At long last, the project is almost over. Less than two days away as of this writing. After delivering the final film a couple of weeks ago, I’ve spent my time relaxing, creating a short “making of” with the rest of Green Spill, writing stuff on this blog and a self assessment document. The self assessment document isn’t quite finished yet. I’ve written most of it in short form which I suspect only I would understand, so I have a feeling I should go back and do a rewrite or three. Also yet to be done is to update the DVD cover and label. We need one version for the “making of” we’re handing in on wednesday, and another version for the team: The version destined to collect dust on a shelf somewhere, but which will be taken out and looked at every few years. The very special Green Spill team member version. With any luck, I’ll be on that right after finishing this post, and the only thing I’ll have to worry about tomorrow is straightening out the self assessment document to something resembling the language of english.
This being the last post I write about the Student Film Project at Noroff, 2009 (at least I think it is), I guess the time has come for looking back and reflecting upon the last five months of work. Continue reading ‘Aftermath’
Having finished rendering and vfx shots, and with a little more than a week to deadline, compositing was next on the list. Beforehand, I had estimated compositing would take a day or two. I had already test comped nearly one third of the shots and thought I could use those as templates for the rest. The only thing I hadn’t done before in any shot was thinking about the suns position and the movement of the clouds. Continue reading ‘Speed compositing: 64 shots in 4 days’
With less than three weeks left of the project, animation was finished to a point where I could start adding fire and smoke to finished shots. Having used FumeFX in the past, it became the natural choice now.
I anticipated this to be a fairly simple task, but didn’t have to work long before it became clear that I had greatly overestimated the ability of 3ds max plugins to work properly together. Having successfully used FumeFX with V-Ray before, it never occurred to me that one tiny change would throw the whole thing off balance. It did though. Continue reading ‘Burning the candle at both ends’
Well, technically it’s been finished for a week now, I’ve just been too fed up to blog about it until now. The past month has been incredibly busy and seeing as my field, post production, comes last (who would have thought?), I haven’t been sleeping that much lately. Lack of sleep coupled with missed deadlines and frustration levels through the roof generally meant that keeping the blog updated became one thing too many. Taking an hour or two out of the on average five hours of sleep I got every night to blog didn’t feel particularly inviting. And if I had taken the time to do it anyway, it would probably have made for rather unpleasant reading.
So I’m picking up the thread a week later, now having had a few nights normal sleep and some time to relax and think about things other than the film. I’ll be back with a few posts about the past month and reflections on the finished film in the next few days.
Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, right? Or so a guy called Murphy felt and it’s become uncomfortably true lately.
During rendering of the final movie we’ve had to re-render scenes due to lighting problems, texturing problems, last minute texture changes, render errors and plugin incompatibilities. In addition we still have issues with FumeFX and VRayPhysicalCamera which won’t get along. We might have to do the Fume stuff in Scanline and then composite it on top of the V-Ray render, but that again poses another problem as Scanline doesn’t play well with VRayPhysicalCamera either. Abandoning the VRayPhysicalCamera would of course fix the problem, but that would mean relighting the scene and render everything again which we really don’t have time for.
All in all it’s a bit frustrating at the moment with the deadline looming and problems turning up left, right and center, but that’s production for us I guess. After all, our pipe line isn’t really that tried and tested since we haven’t done many films yet and decided to try some new stuff in this one as well.
The good thing to take away from all this is of course increased knowledge of how to fix a fair few things and stuff not to do in the future. I’ll try and hang onto that when working until sunrise to get things fixed on time the coming weeks
So we’re finally at the animation stage. Or have been for the past few days. To get the most out of the remaining time, Andreas, Aleksander and Jamie are chipping away on the shots while I render them out and take them through compositing.
As I’m the last person to touch the footage before editing, I’ve spent the past few days trying out different “looks” for the final film, screened them for the rest of the team and adjusted things based on the feedback. We finally decided on the look in the video above. I then created a Nuke template that I can use to quickly apply the same look to the rest of the shots. Continue reading ‘Animation!’
Compositing in After Effects is in many ways very similar to working in Photoshop. If you are familiar with layers, masks, blending modes and/or filters, compositing in After Effects should be a breeze.
In this tutorial I’ll take you through the process of quickly creating a textured city in 3d studio max 2009 and how you, through a few extra render passes, can go from a quite crappy render to something half-way decent using After Effects CS3. If all goes well, we’ll end up with a finished shot not too far from the left side of clip above. In part 1 I’ll cover the creation of the city in max and in part 2 we’ll jump over to After Effects for the compositing.
I know, I promised to post this more than a week ago, but it’s the holidays and found a few things I wanted to test before I started rendering the final shots. What happened was that I watched a most illuminating video lesson concerning motion blur and depth of field passes for Nuke made by the good guys over at fxphd and realized two things: I used a slightly wrong depth format when applying depth of field and there is an easy way to apply motion blur in post, given that you output an extra render pass. The video in question was concerned with Maya and Mental Ray however where as we’re using 3ds max and V-Ray. It therefore took me a few extra hours of research before everything was working correctly.
In addition, there weren’t time to research ways to set up a render queue before making the previz, which meant I had to start every render manually when the previous render finished. With no wish of repeating that experience for the final film, I did some quick tests and got a rendering queue set up using Backburner.
With that out of the way, I rendered out the rest of the new shots and put them into our most recent cut. As we’re mostly concerned with timing and shots at this point, we decided to manage without sound for the time being.
Oh, and I’ll quickly mention that I did some work on a little 3D + After Effects lesson I’m having in a week or two. I’ll try teaching the rest of the class how to create the little sequence above and might put the tutorial up on this site when finished.
As we’re refining the previz, the storyboard needs to reflect the changes and so we’ve come to draft 2. Jamie and Andreas drew the new frames and rearranged things based on class feedback yesterday and Aleksander and me digitized it today. The digital version can be downloaded below.
As mentioned above, the previz is also being worked on and we’re close to finish draft 2. Most of the new shots are already created and rendered and we’ll probably finish the remaining shots tomorrow. The new finished shots are already in the cut and so we should probably have the draft 2 previz ready for your viewing pleasure tomorrow or friday. I’ll put it up here as soon as it is ready.
Meanwhile the easter holidays are coming up in a couple of days and we’ve decided to take a break from the project during that time. People are feeling a little worn out at the moment and I believe a break will do both the film and the team members some good. Personally, I might tinker a little with the environment, making sure it is ready for animation after the holidays. That shouldn’t take long though. At least not in theory.
