Roll credits

Here's a playblast of the credits!

Gimme some feedback today before I render and composite tonight and tomorrow... enjoy!


Crosshares Credits playblast

So... posters?

Re-re-renderisation-o-matic-a-tronic-al-ism-ist-ic

That's gotta be the longest title this blog has had.

Hopefully one of the shortest content: A few things we missed in the 2nd render pass. I've re-rendered shot 5 and 29 tonight, but there's still the following to fix:

shot29 STILL has orange rendered without smoothing. Double-ultra-mega-check this.
shot31 is missing the last few frames of the shadow pass - they may be on a computer @ uni somewhere
shot38 needs orange amb

There's several compromised shots, but with the magical power of compositing, nobody will notice. Except me. But I have a terrible memory. So I'll forget. Then the movie will be awesome. Yeah.

Done comping for tonight. Show up for sound tweaking Saturday evening, we'll have all the shots rendered before 5, and edited before 6. So there.

Rough Customer

The dead rabbit's lookin' damn good! My only thought is to just dirty him up a little more. Like this...ish:


Other than that tiny thing, I think it's looking freakin' awesome! Nice!

The bunny is dead, with a little more dead.

Re-Renderisation

The first rough comps are done!
But there's nothing to show because:

a)
I haven't added the skies yet, so it's pretty useless rendering them out at this stage...

...and b)
shot01 needs shadow pass from 153-250 & rain
shot02 needs rain
shot03 needs fixed bg amb from 85-105
shot03 needs legs frames 109 & 152 re-rendered
shot03 also needs rain
shot04 shadow pass needs legs added for 20 frames
shot04 needs rain
shot05 rendered with wrong camera - rerender
shot05 needs rain
shot06 needs rain
shot06 - check shadow calculations
shot08 blue beauty missing frame 16
shot08 blue needs to be smoothed
shot10 ambient pass has barbed wire
shot10 blue needs to be smoothed
shot14 missing most passes
shot19 amb has barbed wire
shot20 may have lower smoothing on blue - check
shot22 has light in character amb
shot23 has incorrect shadow pass
shot23 orange needs smoothing
shot25 gun is not separate to character layers
shot26 has no zdepth
shot27 also missing depth
shot29 has incorrect shadow pass & no zdepth
shot29 orange needs to be smoothed
shot30 has incorrect shadow pass
shot30 - can blue be smoothed more?
shot31 needs blue added to shadow & zdepth pass
shot32 has incorrect shadow pass
shot32 needs orange's hand & dead hand added to shadow & zdepth
shot33 needs more amb frames, or lose the photo…
shot38 has no shadow & zdepth pass
shot38 needs orange pass
shot38 has wrong wallet UV layout
shot38 render passes need to have uniform lengths i.e. 1-160 wallet, 1-150 bg & 1-200 shadow
shot39 amb has wrong texture
shot40 bg amb has wrong texture
shot41 rendered from wrong camera
shot42 needs new wallet texture
shot43 missing texture
shot44 bg amb has wrong texture
shot44 - try optimising orange's eyes & brow

I think that's all of it. We'll get busy with that soon, yeah?

Dead Bunny Shot Update

What you guys think so far? Like ze carrot?

Electric Feel

This is a test of the electric bzzt n shit for shot 30. I think that's pretty cool, what do you guys think?


Crosshares shot 30 test

I have some more epic

I was compositing away, and shot 26 struck me as very... well... striking, for want of a better word. I'm twiddling with some colour correction along John's suggestion, what do you guys think?


Kind of emotive, isn't it?

Oh, and yes, we're missing a few vital things in some of the renders. I'm making a list. Should be easy fixes.

Doink!

...because I've run out of witty titles.


Crosshares 5th October.

Watch it a few times, let me know if there's anything that stands out. Music will change, let me know if there's anything else I should add. Below are my notes I wrote to myself this morning...

Drums good...
Opening strings ok
Needs more punch on orchestral hits
Mixing of themes is nice though
Watch trombones on fade out
Bass thump needs to be pulled back

Middle battle theme ok?

Remove high trumpets and high trombones
Yeah, definitely lose the heavy thump of the thinking music.
...and the slow bits

Last battle theme has too many high bits. Something not quite right.
Steel guitar too high on velocity. Push back a bit.
Make quiet bits quiet - contrast.

Make sure there's plenty of falloff when bouncing...
ALSO! Higher sample rate when re-bouncing for next draft.

Oooh, and fyi: I love Logic. It is awesome. That is all.

The Decorated Death

Bombi added some more props. I'm liking the feel of it :)
... Now listening to his ipod.... Muppets Treasure Island soundtrack.... Good :P

Schedule!

This is how much time we have!


Now GET TO WORK!!

Stock footage rain

Crosshares shot 3 test 2.

Woo! Explosions!

I got the shadow pass to work without taking 2 hours to render per frame (thank f for that,) and Z depths... to an extent.

The tree looks like this:


Which in turn, looks like this:


Crosshares Rendering Demo.

Wallet lulz.

Wallet blooper

The irony of this situation is that I have a broken wallet irl too...

Storm clouds over a blue solider....

The sky is what I considered finished due to seeing Tom's renders, which blurs the clouds out (im not complaining about this, its just there's no use in putting detail in if it doesn't need it). Although I can do it later on if need be.

The dead bunny shot ive redone because a while back we discussed it and the previous version was way to scary and gross so I slapped down some new paint, tell me what you guys think.

Where would we be without shakes?

What would our film look like if we didn't have shake? Something like this:


And here we are in the land of dystopian green. There's a few errors to address pointed out in the image below...



...now comment, you bastards!

Animation round 1!

Here be the first animated animatic! Marvel, comment and critique!!


Crosshares Previs 14th September.

And here's a newer one with better shots, nicer animation and better cutting. Albeit, no soundtrack...


Crosshares 15th September.

Deglossed around the edges

Here's a new version: better reflections, slightly dodgy AE comp instead of Shake... Animation isn't quite as embarrassing this time...


Refined rendertest...

Shadows need to be tweaked to an agreed level. This is much less on the stylized purple, more to a darker blue.

Bugger'd hand and dodgy textures fixed too. Reflection now only on the outer gloss at about 0.2 reflectivity. Shiny.


H264 compression washes out the colour something fierce.

How to renderlayers...

That last post was a bit wordy. Here's a .gif that makes life a little easier. If it doesn't play on this page, just try clicking it.



...or not... Doesn't look like blogger likes animated gifs...

Rendertests engaged...

Prepare to be marginally amazed:


Shot 32 rendertest.

Whatcha think?

This render took about an hour and a half for 130 frames, split into:
1 background beauty pass
1 background amb occlusion pass
1 sky texture a la Brad
130 character beauty pass frames
130 character amb occlusion frames

There's 1 directional light for key (colour white, intensity 1,) fill (80% grey,) rim, shadows (raytraced, 1 degree, 5 depth)... and 1 omni for a little face detail (0.2 intensity, specular on, shadows off).

I don't have any clever naming conventions or path structures yet, but in theory this is gonna work quickly and painlessly. Comp'd in Shake with a bit of blur and distance fog.

W00t!

ALSO!!
Watching this at the proper framerate, I realise this particular animation sucks some serious testicles. I'll be redoing a lot of animation and religiously playblasting - just to get it absolutely perfect.

And Neil, check out his wrist. We'll need to repaint those weights a little, I know Orange has something with his finger too...

Blast!

Another explosive experiment. This one I just stole from the Visor. Looks cool though.


Another explosion test.

Freakin' out

This smile is the widest I can make with blue's current controls. Can we add a 'big grin' or something so he doesn't look so freaky?

Also: a picture of some procedural animation gone awesome.

Eye see you O_-

Textures are GO!

Hokay! We can render now! I figured out what was causing the Vram to spak out every time we tried to render a scene with more than one character in place.

2 things:
Texture size
Texture location

As fantastic as the ARNE server is for centralizing everything, it can't quite handle being used as a texture cache as well as a computer can by itself. The solution is dragging the project across to the scratch and rendering locally. The trick to making this work is making sure we move any updated files back to ARNE when we're done, and double checking the project settings each time we start up - which we do anyway...

I've resized all the textures down by an average of 50%. In some cases, even more. Now that the computer doesn't have to Unwrap, filter, light, layer and render 4 4096px square textures per character at 2 characters per screen, it can actually render a frame without crashing!

Here's a bit of maths for scale - an average scene before would calculate about 201326592 bytes of information per frame. That's 0.2 gigabytes (200Mb) of data streamed over a network into random access memory for textures only. Not including lighting, shadows, geometry or visibility calculations. All that cache data is processed to make the single .tga file, which is barely 7Mb...

Now, the same looking thing is only 12582912 bytes. That's only 12Mb (0.012gb) of information to play with for a render. Much easier. The only difference is the texture dimensions.

To prove my point, this is what a production render looks like. Ignore the dodgy reflections...

Re-visualised by a half

Crosshares previs mk02.

oOooh... shiny.

I vant to suuck your blooood...

Heh, Blue's shoulders were fixed so that they zero back properly. Though that means that we'll have a few shots like this!

Explosms evrywarr

More explosions n stuffs. A few layers of smoke, kinda stylised looking. Massive render time, so we'll use this as a billboard, or just add it purely in post.

Explosion test 3.

MY BACK!!

AAAAARRRGH I'm sadistic.

planks in a trench

OMFG Aliens!

Ah, lol...

If rabbits could fly...

Experimenting with some clever distortion and stretching techniques, should we decide to make the animation even wackier. Then I got carried away with photoshop.


Yeah, that was too much fun...

Explosmnimation.

Like I said earlier, I now have Maya.

To celebrate, here's an explosion.

Explosm mark 1.

Whatcha think?

More Music

Hey guys, Bob's sent me another musical iteration. I've got some thoughts, but I wanna hear what you guys think first.

Have a listen: here.

Explosive erection!

WAAAAAH!!

Suc-freakin'-cess!

A-HA!! I have Maya at home! Finally!


Previously there was a glitch somewhere in the process that made the loading circle pop up every time you tried to do something in a 3D viewport (kinda necessary for 3D work, as you could imagine...) I found a site that showed me a simple work-around, and now Maya works for me at home!

Buddy Flick

Working on previs most of today. This is another test of the rigs, another few tweaks and fixes, plus some useful paraphernalia to promote the film. Neil and I did these ones, did you want to do another one Brad? We left space on the board.




There's still some minor texture tweaks to make to:
-Blue & Orange's ears
-Orange's neck line
-Bump texture on Orange's face
-Orange's eye specular and reflections are doing something funny. I'll get to fixing that soon.

I think Blue's texture is ok for the moment...? I changed the file format from .jpg to .tga and we made his eyes brown again.

Flex fail

Yep, well, I'd look kinda worried if this happened to me too...



This has occurred because somebody has removed (not unloaded... removed,) the shotgun reference from the Blue+shoutgun.mb file. Which is very not cool. More than that, the reference has been removed AND THE FILE HAS BEEN SAVED OVER.

VERY NOT COOL. This means that we have to re-reference the gun back in, which will make it seem to maya as a new object. So any work we've done with blue in the pre-vis shots with his gun has to be completely redone.

DO NOT work from v00 with anything, and ALWAYS keep a backup of the file before you save over a changed version. In this example, start work from blue_model_v106.mb, then save v107. When you're done making changes, save as v00 and test it. If it doesn't work, we just re-open v106 and save over v00 again...

...and while we're at it, don't work over the top of referenced objects. It just doesn't work.

Rethink reflections...

Forgot to take reflections off! Looks kinda kooky...

Referencing, people, REFERENCING!!

There are SO MANY broken references in these shots! It's ridiculous!! Often they're pretty boring, but shot 17's kinda funny -



- Blue's texture had been assigned to lambert1
- Lambert1 was actually applied to the ground AND the blue rabbit. WHAT?!
- ALL the references were set to the D drive, not the project directory...
...and the camera wasn't locked.
...again.

-_____- "

Orangey goodness

Here's Orange. Just because he's badass. I changed the size of his gun and updated all the textures to his most recent iteration.

Also, his hand was broken. I noticed while pre-vis-ing...

Blue Animation Test

Blue Spew

Blue is born :P

Refer-a-Ninja

Remember Mini Ninjas? I can recall being quite excited about it, maybe some time last year. Then it was forgotten...

...Then I found it for $30. It is so freakin' awesome!! You should definitely play it, but more relevant to this - have a look at the art style. This is very much the rendering style I think we should be aiming for. I'll bring it in to uni some day, so we can play and have a good look at it.

Pump Ya Full of Texture

Blue's finished texture and bump, can be fiddled with later depending on shots etc.

Blast of Orange's Gun Colour

Gun basically finished, rigged, textured and bumped. Some UV's are off but that can be fixed later

Falling short on cash, but not on physics

Well, it works. Whatcha think?

It's on vimeo too.

Cheap expensiveness

Ok, the title doesn't make any sense. But basically I've got the wallet dynamics down and ready to go...ish.

I'd better do that shot myself, just in case something goes wrong.



Whatcha think? Just a dummy texture on the photo until we have something else to go with.

Camo?

This is my hat in the ring regarding Camo on the rabbits. I'm a little iffy either way. Brad was right that it does make it a little busy, but by the same token the plain orange might be... well, too plain.

Ideas?



One idea later, this is what happened. Brad suggested that the bigger camo-style shapes work better, and perhaps take it down 30%. I took it a step further and took it down to 50%... 30% looked too similar.

Music, timing, fur and militant rodents.

So! More music!

This is getting closer to what I was hoping for I think. I've re-arranged everything to sound better and work together sounding similar, but hopefully not the same and too repetitive. It's only midi, so it's not perfect. Still, I'd like to think it's pretty damn close.

I've taken our first previs and stretched it around with AE to match our music timing to our key actions and cuts. It looks pretty nice to me, but I'll wait for your OK's before I go around saying it's perfect. I've added the timecode thing too so we know EXACTLY how long the shots are supposed to be, rather than just taking a good guess like we did last time. We'll still have the extra frames added in for the sake of editing and tweaking, but it'll be a lot cleaner work than last time.

Watch, listen and comment!

Music, timing and furry military rodents.

Bump N Text 01

So as you guys can see the texture I did that bombi slapped on his animation in the earlier post pulls the texture around its neck a bit(im still workin on this).

It may not seem like much but it has alot of work in it. I'm going to go on a rant here...

Ok so first I did the texture and stuff, including an 'army' like pattern on his cloth although when i finished it, it just looked off. Just this morning I deleted the whole pattern and have decided it should be plain orange. Why? Because it draws emphasis off the whole form, there's so much value and shape in his arms then the rest of his body that it just looks ridiculous. This is my opinion but I'm feeling pretty strong about it at the moment.

Also since we are creating 3D, a medium that can look extremely plastic looking at times I first decided to try and give some bump on his fur....which turned out to look like he was made a grass or had just been beaten with a the end of a metal cleaver. So I thought about it and came up with the concept of 'bump noise'. If giving him a bump on his fur looks weird, I would need to imply that his fur is actually smooth and everything else is dirty and gritty. So the concept of 'bump noise' is to break up the shapes of his clothes and helmet (maybe even the environment to some degree) with a very light gritty texture. You can see if on his helmet, and that same texture is applied to everything but his fur.

Also did alot of tweaking with his cloth bump which I think has turned out quite nicely, now all I have to work on is his scratches and bump for helmet and vest. I also changed his eyes to the same green in the concept art cause green goes well with orange(you can see it on a colour wheel).

Thoughts or anything ive missed out on?