Check out the new short from the Blender Foundation.

http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/

A couple of weeks ago Jill was working on the first scene located in the Brothus Nightclub. We had a few characters in the scene with partical hair that went crazy when we upgraded to the latest version of Blender. Version 2.46 just came out as a post “Big Buck Bunny,” version of Blender and it has some great advanced features that we are struggling to keep up with and incorporate into the project as appropriate. A complete re-write of the partical system with hair specific features was one of the upgrades, so our character files didn’t know what to do and when we opened them. The entire characters had become giant fuzz balls!

So we promptly made our characters bald to continue with blocking/animating the scene until we have time to get up to speed with the new hair features in Blender.

Jill also had been aching to explore an idea she has been developing for a while for an “signature” opening sequence for Imaginarium Foundation, similar to the “Boy fishing off the moon,” seen in SKG films. So setting the fuzz balls aside, Jill proceeded to sketch out a storyboard for the entire sequence so we could discuss the shots we projected would be needed to realize her vision. The next step Jill completed was creating models for the basic elements in the first few shots. Now she is entrenched in the process of setting up the animation for the first couple of shots. We’ll give you a preview of the sequence once we have shots nailed down.

When Tony was learning to sketch storyboards, he had a particular drawing style for Tigras’s hair that we fondly referred to as the “Helmet.”

So when Wally began creating the 3D puppet model for Tigras last week and asked, “How do I create his hair?” The answer seemed obvious. Make a helmet!

In the spirit of Tony’s stylized character portrayal, Wally modeled blond helmet hair, using a helmet shaped mesh with an image texture of blond hair strands.

As a comparison, here is sample of what we have done when we wanted to get a little more serious about hair.

These are just for fun of course. Since we plan on shooting live action and are only modeling basic characters as place holders, it doesn’t really matter whether we use Helmet Hair or more complex partical system hair strands, for the purposes of our 3D previs animatic.

  Dining table by Tony B.
VG is the acronym the characters in our story use for a popular drug called the Venus Gas.

Tony has been modeling set elements for Michael’s VG lair. Its a large set with various unique props and set dressing. Tony started with created Michael’s rocket propelled hovering Mediavision unit. Last week we created the dining table and chairs. Coming soon is Michael’s VG Tub!

“Coffee pot” racks by Wally and Tony

Most of team is currently modeling the set components for the Special Pregnancy Center where Nolan is created in an incubator we refer to as the “Coffee pot.”  Wally, Tony, Charlie and now Eric each worked on different parts to the set this last week.  Wally was using Blender curve modeling function to create a rack for incubators.  We discovered that the OpenGL graphics used for the realtime editing views will simply quit showing everything if it runs out of system resources.

Half of Wally’s model simply disappeared which sent us into a panic of not understanding why we couldn’t see the whole model, but soon realized that it was there after doing a render which showed the entire object.  A couple of things we took away from this excercise was that curve modeling seems to take more resources then mesh modeling, and that Blender won’t throw up any kind of warning when it’s not getting enough resources.

Tony created a health monitor station and our newest member Eric tackled a digipad.  Stay tuned for an very unique design for a lab microscope by Charlie.

Lab chair by Charlie Yates

Once the models for Brothus’s nightclub were completed the team moved onto modeling the exterior and interior set for a lab.  Our starting point for the models are the production designs done by Ted Gocek, Dave Jenkins and myself.  A new artist on the team Charlie had prior modeling experience and got to work on set pieces.  He soon was asking how to lathe in Blender and the rest of us scratched our heads.  We hadn’t thought of lathing as a modeling technique before although in reading, it’s a fairly common practice.  So Charlie inspired a quest to figure out how to lathe or do something equivalent in Blender.

Up until that point we had been strictly using mesh objects as a modeling primatives, but Charlie’s request demanding figuring out Blender’s curve system.  So we did it!  It turns out that you can create curves and then bevel those curves with another curved shape of your choice. 

The new technique spread through our modest studio like wild fire. Jill was using curves to model a lab bed, Wally was curving and beveling his Embryo chamber rack, oh and Charlie?  Well he lathed himself a 70’s style lab chair.

Of course lathing is only one technique in building 3D models.  Wally also completed the exterior model and Tony made some view screens for the lab.  Like Brothus’s club, we will eventually finish the models and someone will take on the task of assigning materials to apply the color scheme.

Stay tuned for more progress on the Pregnancy Center.

Nightclub Bar

No we didn’t visit Brothus’s nightclub on the planet Camimbright in the Six Superior Systems.  Instead we made the night club!  In our last update I reported that we were nearly finished with the component models of Brothus’s pride and joy.  Well, we actually did complete the models and then moved onto applying color schemes. 

The modeling was joint effort by Jill, Jason, Wally, Tony and myslef.  Once we completed models the rest of the team moved onto the Pregnancy Center which you can read about below.  I created the layout of the set interior, building the basic room and placing the models using the production design illustrations previously done by Tony, Jill and Christy. 

The next step was to apply colors.  I created a coloring book using selected storyboard panels, which I color in the black and white illustraitons with color pencils.  The purpose is to use color methodically as an additional storytelling mechanism as well as a subtle reinforcement of themes and characters for continuity.  Jill took on the task of applying materials, also known as Texturing to the models. 

Using the coloring book as a basis for the mood and tone I’m looking for, Jill carefully choose her color palatte.  Applying materials (to color the models) is not a trivial task.  The material settings are complex allowing you to set the main, diffuse and mirror colors as well as a variety of shading and lighting options.  In addition a number of effects are available to give a more natural look rather then the shiny plastic look that would appear by default if simply assigning a color to a model.  One of the tricks utilized was downloading Blender material libraries as a starting point. 

What’s next for Brothus’s night club?  Well we need to get some Puppets (what I call 3D models of character’s standing in for what will be live action actors) and block out the action of the first scene which uses this set.  Jill is currently helping me with the process of modeling the character puppets.  Then we will rig them for animation and set then up in the scene.  Each shot of the scene will be saved to a seperate blender file and then rendered into seperate animations.  For this scene I anticipate 10-20 different shots based on the 2D animatic for that scene. 

Stay tuned for more progress on Brothus’s club.

Part of composited animation for previs 3D animatic.

I’ve been personally working ahead of the rest of the team on critical scene which explains the backstory to the X and Y Universe.  The scene calls for shots in space and of planets as well as grand establishing shots of an ancient city and crowds of people.  Several elements of creating the shots for this scene have been more challenging then I expected.  The amount of models in the shots of the ancient city with the crowd have made it impossible to work on the shot comprehensively because of memory and CPU limitations. 

So the first trick was to layout the models in layers.  That allowed me to work with subsets of the shot, one layer at a time and therefore not get hit with the slows that occur or the crashes that come with using too many system resources. 

The crowd was particularly challenging because I wasn’t sure about the best approach.  Blender would allow you to duplicate character models of course, but there is also this interesting feature that allows you to create multiple “instances” of the same model. Essentially you have only one model and then you create points at which you want Blender to render duplicates of the model.  Ultimately that approach seemed to take more system resources then actually duplicating the models.  I.e. I was getting unusual and incorrect rendering results using the multiple instancing, blender refers to as “Dupliverts.”

I finally got all the models layed out in various layers. Now how to do the rendering?  It occured to me immediately that if I couldn’t even handle laying out the models on one layer I wasn’t going to be able to render a 1400 frame animation all at once.  In fact most studios would have this problem at some level.  Maybe with more equipment a pro’s threshhold for screaming at the whirling fan of the computer would be higher, but ultimately every production has to deal this problem at some point.  Yes there are render farms, but the problem isn’t that big yet, we are just doing low poly 3D animatic here.

The solution is compositing.  You have to render different elements of the shot seperately and then composite the frames together.  Blender has a node compositing system for this purpose which I’ve been learning.  The compositing system is linkable to the rendering system so that you can render the different layers into seperate buffers and then composite them (along with any other processing like color correction) into the single frame of the shot.  Of course this doesn’t exactly help my resource management problem because storing and manipulating various render layer buffers isn’t cheap either, as far as I can tell.

So I ditched the render layers and rendered to the harddrive layers as scene elements against a green background.  Yes! my own greenscreen within the computer.  Then using the same process, from the Blender side of things, you would use to handle live action green screen fotage, I composited the elements of the scene back together. 

I tried it out for a single shot and a small 10 frame animation and it works!  So now I’m in the process of rendering out about 40 different 1400 frame animations to be composited together.  You can see some renders of the work in process

Stay tuned to find out what happens next in the Compositing Adventure.

Modeled by Jill M, Tony B and Tyee

Producer Confession

I wanted to lay out a confession that I have fallen grossly behind in most the administrative aspects of the film since the beginning of the new year.  The public website as well as the Story Reel Development site are in need of update and many of our members are still waiting for a copy of the Story Reel Version 0.2 draft on DVD.  My excuse is two fold.  First I’m in my busy season at the day job.  Second, we are making good progress on the next version of the Story Reel, but I have been putting time into that at the expense of routine business. 

3D Modeling Adventures

Five of us are meeting once a week to collaborate on 3D modeling and animation being used for the next version of the animatics.  The usual suspects, Wally, Jill, Jason, Tony and myself.  We are takling the 3D animatic process one scene at a time and have chosen Scene 2A to start with.  The scene is a flashback to Dominic shaking down Brothus in his nightclub.  The storyboards depicting the action were done by a talented artist, Dave J, over a year ago.  The production design for the sets were developed by Jill M, Christy S. and myself.  Concepts for the warddrobe were developed by Jill and the color scheme came from Tony B. 

The storyboards as they are block out some key concept frames but the detail blocking and camera angles for all the shots in the scene are missing and will need to be re-worked.  I’m contemplating trying this on the fly once we have the 3D assets complete rather then going back and sketching in more 2D boards, but we will see how it goes.  Armed with the other assets, production designs, wardrobe concepts and color schemes we have been modeling the set, set dressing and related props.

We are near completion with having basic low polygon models for the set pieces and will next focus on getting 3D puppets with wardrobe that is a likeness or has the look of our official wardrobe designs.  We aren’t going to spend time on making our puppets look exactly like we expect in the final film, because they will be replaced with live action actors anyway.

After that we will apply basic, fast rendering materials/textures to the models that utilize the color scheme for the scene.  Then we will Layout all the models and block the shots.  Each shot will be animated seperately.  Each shot will also be seperately lit, the camera angles set and then rendered.  Finally the shots are edited together to create the scene.

Plutonians Fleeing Averon Prime

 Too Far Gone_New.mp3 Music and Lyrics by Christine Long.  Arrangement by John Centrone.

Well, we actually got a draft of the Story Reel completed and distributed internally to our cast and crew.  We are working on producing shorts from the Story Reel that can be shown on this website and YouTube publicly.