Category Archives: Projects

The End

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Production is finally coming to a close. We had the first fully rendered and composited movie finished this morning and now Fusion is just rendering out the last corrections we need before we call it done.

The final result isn’t all that I had hoped, but it never is so that is ok. If everything in the story had made sense would have been good, for instance.
On the other hand there are some scenes in there that I am genuinely pleased with and given the rarity of that occurrence, I have to say that it could have been a lot worse.

Going Mental

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Hello. Long time no see and all that fluff.

I have been working on bachelor for a long time now, so time has not been in ample supply.
Apparently, to get the best result with your zdepth layer and depth of fielld, you need to render your images in double the final size and the zdepth layer must not be anti-aliased. I haven’t seen a convincing example of why not yet, but it makes sort of sense so I am willing to play along.
Problem is, we use a custom mentalray shader for DOF and mentalray has not been very happy to refrain from anti-aliasing the zdepth layer. Even setting min and max samples to 0 didn’t do the trick for us.

In the end we found that you also needed to set the filter type to traingle. A width and height of 2 is fine, but you need the triangle filter.

You hear that google? No anti-aliasing in mentalray by using triangle filter with 0/0 samples!

Now to solve that render layer crap.

Production Diary – Things To Remember

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No chronological logic here. Just stuff.

Fusion seems like a nice program so far. The depth blur still leaves something to be desired though. It makes weird ghosting around hard edges. It seems like we will be able to get a better plugin for it however, so it will probably be fine.

We began animation a couple of weeks ago. It was a bit hard to get back into it and it took a while to get control over my curves again. Or at least, as much control back as I used to have. Also I tend to forget the entire workflow of blocking, posing, breakdowns, refinement and overlap.
I was never to fond of having poses on stepped keys and then going to smooth/flat tangents so I am trying to work with having them on flat from the beginning. I see the problems inherent in having the computer giving you an estimate movement, because it is so easy to just use that and call it a day, when your animation could have been so much better if you used more time on making a real break down. But on the other hand, I always felt that going from stepped to spline was to timeconsuming and to much curve manipulation was needed. I am willing to admit that this is probably due to my keys not being good enough to begin with and that I just need to think more about the final animation while working, but this new way seems to be working for me so I’ll stick with it for the time being.

Production Diary – The Dark Ages

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As I predicted the servers were still down, but at least now there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it seems that we will get back all of our stuff. This is of course a good thing. We will, however, not have them until sometime next week. This is a not quite as good thing.

I spend all of last week modeling background props and structures and hae continued this into this week. Not having the control machines near the girls workspace have meant that I’ve had to focus on more pereferial things. Unfortunately we didn’t have any real designs on these thing so I had to just build whatever I could come up with. This in itself is not a bad thing as such, but when designs of the big steam machines were done, they didn’t exactely match. On the bright side it gives some nice contrast if we can pull it off. On the other side, if we can’t pull it off it’s just going to look pants.
I think we will be fine.

Production Diary – The Lost Chapters

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week 2:

This week was used to build blend shapes for the face. Because we didn’t have enough time and assistance to build a fully joint driven face rig we settled for blend shapes. I used the simple technique of just copying the base mesh and then manually translate and rotate every vertex into position. I would have used soft mods, but the damn thing wouldn’t work for me.

We designed the shapes in blocks (eyebrow up/down, mouth corner in/out, that sort of thing) rather than full expressions. Hopefully this will give us a lot more freedom to make expressions when we animate.

By mid-week it looked like I was making good progress, but in the end I had to use the entire week to do the shapes.
The primary reson for this was that I had to make sure that the different block played together nicely. When you move the inner eyebrow down it should look good on it’s own, but also looks nice when you do it together with the middle eyebrow. This took some trial and error but I think I came up with a good solution that also gives nice freedom.

week 3:

mostly spend doing the final face rig. Sune Kempf came in again and walked us through the setup process that he recommended that we use. It is a face setup where the main face rig is hidden and remains in place while a secondary set of controllers then travel with the face (or camera or whatever you prefer). All facial deformations are then transferred from the face-rig mesh to the primary mesh via a blend shape.
The advantage is that you don’t really have to worry about cluster deformers doing double translations or weird rotations and stuff like that, because the face rig isn’t actually moving.

Another good thing is this way two people can work on the rig at the same time (one face, one body) and just put it together in the end. It would be even more awesome if I wasn’t doing the entire rig on my own.

week 4 and 5:

I started to build the set. It’s done with standard poly tools. Nothing fancy so far. So far I have done most of the two main control clusters and a large secondary… thingy.

We still haven’t done any texturing (>_<) because I am still not clear on how exactly we are supposed to do it. I still hold for a Kingdom Hearts 2 style shading, but I think I am the only one who are actually considering it.

Another problem we have been solving is translating geometry to mentalray. With the amount of polys we seem to end up with, the standard approach of just smoothing and then rendering is much to slow. In stead we have been looking into the approximation editor which seems to be a good solution. It does mean that we have to revisit some geometry to make sure everything is tris and quads, as the AE doesn’t seem to like 5-edged polys.

week 6:

Meltdown…

A power failure in the power supply of our servers completely shut down all access to our drives with all our materials on them. Monday they said that they would have it up and running later that day or at worst: Tuesday. Tuesday they said that would be up later that day. Wednesday they said that would probably be a while yet. Thursday they got out internal mail up and running but still no drives.

So we have been working very sporadically using as much energy on figuring out what we can actually do, as we use on doing it.

So I have been modeling different small stuff. Random structures, stairs and the likes.

week 7

Holiday! And meltdown continues unless out tech department pulls a miracle out of their sleeves and the chances of that happening are currently so small that… they are… ehh… very small.

Template Hell

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I had the problem with The Setup Machine and now I have it again with Movable Type that I use to power this site. Using fully ready-made solutions to problems can be a great way to start out or solve a problem you have no way of solving on your own, but they can be a real hassle if you want to change anything to something more what you had in mind.
Like, where the hell do you change the width of this page?! I did it once but now I can’t figure out how I did it…

Production Diary – Entry 1

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So because I have nothing better to psot here, I am going to put up a prodution diary for my bachelor project.

I did the model. No real issues there except the design got changed a bit while I was modeling it, which can get a bit annoying but no big problem. The mesh in the face didn’t turn out as nice as I had hoped but there simply wasn’t time to change more and I think it will be fine.

We are rigging with a combination of The Setup Machine 2 and custom rigs. I would have liked to build it all from the bottom up to get more experience with that, but given that our character is so “simple” and TSM has so many nice features it makes it hard to justify using a sub standard rig just to satisfy my own desires. When all is said and done we have to actually animate it also.
I did add a heel roll feature and changed the pivot of the foot to the ankle, because I hate it when rotating the foot in IK moves the entire leg. I just hope the rig doesn’t blow up halfway through the production.

During the holidays I hope to get around to adding texture coordinates (*shudder*) and finish skinning the model. Maybe I will get to look at some texture work as well, but I think not. Zelda is calling to me!

Analyze My A’s!

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So people, Google Analytics has been set up on my site to track everything that you do!
I’m going to be so depressed in a week when i find out that no one is visiting… :(

Also, music sounds quite bad when played through the speakers on my laptop. A lesson to be learned? Yes: don’t buy an Amilo M1425 if you plan to keep your neighbours awake at night by playing loud music.
Especially not if that Neighbour is me and you want to stay alive.