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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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.

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.

Rethink reflections...

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

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...

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.

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.