Making the X&Y film continues to be a rewarding journey and I’m attempting to share what I’m learning here in the X&Y Journal.
Currently I’m using Blender 3D to producing a 3D animatic in episodes as a preproduction tool for the “X and Y,” film project.
The final film will be produced as a live action feature with Visual Fx.
Browse the journal belowl for preproduction media including concept art, storyboard sketches, animatics, temp track music clips and documentary photos/videos.
Well this one is going to get nerdy, so if you aren’t interested in the technical details of animating with Blender, skip past this post or consider yourself warned.
For reference purposes, I’m using Blender version 2.49. There is a 2.5 Alpha version available, but I’m not needing to be cutting edge here.
So what was Marie’s problem?
Here is what I was trying to do. First you have to know that I’ve been using Shape Keys on Marie’s Mesh for the last, say 1000 frames or so, to animate her face while she scolds poor Douglas (her husband, read the last post to catch up on the soap opera).
In those frames she was standing in one location, all be it she does move her arms around, specifically to slap around Douglas.
Then we get to my hours of frustation this evening. Now on frame 2300 I want to start moving Marie’s Mesh, along with her Armature and clothes of course, lest this become an R rated animatic.
However once I inserted the first key frame for the location of Marie’s Mesh, it seemed to lock her there. That is, I advanced to frame 2325 moved Marie’s object, the armature and clothes object to a new location and then inserted the key frame. All looked good until you advance another frame and then Marie’s mesh (not the clothes or armature) would pop back to the first location I keyed framed. Upon analysis of the IPOs and action window for Marie’s Mesh and several tests it became clear that although I physically changing her location in the 3D window, every key frame I inserted was being coded at the same location as the first.
I poked around for about an hour and then realized in the IPO window a particular setting. Marie’s IPO was set to be linked to an Action. In fact. Marie’s mesh object was linked to the same action as the shapes for her facial expression were linked to. I unlinked Marie’s IPO from the action in the IPO window and Walla, problem solved.
Don’t ask me why, or how at this point, its too late at night, but I suspect her object IPO can’t share an action with the shape keys.
So I’ll look at this again tomorrow in hopes of fixing the scene file, since all this testing was done in a separate file. And, if I come to some more illuminating conclusions I’ll of course post an update.
Domestic violence isn’t a laughing matter in real life, but in the XandY film the relationship between Marie Clarkson a woman of relative small stature and her taller but awkwardly weak husband Douglas brings comic relief to the otherwise serious tone of the film.
Marie slaps Douglas
To animate the slapping motion, I started Douglas moving before the actual sound of the slap to create anticipation in his movement. It took about 1/2 hour to key the basic movements. I then moved onto the next shot which Douglas delivers a short 20 second line. To lipsync the dialog I used the Blender Shape Key function for Douglas’s mesh.
I did this while watching the Golden Globe awards, which I didn’t find entertaining. This awards program doesn’t actually have any entertaining like singing or dancing in between the industry patting itself on the back.
Anyway, back to the couple of shots I worked on this evening for the XandY Film. I don’t have any interesting challenges to report. The whole exercise was rather routine actually, so I’ll sign off with that and try to think of ways to make the dry busy work of translating my vision to the animatic more interesting.
Instead of celebrating everytime a scene is completed as a previs animatic, I’ve buckled down to focus on developing at least 10-15 minutes of content at a time to share.
X and Y, Previs Episode 1 from XandY Film on Vimeo.
A couple of interesting points about video editing with blender came to my attention in putting this together.
1. It doesn’t appear you can import raw video editing data from one blend file to the next. So I had to render out seperate mpegs and then combine the rendered video in a master blend file.
2. A video with audio will come into the blender editor as two seperate data pieces. So you can render video and sound seperately and then combine to make better transitions. I didn’t do this in the interest of time. Instead you’ll notice I just left a quick black break between each scene.
That’s all for now. I’ll plan on posting when the next previs episode is ready which is probably a couple a months away.
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.
We have taken a fairly crude approach to developing the elements of our scenes. We model everything. Eric, who seeks a future in game graphics is paving the way for mixing in some image texturing as a less resource intensive way of giving the visual feel of an object without actually modeling it.
For example we modeled three planes and positioned them at various depths to create a Mediavision. Instead of modeling a view screen and drapery around the screen as designed by Christy Sotta, we simply used your original drawings as a texture to fake the modeling for the scene.
Eric is also looking at the UV mapping function in Blender which allows us to unwrap a 3D model into 2D space so we can then draw or paste an image onto it. Its specifically useful for creating some of our puppets where we only plan on one wardrobe and don’t need variation in facial expressions.
At some point soon we will be able show everyone a modeled character versus a “half” modeled character with UV mapping to see the difference.
