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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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!

Explosive erection!

WAAAAAH!!

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.

Blue Animation Test

Blue Spew

Blue is born :P

Pump Ya Full of Texture

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

Shot 10 - Gross Close up

Rough speed paint so we get a bit more meat into the next previz. The current aspect ratio is 2048x1152. Twice the size of our film's. This shall test if I need to go up any further. Next is sky which will be 4096x2304 so we enough playing room with it when we shove it in.

Blue blends in :)