This doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on the AVE ICA, merely that I’ve been busy to the point of not finding time to keep the blog as up to date as I probably should have.

Starting with the week leading up to the Easter holidays, Andreas Nor was kind enough to help me record foley sounds in the Phoenix building. The week after, home in Norway for a couple of weeks, I began building the 3D scene. At this stage I had ruled out Vue as it caused too many new problems that needed solving. Instead, I opted for 3ds max, using Mental Ray as the render engine.

During the easter holidays I created the first version of my 3D tree and tracked all five shots in PFTrack.

As I had only used PFTrack once before several months ago, I had to relearn a fair few things, but the tracks went well and I feel they ended up being pretty solid. Having created the tree and the tracks, I actually began rendering a few shots and performed some test comps.

I wasn’t exactly satisfied, but before I had time to make any changes, Easter was over and I returned to the uni merely five days before the final year project was to be handed in. This forced me to stop working on the AVE project for a while and as I later got an extension on the final year project, two weeks went by without any updates to the AVE ICA.

After delivering the final year project on 26 April I once again returned to the AVE project. During the for lack of a better word “break”, I had decided that the scene I made originally was too heavy, too boring, badly lit and lacking in detail. Starting up again, I therefore chucked nearly everything in the scene. The branches, the lighting and half the textures were some of the things I got rid of.  From there, I started with a tree from seek.autodesk.com, rotated it on its side, added moss and plants and tried to make it look more detail-rich.

Having now created one branch, I converted it to a Mental Ray render proxy and made ten instances in 3ds max. From there I started populating the big tree. Using instanced render proxies greatly sped up the viewport and reduced memory use, though it had the obvious drawback of looking repetitive. In hindsight, I probably should have made a few variations, but time didn’t allow.

As soon as I was reasonably happy with the finished tree, rendering begun. The shots were quite heavy to render due to light spilling through a lot of leaves. With rendering settings dialled lower that what I wished for, only a few days left until the deadline on 7 April and still without finished renders, I had to ask for an extension in AVE as well. By the time the renders actually finished, the deadlines in Studio Practice & Business were closing in fast and once again I had to take an unwanted break from AVE.

In the end, the last Studio Practice & Business deadline was late on a Tuesday and the AVE deadline was set for the following Friday. This effectively meant that I had less than three days to key and composite five shots, solve any unforeseen problems, cut the project together, write a report  and hand in the assignment before 4pm on Friday. I delivered 3:50pm.

Having finished I think the project turned out quite well. Sure, the pulled keys are imperfect in places, the leaves aren’t moving due to Mental Ray render proxy issues and the render and contact shadows/lighting could have been improved in places, but overall it could definitely have been worse. I also gained quite a few skills during the project, such as more advanced use of PFTrack, better understanding of roto and comp, and I used the 3D tools in Nuke for the first time.

Next and probably last post regarding the AVE ICA will contain the finished piece.

Christmas is long gone and I’m back in Middlesbrough after a refreshing break. The first thing I had to focus on when I got back was to create a presentation for Advanced Visual Effects where we were to present a storyboard, previs, schedule and a couple of other things regarding the ICA. As I still didn’t have a previs because of work on my Practical Project, this became my main priority.

This is the first project I’m doing which combines CG and live action, green screen removal and 3D tracking. Because of this, I decided to make life a little more difficult for myself than was strictly required by doing all aspects of the work I’m supposed to do in the final shots right in the previs. I did this in the hope that I would gain experience which might help me when doing the real effects shots later.

Basically, I tracked all five shots in PFTrack, modelled and rendered a fairly simple scene in 3D Studio Max, quickly keyed the footage and composited it together using Nuke. As this is just a previs there is still a ton of errors and problems with almost everything. I have continuity errors, issues of scale, existence of contact lighting and shadows in odd places, lack of contact lighting and shadows in others, horrible keying/roto, no colour and grain consistency between shots and so on and so forth. There are also two different actors as I was shooting on two separate days and didn’t have the same people available.

The process of creating the previs took about three days and in hindsight I’m very glad I did it. As a result I will at least do these things differently when creating the final piece:

• Shooting in 1080p instead of 720p to get a better resolution for keying
• Make very sure all forms of sharpening in the camera are turned off
• Shoot a lens distortion grid for every shot to make sure I can accurately get rid of lens distortion (I actually went back and shot grids for the previs, but as the distortion changed quite dramatically with focus and I only had notes for focal length it didn’t help much)
• Be more relaxed about the subject being partly outside the green screen here and there or a cable/tripod being behind the subject as those things can be easily rotoscoped, but making all the more sure the green screen is evenly lit and that shadows are reduced to a minimum
• Adding less contact lighting on set and more in post as the light I got on set was generally too harsh
• Create and import a simple proxy scene of the CG environment to the matchmoving application to avoid scaling issues
• Make sure of continuity between shots – both in the studio and in the CG environment
• Read up on colour grading

Finally, after the previs was finished and the presentation was done, I opened Photoshop and have played around with ways of making the finished shots more interesting. Underneath is one version where I’ve added more glowing things and a slight spotlight on the apple, but I might dial things back a bit if this turns out to be too much.

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.

Go to Part 1

5. Importing footage

Open After Effects. Press Ctrl+I for Windows or Cmd+I on the Mac to import the render passes. Navigate to correct folder and select all files by pressing Ctrl+A/Cmd+A. Make sure to check the box called Multiple Sequences. Then press Open.

After Effects is now going to ask you whether the Targa files are premultiplied or not. As we checked the premultiplied box when outputting files from max, they are indeed. We didn’t set any background color in 3ds max and so it should be black which is the default. As a result, we’ll choose Premultiplied – Matted With Color and make sure that color is set to back which is the default in After Effects.

As you are importing four image sequences, you’ll be asked the same question four times. Answer Premultiplied – Matted With Color every time.

6. Layers and blending modes

Now that the footage has been added, you need to drag it down to the time line. Start with your main pass, in my case city{0000-0100} and scrub to a place in the time line where you are able to see both the city and the sky.

To add a bit more light and a hint of global illumination, we’ll add the occlusion pass next. This pass goes above the main pass.

To see the main pass through the occlusion pass, we need to change the blending mode for the occlusion pass from Normal to Soft Light.

You might need to press the middle button in the lower left corner to get to the blending mode options.

To make the scene less gray and boring-looking, we’ll give the scene a yellow tint as if sunlight was illuminating the city. Right-click below the two render passes you added, choose New and then Solid.

Then, under Solid Settings, give the solid a light, yellow color.

Change the blending mode for the solid to Multiply.

As you can see, this gives us a slight problem as the sky just turned yellow too. This is because unlike the rendered passes, the solid does not come with a built-in alpha. To add one and get rid of the yellowness, first drag the matte render pass into the time line. Drag it to the bottom of the stack.

This seemingly cleared up the matter at once as the sky instantly went back to black. However, this only happened because the underlying matte is black in the area representing the sky and that anything (including light yellow) multiplied by black becomes black. To make the sky area of the solid truly transparent, you need to right-click the solid, choose Effect, Channel and then Set Matte.

In the Take Matte From Layer drop down, select the matte which will be the fourth option. As the matte doesn’t come with an alpha channel, you have to change the Use For Matte option from Alpha Channel to either Red Channel, Green Channel or Blue Channel. As the matte is grayscale, the red, green and blue channel contains the exact same data and it doesn’t matter which one you choose.

The solid is now transparent. As we’ll be needing to apply the matte to other layers later, select the matte in the Effect Controls window and press Ctrl+C/Cmd+C to copy it. Next up is the z depth pass. This can be used for two purposes, but here we’ll use it to decrease contrast further back to put some “air” between the foreground and the background. Drag the z depth pass to the top of the time line.

As we wish to decrease the contrast more the further away you get, we want the lightest areas in the background. To achieve this, we’ll invert the layer by right-clicking it, choosing Effect, Channel and Invert.

Then set the blending mode to Add.

We have now successfully put some “air” between the foreground and the background, but in reality, this “air” isn’t white on a sunny day, but the color of the sky. We’ll apply a color correction to the z depth pass by right-clicking it again and choosing Effect, Color Correction and Hue/Saturation.

Check the box called Colorize and then turn the Colorize Hue knob to somewhere round -160.

Also, the sky has turned white, due to the fact that the z depth pass does not contain an alpha channel. With the z depth pass selected in the time line, highlight the Effect Controls panel above and press Ctrl+V/Cmd+V to paste in the matte from earlier. The Take Matte From Layer drop down resets for some reason, so we have to select our matte layer again.

7. Sky replacement

Now that we have a basic composite for the buildings, we’ll proceed with replacing the sky. First step is to find a suitable image. Personally, I went over to CG Textures and downloaded one of their Skies 360 images. Import the image by pressing Ctrl+I/Cmd+I and pointing to it on your hard drive.

Next, drag the new sky layer into the composite, directly underneath your main layer.

Right away, the sky looks too large and rather boring so we’ll try making it a bit more interesting. First, reduce its size by expanding the layer (press the little triangle) and scale it down to around 40% under Transform.

In the viewer, drag the sky layer upwards to match the horizon in the cityscape.

Select the sky layer and press Ctrl+D/Cmd+D to duplicate it. Rename the layer to something like Sky Flipped. To do this you select the layer on the time line and hit Return on the keyboard to rename it. As you might have figured out by now, we’ll be flipping this layer. We’re doing this to conceal the fact that we’re using the same sky map twice. Expand the layer again, uncheck the little link symbol next to Scale and set the first value to -40% instead of 40%. Then check the link symbol again and in the viewer move the sky so the cloud formations doesn’t overlap with the same ones in the layer underneath.

Now for the fun part: Still using the Sky Flipped layer, play around with different blending modes until you get a dramatic effect. I ended up with Linear Light. Don’t think about matching the color to the rest of the image yet, we’ll look at that next. You now have two sky layers you can animate at different speeds, making it look like some clouds are moving faster than others across the screen. Don’t animate anything just yet though.

To make the sky and the 3d clash less, we’ll create what’s called an Adjustment Layer. An Adjustment Layer doesn’t contain graphics, but will let you apply effects to it that also applies to all layers below it. To create one, right-click any empty space in the time line and choose New and Adjustment Layer.

In this case, we only want the Adjustment Layer to affect the sky, so we will drag it to right above our two sky layers. If you like, you can rename the layer to something like Sky Adjustments. Now that we have the Sky Adjustments layer in place, right-click it, choose Effect, Color Correction and Hue/Saturation.

Now, dial Master Hue back to round -10 and Master Saturation to about -50 and the sky and city should begin to match each other.

8. Tracking

The sky replacement is now almost finished, but one major thing is missing. While the rendered footage is constantly moving, the sky maps are stationary, making the composite painfully obvious as soon as you hit the play button. In other words, we’ll have to animate the sky, making it look like it follows the city horizon. Doing this by hand can be very time consuming and painful, though luckily there is a better way called tracking. When tracking a shot, you’re basically making After Effects watch a few selected areas of the image, frame by frame, and recording their movements. You can then apply the same movement to other objects in the scene. Areas used for tracking are preferably points of high contrast that don’t deform too much during the clip, making it easy for After Effects to recognize through a long sequence of frames. In this respect, the shot we’ve just created is rather difficult to track. Nearly every part of the rendered sequence deforms over time. In addition the sky needs to move with the horizon, confining the area of tracking to that fine line which is almost constantly deforming. In other words, tracking this shot, although possible, will probably be difficult and time consuming.

Luckily, we’re talking about a 3D render here, and so we have the means to fix this pretty easily. Go back to 3ds max, create two pyramid shapes and place them close to the horizon, looking through the camera. Make sure to space them a little apart. Now, hide all other geometry in your scene, give the pyramids a white, self-illuminated texture and render the sequence against a black background. Instant tracking markers!

This makes tracking a breeze. Import the pyramid pass and drag it to the bottom of the time line.

We also need something to apply the motion to. For this we’ll be using what’s called a Null Object. Basically an invisible object that can store information about position, rotation and scale. Rather like a Dummy in 3ds max. To add one, right click an empty spot on the time line, choose New and Null Object.

With the Null in place, right-click the pyramid layer and choose Track Motion. A panel named Tracker Controls will appear on the lower right of your screen.

For this scene we need to track both Position, Rotation and Scale so make sure all three boxes are checked. As it’s hard tracking rotation and scale with only one Track Point, an additional point will appear once you check them.

Click the button called Edit Target and make sure it is set to our Null Object. This will make sure the motion data will be transferred to the Null Object when racking is finished.

Now we need to decide whether we are going to track forwards or backwards. In our case, the tracking points (pyramids) are actually out of frame at the beginning of the clip, so we’ll track backwards. That means scrubbing the time slider to the last frame.

Having chosen a frame, we need to align the Track Points with the pyramids. Click and drag one to the lowest corner of each pyramid. We’re choosing the lowest points as they are the last parts of the pyramids to exit the frame before they disappear completely, which gives us another couple of frames of tracking.

Now press the Analyze Backwards button and watch After Effects tracking the scene. As you can see, the pyramids disappear after a while, making the Track Points stop, but after that point we don’t see the horizon anymore and as the point here is to track the sky, that’s perfectly acceptable.

Having finished the tracking, press the Apply button to transfer the position, rotation and scale information to our Null Object. Dimensions should be both X and Y.

Try playing the animation to check whether the Null is now fixed to the horizon.

The final piece of the tracking puzzle is to scrub to the frame where you aligned the sky horizon with the city horizon and parent the the sky layers to the Null once there. Parenting in After Effects is similar to linking in 3ds max, meaning the parented layers will follow their parent. To parent both sky layers to the Null, select them and drag the little spiral icon on one of the layers to the Null Object.

Play the animation again and make sure the sky stays within the frame at all times. If it doesn’t – move the sky layers around in the viewer until they do. Congratulations! You have successfully tracked a shot in After Effects! You can now go ahead and animate the sky layers if you want.

9. Blur, grain and pre-comps

We’re definitely getting somewhere now and to round off the shot we’ll add some depth of field, blur and a bit of grain. All three effects helps us hide the fact that the buildings are a bit low-poly to be in the foreground and that the sky and city doesn’t blend perfectly yet.

9.1 Depth of field

As depth of field is an effect we want applied to the whole image, we’ll first create a new Adjustment Layer and make it the top layer. I’ll name it Depth of field. We’ll also drag in a new z depth layer and make it the bottom layer. Having done that, right-click the newly created Adjustment Layer, choose Effect, Blur & Sharpen and Lens Blur.

The image instantly blurs all over. In the Depth Map Layer select the bottom z depth layer. Also check Repeat Edge Pixels to get rid of the dark border surrounding the frame.

Use Blur Focal Distance to focus and Iris Radius to control how much blur you apply. In this example I set Blur Focal Distance to 215 and Iris Radius to 25.

This leaves us with one problem though, as the sky gets blurred way too much. To fix this, we have to tweak the z depth layer we just added a little bit. Select the bottom z depth layer and in the menu bar go to Layer and Pre-Compose.

This creates a new composition within our main one, meaning we will be able to output the new composition as a new, modified z depth layer. Name the new composition Z, move all attributes to the new composition and open it.

As you can see in the new composition, the sky area of the z depth is represented as pitch black, making the Lens Blur effect read the sky as really, really far away and that it therefore should be really, really blurred. We’ll change the color to something brighter, making Lens Blur go more easy on the sky.

Create a solid by right-clicking in the timeline and choosing New and Solid. Make the color light gray this time. in this tutorial, I’m going for #8A8A8A. The solid goes below the z depth layer.

Drag in a new matte from the Project tab and make it the bottom layer.

Right-click on the z depth layer, choose Effect, Channel and Set Matte. Set Take Matte From Layer to the matte and set User For Matte to Red Channel, Green Channel or Blue Channel. Now we have a z depth map with a lighter background.

Back in the main composition, you’ll notice the sky is significantly less blurred.

9.2 Blur

I would recommend adding a small amount of blur to the composition as 3d renders often gets too crisp. To do this, simply add another Adjustment Layer, call it Blur and add the effect called Fast Blur. Set the Blurriness to somewhere between 0,5 and 2 and make sure to Repeat Edge Pixels.

9.3 Grain

Finally, if you wish to give the shot a more filmic look, you might consider adding some grain as well. Create yet another Adjustment Layer, call it Grain and add the effect called Add Grain. There are a lot of settings to play with here, but I ended up with the Preset called Eastman EXR 50D (5245) and decreasing the Intensity to 0.9. I also set the Viewing Mode to Final  Output.

I guess this is all for now. I know there are still a ton of things I could have gone in more detail about or explained better, but I had to stop somewhere If you’re stuck, want something explained better or just want to tell me how plain wrong I am, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll answer you as soon as I can.

Go to Part 1

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.

Go to Part 2

1. Creating buildings

Create a few buildings in 3ds max or use the max file provided in this tutorial.

Download tutorial max file (42 KB)

The more buildings you create, the more diversity you’ll get in your cityscape. (Shocking, isn’t it?) Make sure the pivot points of all buildings are placed at ground level.

Lastly, you’ll end up with a total building count round 3000 so low poly is probably a good idea if you don’t have a very fast system.

2. Particle Flow

Create a plane and name it CityEmitter. The buildings you created in the previous step will be distributed across this plane.

Next, go to the Create tab, choose Particle Systems from the drop-down menu and choose PF Source.

Place the PF Source anywhere in your scene. The position is not important.

Under Emission, set Viewport Quantity Multiplier to 100% so you’ll be able to see all buildings in the viewport.

Then, under Setup, press the Particle View button. When you open Particle View you’ll get what’s called a Standard Flow which is basically a list of controllers that control birth, position, speed, rotation and shape of the particles. You also have control over how the particles will be displayed in the viewport and during render. Near the bottom is a list over all available controllers.

We’ll now start by adding one of our buildings to the scene:

2.1 Birth

As we don’t want buildings to pop out of the ground during animation, all particles should appear simultaneously. We’ll therefore set Emit Start and Emit Stop to the same frame. I’ll set both to -1 to make sure the buildings are in place before animation starts at frame 0. In my case I want 250 buildings and consequently set the Amount to 250.

2.2 Position

As you can see, this gave us 250 particles emitting from the PF Source icon.

To attach the particles to the plane instead, we’ll need to replace Position Icon in the controllers list with something else called Position Object. To do this, find the Position Object controller in the list of available controllers and drag it on top of the Position Icon controller in the view above. Let go when a red line appears over the Position Icon, meaning it’ll be replaced by what you’re dragging in.

Having selected the newly created Position Object, you can now press the button called By List under Emitter Objects which brings up a window where yo can select an Emitter Object. Choose the plane you created earlier called CityEmitter.

This randomly distributes the particles across the plane.

However, if you scrub through the time line, you’ll notice that the particles falls away from the plane which to state it mildly is less than ideal. To fix this, simply check the box called Lock On Emitter and the particles will stay in position.

This is all good of course, but at this point the particles are placed completely random and in a city with streets, this isn’t very realistic. To fix this, you first need to create a black & white material for the CityEmitter. Light areas will receive the highest density of particles while completely dark areas will receive none. In the example, I’ve combined the procedural textures Tiles and Gradient Ramp to create a texture, but you could also paint one in Photoshop or similar to get a more organic distribution map.

Back in Particle View and still under Position Object, scroll down to Location and check the box called Density By Material. The particles are now concentrated in the lighter areas.

To make sure the buildings don’t stand on top of each other also check Separation and play with the Distance until the particles have some space between them.

2.3 Speed

Buildings really shouldn’t move around that much, so the speed controller is useless here. Right click it and choose Delete.

2.4 Shape

Now we’re going to replace the rather boring-looking ticks with the actual building. Clicking on the Shape controller doesn’t give us a whole lot of options so we clearly need another one: Shape Instance. Replace Shape with Shape Instance the same way you replaced Position Icon above.

Then, with Shape Instance selected, press the button called None under Particle Geometry Object and choose a building by pressing H on the keyboard. I’ll pick my SkyScraper object.

Aaaand, voila! Nothing happened! This is because the Display settings below are still set to Ticks. Quickly select Display in the list and choose Geometry from the Type drop down menu. We now have buildings, though their rotation might be a tiny bit off. We’ll look into that soon.

Go back to Shape Instance and adjust Scale and Variation according to your preferences. I’ll keep Scale at 100% and set Variation to 25% to vary the landscape a little bit.

2.5 Rotation

Select the Rotation option from the list. As you can see, it’s set to Random 3D which explains why practically no building is standing upright. From the drop down menu, choose Random Horizontal to only make the buildings rotate around their Z axis.

If you don’t wish the buildings to be rotated at all, right-click the Rotation controller in the list and choose Delete.

2.6 Adding more buildings

All that remains now is to add the rest of the buildings. Fortunately, this is a very simple process. In Particle View, select the box called Event01, right-click it and choose Copy. Then right-click somewhere else in the same window and choose Paste.

Then hook the new Event to the PF Source.

Now, you only need to change a few parameters to have your new building in place. First go to Birth and set the number of buildings you want. This time I want 750.

Then go to Position Object to change the position of the new building so they won’t be positioned in the same spots as the previous ones. Scroll down to the bottom of the list and under Uniqueness press the New button to generate a random Seed number.

Finally, under Shape Instance, choose a new building by pressing the button under Particle Geometry Object, pressing H on the keyboard and selecting a new object from the list. I’ll choose Rubble. Then play around with Scale and Variation once more until you’re satisfied.

Repeat paragraph 2.6 until all buildings are scattered on the emitter. I chose 500 OfficeBuildings and 50 IntactSkyScrapers.

3. Finishing the scene

As you probably don’t want your ground texture to look like the distribution map, you need to hide the CityEmitter and use a plane with another texture instead. The easiest way is to select the CityEmitter, press Ctrl+V to duplicate it and choose Instance. Name the new plane Ground.

Then press H on the keyboard, choose CityEmitter and press OK. Right-click the plane and choose Hide Selection. You are now free to apply which ever texture you like to the Ground plane. I chose my very simple Rubble texture.

Now you just need to add some basic lighting and a moving camera and you’re ready to proceed to rendering. For lighting I suggest a single direct light with a mental ray Shadow Map for shadows.

4. Rendering

As mentioned above, we’ll use mental ray for this tutorial, so the first thing to do is to enable the mental ray Renderer. Press F10 on the keyboard to open the Render Setup window and under the Common tab, scroll down to the bottom to the Assign Renderer section and press the button next to Production. Choose mental ray Renderer from the list. Next, scroll up again to set your resolution. In this example I’m using 640*360, but you are of course free to choose whatever resolution fits your needs. Next, set your frame range, 0-100 in my example, and choose a place for saving your rendered files. I suggest creating a render folder as you’ll end up with quite a few files. The file format we’ll use is Targa Image File with the following settings:

Still in the Render Setup window, proceed to the Indirect Illumination tab and make sure Enable Final Gather, Caustics and Global Illumination are all turned off.

Then proceed to the Render Elements tab. You’ll need three additional render passes for this tutorial: A Matte to separate the city from the sky so we can do an effective sky replacement, an Occlusion Pass to fake global illumination and a Z Depth Pass to be able to add an atmospheric effect and some depth of field.

4.1 Occlusion Pass

Press the Add … button and choose mr Shader Element from the list.

Name the pass Occlusion and under Parameters press the button next to Shader to add a new shader. Choose Ambient/Reflective Occlusion from the list. There are a lot of settings to play with to tweak the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion shader, but the standard settings, although a little rough, will do just fine for this tutorial.

This basically renders a pass of the scene where this texture is applied to all geometry.

4.2 Z Depth pass

Press the Add … button again and this time choose Z Depth.

The Z Depth pass produces an image where the geometry close to the camera is displayed in white while geometry further away gets darker and darker until it reaches a cut-off point and everything behind it is rendered as black.

Under Z Depth Element Parameters you need to set a cut-off point for where the image goes entirely white or entirely black. In the example scene a Z Min value of 0 and a Z Max value of 2000 works out quite nice as the city plane is 2000 units wide and the camera is looking at the city from one end of the plane.

This might need some tweaking though, so I suggest doing a couple of test renders of still frames before rendering the final sequence.

4.3 Matte

Press the Add … button for the third time and this time choose Matte.

A matte lets you isolate an object in a scene by making the desired object appear as white while everything else is black. In this case we wish to separate the city from the sky and therefore wish the whole city to appear white against a black background. The quickest way to do this is to under Matte Texture Element enable Material ID and set it to 0. All textures in 3ds max has their Material ID set to zero by default and hence every textured object in the scene (should be all objects) will appear white on the render.

Finally, check and double-check your settings and have that cup of coffee while waiting for the render to finish.

This is it for part 1. I’m a beginner at writing tutorials, but hope it wasn’t too long and painful. Anyway, this should keep your computer nice and busy for a while, depending on your system. If you want to take a peek at my finished file, you can download it below.

Download finished max file (52 KB)

Part 2, concerning After Effects, should be up tomorrow.

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.

This sunday Andreas and I scanned in the new storyboard and started assembling it digitally as well as beginning work on the new animatic. We had to leave the building before five though and didn’t finish. Therefore the whole group spent today completing first drafts of both:

As 13 pages of storyboard would be a tiny bit extreme to fit inside a blog post, I made a PDF:

Download Fetch! Storyboard Draft 1 (640 KB)

The storyboard is a bit rushed at this time and we haven’t added much text. Might have missed some arrows as well and there are no transitions yet. Will be fixed in due course. The animatic is finished in the sense that we’ve timed all the shots, but we’re lacking a fair bit of sounds, mainly because there are many we haven’t found yet. I guess we’ll have to consider making our own sound effects.

For some reason we really ran into trouble when looking for music. We listened to a lot of tracks without finding anything we really liked. Then tried watching what music similar films used, like “In the Rough” for instance, and found that they didn’t use music that much, but had a lot of sound effects in stead. I honestly don’t know what we’ll end up with, but as of now the animatic needs more music.

Today was a long day. When we arrived this morning, the storyboard wasn’t finished, the work on the animatic wasn’t even started, and there was a presentation to make. Add an ill team member and another that needed to leave early and you have the recipe for a long day at school. 

The day started by me separating the storyboard images we scanned the day before while Andreas and Jamie drew the last few frames. Then Jamie went on working on the animatic while Andreas and I started assembling the storyboard. After a while Andreas had to leave for work. Jamie continued working on the animatic with some help/input from me while I worked on the storyboard with some help/input from him. At long last we were both finished and we begun work on the Keynote presentation. Being rather tired, I just ripped off our previous presentation, replacing content and wrote nothing but headlines.

The whole process up to the concept art presentation has been rather tiresome for us as we’ve never been quite on schedule. This is in part because of holidays and illnesses as mentioned in the previous post, but I still feel we could have taken better advantage of the time we had. I don’t particularly like the feeling of being behind, so I think we should try to be more focused from now on.  

On another note, I worked some more on the temple exterior comp yesterday. Composited in the new temple, added some fire to the debris, adjusted the smoke opacity and made the fire cast light on its surroundings. Image in top of this post. I didn’t have my tablet (nope, not an affiliate link) when working though and for that reason I’m still not happy with the temple/debris edges. I think it’ll be good enough for concept art though

Tomorrow, the concept art presentation will be over, and maybe we’ll be able to relax a bit.

I haven’t had time to write anything the last few days unfortunately, so I’ll try putting the essentials down in this post.

Andreas had a few suggestions about the temple exterior, so I made some changes to it at school on wednesday and thursday. I then put them on my memory stick so I could work some on it during the weekend and left school. Without the memory stick. No update on that front in other words. I’ll put it up in its current version at my earliest convenience. Whenever that may be.

Not being able to work more on the temple, I tried fitting it into some surroundings (I’ll replace the temple with the current version when I find my memory stick). As this is still the concept phase, 3D can take too long to do so I ended up finding images on the internet and mashed them together after a fashion in the top image of this post. The shadows aren’t right, but not too important in this case. I’ve made the temple, the road and the stars. The other components I’ve found. Landscapes were made by Ladyofspira. I don’t have anyones leave to use the images, but as it is only intended as a possible guideline for general looks and meant for the team only, I hope I won’t get too many lawyers banging on my door. If I’ve used your imagery and you want it removed, leave a comment here and I’ll take care of it at once.

On thursday, the group made radical changes to the story, for the better in my opinion. Jamie wrote the second draft of the story while the rest of the team was present. Andreas and I worked the story into a draft one treatment that afternoon:

Synergy

FLY-OVER CAM. Futuristic motorcycle driving high speed across desert landscape, suspicious DEVICE with timer countdown fastened to bike. Bike approaches destination, lights from fire in distance. Bike slows down, stops in front of entrance to HIGH-TECH TEMPLE, signs of recent destruction and mayhem. FEMALE dismounts bike, picks up device and moves into temple.

Female moves deeper into temple ruins. Inside temple enters LARGE CHAMBER showing recent signs of havoc and destruction.
Giant PILLAR thrown towards her. Barely dodges flying pillar but drops device. MALE in armour appears in end of room. Female spots giant ROBOT emerging behind him. Robot backhands Male out of the way, charges against her.

Female runs against charging robot, leaps to attack. Attack dodged, giant FIST punches her, throwing her across room.

Male’s attention drawn to device. Runs towards it but stopped by robot attacking him. He attacks back, misses, robot throws him across room, through BRICK WALL. Female lunges for device, stopped by robot grabbing her. Robot pins her to floor with foot, about to crush her with fist, but knocked back by flying AXE hitting its face, from Male emerging from rubble. Female free, grabs SWORD and thrusts it through robots head.

Robot shuts down, falls to ground. Heroes stand over destroyed, inactive robot. Long awkward SILENCE. Countdown reaches zero.

Device gives distinct BEEP, breaks silence.

Female: (Neutral tone) Your lunch is ready…

Male: (neutral tone) Thanks. (Pause) So what’s for dinner tonight honey?

Female: (in same tone) Leftovers…

Male: What?! You said you where making meatloaf!

Female: (Irritated) Yeah! And you said you would fix the sink! That was last week! And what about the dog?! He smells like week old crap!

Couple walks away, arguing like typical married couple.

Finally, since the arrival of the aforementioned device, we’ve been in need of a count down display. As compositing etc. is my area, I spent some hours this weekend trying to create such a count down in Nuke. I had to do some light programming, something I haven’t done in a long time. Luckily I got some help from the good guys over at fxphd and I got it working in the end. This is a temporary design and will probably change, but decided to put it up anyway:

Tomorrow we’ll work more on the storyboard for the presentation coming up this coming Thursday.