Our first YouTube post
We made our first YouTube posting and embedded the video on our public site this week. We will be using YouTube to post video clips from the animatic as we make progress.
The video was of the draft 3D animatic for Scene 9, which is the main scene in the film that gives the audience a peak at the Universe and backstory Dominic’s soap opera is set in. Doing the animatic for this scene involved a wide variety of skills that we will use and perfect this year on the creation of the animatic.
The process started with basic modeling of the sets and props. Next we created the layout of the sets from the angles we expected to shoot, using the storyboards. Then the models were given what blender calls materials but is referred to more widely in the 3D community as texturing. All the materials in this scene were basic and procedural, which means we didn’t map 2D photos on the models to create more detailed textures. Next shots were created by blocking the elements and characters and animating either stuff or the camera as necessary. The scene was broken into 14 shots most of which were animations, a few were jpeg stills. Using the procedure we learned from the Blender Foundation Open Movie Projects, we created a separate Blender file for each shot.
Therefore each shot was rendered as a separate Raw AVI and/or Jpeg. The shots were combined with superimposed text, music and dialog in Blender’s Sequence Editor to test timing a create a draft animatic for the full scene. For this scene we experimented with Halo effects, creating smoke and partical hair.
We hope to post some of the action sequences of 2D animatic previously completed to YouTube in the near future as well.
