to watch it.
What are your thoughts about using Cycles in production?
Cheers
Using cycles is still quite problematic, but we knew it isn’t ready yet. Brecht is busy and expects to have things more stable and production-ready soon. We’ll keep you updated :)
Aww great! Thanks Ton, best wishes for all. Keep the good work
I love the weeklies:) Very impressive speed!
The scientist tracking test works great, the dome looks awesome and “amsterdamned” is bulls-eye! :D
Q: What are you going to do with the stylistic edges of the image of the dome (dome-pano0005)?
Pin-prick: I think it would improve the quadruped robot a little bit if the shield plates on the hind legs are smaller or at least different then the front ones. It looks awesome! Who have done it?
Great work, thumbs up and great luck to the whole team!
Roger over.
LOL! I will definitely subscribe to this newspaper! Where is the sign up form? :)
Is the weapon made like that because it looks cool (which it does btw) or because it needs to be large to hide object tracking markers?
About the gun, what about shadows for the new shape, falling on the ground (behind the actor)? Hmm seems like a hard effect to integrate.
Great work guys! Just one little remark:
In the tower scene, the guy is on the ground, and it only takes him one shot to slingshot that entire thing out of the tower? What kind of guns do these guys have?
You probably have a reason for that, but it just felt a bit weird for me…
Jumping off to avoid further damage, maybe?
I agree, the intensity of the motion seems weird.
Agree! That does not look believable. Would look much better and more realistic if the robot/beast just falls straight down.
I was listening to this when I watched the animatics. Not a bad combination:
http://grooveshark.com/s/Bad+Boys+Main+Title+Heist/3eOHev?src=5
Awesome!
I would be interested, how/if the shadow can/will be fixed in the scientists weapon-shot … which is great as all your work :)
I’m way to involved in your production *g*
The scientist gun is also on sebastian’s training dvd! We can ask him to give out the .blend for you guys though.
Make it for real, with LEDs in it to get the flashy effect right and then smooth/texture it with CGI.
If actors need to touch things or shadows become an issue, try to build it for real. This is what they did on Iron Sky.
Some labour in a workshop can be waaaaaay more efficient than trying to get a photorealistic 3D render/composite of a relatively simple prop.
We do our best to also use real props, but there’s also a good reason to do it in Blender. (You know… the reason why we do Mango in the first place ;)
BTW: we propably do call for props and model makers here soon!
I was just about to mention that if you need mad scientists props or perhaps a tour in some labs to get inspiration for sciency stuff, I certainly arrange something. My labs are in Utrecht, but I can also put you in touch with people with labs in Amsterdam.
Great idea! I’ll mail you :) (and for everyone else, if you have links to pictures of the mad stuff in your lab, post it here :)
This stuff is not mad ;) just the people who use it.
Photos of the lab have to wait until early april …
It seems like there’s some good renderings already, but some of the images still show that you would need to put some of the Cycles focus on smarter sampling algorithms to remove any remaining noise.
I already mentioned bi-dir or two-way pathtracing at one point, you might also want to look at the possibility of having algorithms that can automatically target regions for more sampling by way of estimating which parts of the image contain fireflies or otherwise undersampled areas.
This is mainly from seeing that lamp scene, I could easily imagine a restaurant full of those lamps with all of them producing caustics, which would be a very pretty sight if Cycles had the algorithms needed to pull that off in animation :)
If you guys are looking for cool mech inspiration I suggest Metal Skin Panic Madox01, there are some great weighty action scenes there.
Looking good!
@Ton and @Sebastian,
have you seen the comment I post on the post /random/sample-chapter-from-track-match-blend/ concerning the idea of some tracking constraints to improve again and again the accuracy of the tracker ?
Since their is already a standards in engineering to fully describe that, I post a Wikipedia link.
To my mind specifying that a set of points are coplanar in the virtual plan A for instance the floor, an other set are coplanar to a second plan B for instance the wall and that the two plan A and B are perpendicular each other could :
* help tracking point
* help detecting errors that are really error and avoiding giving and Hi score to track point that are accurate
* help refining focal length
* helping reconstitution
What do you think about it ?
Hey!
Yeah, that would be a great feature, and in fact it is planned since quite a while. I am desperately waiting for it. The solver for that is even already finished, it is just that apparently some legal questions and patent issues have to be sorted out first. But that is being taken care of, so it is just a matter of a short time until this can be implemented.
Thanks a lot for your input!
:)
Nice to heard so good news :)
Thank a lot ! Keep on doing amassing things …
It’s sad that patent issues should hold back the development.
Maybe this will be corrected, but there is no shadow of the gun on the ground, in the gun tracking test.
(sorry, my english is not so good)
cool stuff
the progress von the Robot is very impressiv looks a lot like a Killer Kobot
but how are you going to animate the head? as far as I am able to judge this robot are intellegent Entietys so they have to act and more importen they need to act seriosly
It’s just me or the gun resembles the Gravity Gun from Half-Life2 ? :)
Awesome work btw!
In the scientist gun you need to put some weight in the hand of the actor, without this it appears too light for the scale of the gun. You can use the velcro type of bracelets used in training sports. Just a suggestion, the rest of the work seems awesome!