M dot Strange's blog

As I go into production I thought I'd share some of the final tech details... and thank some people... I will NOT be compositing shots as I go along like I did with WATS... Its not very efficient as you end up wanting to change shots which means re-rendering 3d AND re-rendering the comp... also I dont want to rush the matte paintings and particle fx work for each shot... So I will go through and animate and render all the 3d... then when the whole film is done... start comping the finals... I was able to sort out my Exr problems.. the problem was with After Effects interpretation not C4d... so to get Exr working properly with Cs4 right now... You need to check "preserve RGB" in the interpretation options in Cs4... change the project to 32bit of course... add the "hdr compander" effect to the footage with an expansion gamma of .4545... Once I get to comping which will like be a year from now I will render out the finals to the SheerVideo 10bit codec... mega thank

After the 24th revision of the HSM script... it has some weird parallels with WATS, subtextually of course ^ ^ AS I would never give you the same thang twice... BUT one of the characters from WATS plays a different character in HSM... well actually two ^ ^ Which two characters do you think are in HSM? Rain? Ori? Blue? Him? Emmm? I must say... archetypes are archetypes... and there are certain ones I like to use...this is relevant to my interests(from wikipedia) Jung outlined five main archetypes; The Sel f, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation The Shadow , the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless The Anima , the feminine image in a man's psyche; or: The Animus , the masculine image in a woman's psyche The Persona , how we present to the world, usually protects the Ego from negative images (acts like a mask) I wrote a little about how I was tying abstraction layer theor

As I r making this film and thinking about the future... I think that to be successful and survive as an artist you need to create things that people will want to watch more then once... Putting the film in its entirety up for free on Youtube will always be part of my plan... NOW if I only had income from that I would be deD... I had to sell DVD's to survive to make another film... So besides the 2 people who bought my DVD cause they pitY poor lil weirdo meh... I figure there was something about WATS that made people want to watch it more then once... Was it all the audio visual madness packed into it? Was it the several soundtracks? Was it for the bonus features? I da know... but thats what I'm trying to figure out... What is it about a movie that makes you want to watch it again? What is it about a movie that makes you not just want to watch it for free but buy it to watch again? NOW... I think it has a lot to do with the narrative and how solid or open it is... there are ple

I finished test rendering all the sets... and I finished testing all the chaRacters by animating them doing the thang they gotta do most in the movie... most everything worked ok... had to redesign some things simply because after looking at them with fresh eyes I thought they sucked so I redesign them OR the designs weren't functional so I redesigned thems as well... Didn't have to redesign too much... Only minor probs with the renders of the sets... a flickering texture I had to change from Alias to MIP... and some shadow map and AA issues that cranking them up a little fixes... but yeh I was actually surprised there wasn't anything too major... For WATS I didn't test anything haha... just got to animating shots and going OH shit this doesn't work PANIC PANIC PANIC ^ ^ So what you will see with HSM is M dot Strange refined... every aspect of the film is mega refined... from the script to the characters to the setS to the character animation... and it all has to do

I recently subscribed to Cinefx because i cannot read enough and I had enjoyed it in the past when a friend who worked in the visual fx industry gave me a stack of old ones... ANYWAY I was reading the latest one and looking at fx/animation stills from Transformers 2, GI JOE, the new Harry Potter movies and more furry animal bullshit..... AND THE VISUAL FX/COMPOSITING SUCKED! I couldn't believe it?!?! I don't watch these kids of films but the work was not only derivative and cliche...it was HORRIBLE! Technically it wasn't even well done... I mean as much as I hate Hollywood films they always had a technical edge but after looking at these stills I think they technical edge is gone now because I see much higher quality stuff online done by regular peoples... done by "amateurs"... maybe my eye just has gotten that much better but I was shocked at the crappy quality of the work... The work I was looking at in Cinefex was so derivative the stills from Transformers 2 we

I don't know how I had not seen the film Dororo (2007) until now?!??! I just watched it and it was the BEST film I have seen in a LONG TIME... It was so great... had all the things I love in a film... so you should go watch it now! I can see people saying some of the fx were low budget and cheesy but I dont give a fawK cause the story and everything else was pure WIN... I grew up watching Godzilla, Ultraman etc so I like the guy in a suit stuff... The story and its nuances/themes and how it call came together was pure genius... clearly the work of a master and it was...as its based on the Manga by Osamu Tezuka... I've read a lot of Tezuka's stuff and watched a lot of the Anime based on his works like Black Jack which is one of my fav's... yeh if you want to learn how to build suspense and tell great exciting, heart wrenching stories study his stuff as he was a master.... Apparently they are now making Dororo 2 and 3... and looking at it as a "Japanese lord of the r

Still tweaking on EVERYTHING haha... revised the script and animatic three times in the past two days... it came in late but my umm STRANGE sense of humor made its way into HSM after all... it was looking like it was pretty serious until now ^ ^ So besides that... I'm still doing the final checks/tests of the characters... found myself adding FK switches on all of them for they arms... wielding weapons to animate is much easier to do with FK than IK... So cactus dans plugs already have a switch BUT its on the arm joint nested in the Hierarchy since I'm all fancy now I wire my own controls via Xpresso onto the Characters main controller... so yeh doing that stuff... test animations... adjusting joint limits controlled by hand, foot and finger tags.... pretty much just like optimizing everything... Still doing test renders of the sets... so far no major problems... some flickering textures from AA being set too low.... ALSO since thinking about all 2000 shots and 45 sequences at

Ya know there's this saying in pop culture.... where they bring shit back from like 20 years before and say "Everything old is new again" So like... So if all the "new" is really old.... then there is nothing new? COUGH Hmmmm is this a natural phenomenon? OR is it just because once a company originally develops or purchases the rights to some intellectual property they want to keep reusing it over and over because its cheaper and easier? Me thinks this is so... So don't buy into they "there are no new ideas" bullshit... there are plenty of new idea but since they dont own a license on them they dont want you to use them haha... OR you can develop them on your own then you sell it to them and all of a sudden something new emerges to be recycled for 20 years COUGH *Tim Burton* COUGH Yeh its "easier" to do the same thing over and over and to recycle the same shit forever BUT be warned! Emerging audiences will not stand for such craP... So I

So what I'm doing now.. is doing test animations of all the characters while practicing animating ya know and rendering out flythroughs of the sets... I'm looking for problems in the characters and the sets... Like I learned that c4d hair freaks out sometimes with moving lights...so I converted it the hair to polys...bug deD... then I learned that NO 32bit formats rendered out of c4d create a proper alpha channel when using volumetric or visible lights so BACK TO 16 bit TIFFS for me.... Exr seemed too good to be true as it was 32bit and half the size of 16 bit tiffs but yeh...I had to abandon it... ALSO had some gamma issues and undervoltage probs on one of the render slaves... fixed that up... oh yeh so my render slaves are all Q9300's but I OC'd them to 3.33ghz... they run c00 like that... So yeh as I'm trying to be creative and have fun doing the first animations with the characters I have to squash bugs along the way and work around tech proBlems... BUT its look

As you know I don't want to have anything to do with the "Hollywood System" at all... well yeh I don't... but I'm writing this to warn of about a certain type of person... there are people in the "indie" film scene NOT because they are making films that don't fit in the Hollywood system i.e. something different... BUT because they don't even have what it takes to be in the "Hollywood System" i.e. desperate for ideas.... So these people will wear they plastic shiny badge of "indie" to get close to people like me or you... why do they want to get close to us? Well you probably guessed it... to glean some of our originality and creativity to use as they own... because we don't have money BUT we have ideas.....since they don't have any ideas they try to pluck them from you... Know any of those people? Maybe you can't spot them yet... About 8 years ago when I was young and gullible... one of these people suckered me in

Now here's some really geeky stuff that doesn't seem like it would matter that much to most BUT when in production your format choices are important.... My process for HSM is... Rendering 1920x802 24fps EXR image SEQUENCES out of Cinema 4d... with at least an RGBA pass and a depth pass out of ZBluR... I did a bunch of tests and EXR produced the SMALLEST files out of the 32bit formats which I want with my 3d renders so I can push em hard in After Effects if I want too... So yeh if ya don't know...32bit files are pretty much the highest quality you can make right now as opposed to 16bit and 8bit..... So EXR out of C4d... So then I have to composite these thangs in After Effects and then render out the quicktime MOVIE files to edit themS... The codec chose to render out the final movies that will make up the master version of the film is the SheerVideo 10 bit codec... Its a lossless 10 bit codec but only a fraction of the size of the other lossless codecs... for WATS I used un

So every once in awhile I get emails from animation students who take it as their duty to tell me how technically flawed my work is... they point out that what I do would make they masters OH I mean teachers scold them for being bad animator drones... Now my initial reaction is to always think of my own quoteth ^ ^ "A persons advice can only go as far as they have gotten" BUT today as I got this mail after watching and reading a bunch of "filmmaking" podcasts and blogs that were totally focused on TECHNICAL issues I am writing public reply to said peoples. -------------- Well this may not make any sense to you since you are studying animation BUT the least important thing when making an animated FILM is the animation... NOW all the people all over the world who love WATS don't care that a lot of the animation was crude and crappy...WHY?! because its a FILM it has mood, emotion, feeling...a depth... They knew one d00d did his best to try to convey this emotion an

So last night I did my first test with the lil render farm... rendered a flythrough of one of the sets... When you do such tests your looking for hardware problems... overheating CPUS's etc... your looking for software probs... plugins acting funky.. and your looking for problems in the scenes...flickering textures etc... Well I was glad to find no problems whatsoever... two of the overclocked machines got they temps up a little but nothing extreme so it seems good... Oh yeh after doing a bunch of benchmarks... I decided to use one of the render slaves as my main workstation as its opengl performance beat my big machine... so now my 8 core machine will be the render server and a render slave full time... So now my workstation is a Q9300 oC'd to 3.5ghz with 8gb ram and a 4870 hd... it was getting on average of 10+fps over the 8 core box.. me thinks the server mainboards aren't designed to crank gfx madness OR the fact that the 8 core is at 2.8ghz and the quad is 3.4ghz made

So today Maxon released Cinema 4d 11.5.... now there's a bunch of AWESOME features but a few in general are just over like 9000 to the power of 9000 and sheT! Render Instances: So in short and suite... render more objects and particles than ever before while using minimal ram... I set up a scene with 2,500 animated characters which was over 1.1 BILLION polygons... it took 15 minutes to render and only used 3.2gb of ram 0_0 Some other users have rendered scenes with over one TRILLION polygons as well 0_0 Modynamics: Now the super powerful Mograph module has its own really powerful and flexible dynamics system built in... I've done a bunch of tests with this today and its great for all kinds of things... AND you get great feedback in realtime in the viewport as you experiment Multithreaded SPD and Shadow maps: Now just a few posts ago I wrote about how I was moving away from using SPD because it was a single threaded process.... well now its multithreaded and FAST AS FUK! I did s