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Showing posts from November, 2009

Post first swordfight thoughts

So I only have one more shot to do to finish off this first swordfight in the film... - Motion clips work great for blending together multiple separate actions like... running + jumping + slashing... The only problems I've had with them is when a character is spinning 180 degrees and that motion clips is mixed with others that are not rotated... I tried using a pivot object to rotate the other clips but it ended in chaos... I'm sure theres a correct way to do it but I couldn't spend too much production time trying to get it to work... - Good sword fight scenes are all about good strong opposing poses... get the poses right and half the work is done... watch J Samurai films from Gosha or Okamoto to learn how to do it right... I also learned a lot about showdown poses from DBZ... DBZ used still poses with minimal animation to GREAT effect... the action in Samurai showdowns really comes from the music because its not like Chinese swordplay with lots of superfluous action to ma

Grind and move forward

The last couple days of production have been a grind... tough shots that just eat through the hours... I'm still on schedule though... they are all action shots and I could have made them simpler/less awesome and it would have been easier BUT ya know being on schedule is fine and all but if your not making awesome stuff whats the point ya know? So I'm doing my best to do both... To do awesome stuff while not taking 10 years to do it... haha actually I'm trying to finish in less than a year from now ^ ^ We'll see how it goes... BUT I'm thinking if I'm not going to do my best, craziest and most complex work on this film when/where am I going to do it? This is my stage and I have to go all out! About moving forward.... So I'm animating shots while previous shots render... when a sequence is complete I watch it and take notes on error to fix LATER... in the past I couldn't stop my tweaker self from fixing them NOW but I've changed and its a good thing...

Something! better than nothing ^ ^

Since I do want to show yall some stuff from HSM but I really can't before its done because there isn't anything in the film that isn't totally new and original... I pretty much developed and created my own universe...with its own look, rules and way things work in a way... So as to not blow the whole surprise, or let someone else borrow it and claim it as they own new and unique style 0_o ... here's a tiny somethin... just a skeleton animation of the monster the main character is fighting right now... its a super quick, nothing fancy... just him trying to decapitate the hero But that is my standard skeleton that ALL of the characters share... his neck and arms are elongated though ... but I used the same skeleton for all the characters because theres only one rig to learn how to animate AND I can share motion clips between ALL the characters... I can't enough about how AWESOME motion clips are in Cinema 4d... without them this film would take me 3 to 4 times as lon

Gamma: what it is?!

NOtes: Have been using the AWSOME linear workflow plugin DeGamma for the whole film...it also comes with some great lens distortion filters I've been using a ton... but ANYWAY the plug automatically switches everythang so you can render in linear space BUT what I just noticed that by default it ignores bitmap textures... what does this mean? it means it doesn't adjust the gamma of bitmaps used as textures so they are a lot darker than when you made them in like... nonlinear space... So far I didn't even notice as most everything is looking fine... BUT I've been having a hard time illuminating the ground on some shots... and guess what the ground uses a bitmap texture.... so I opened the bitmap in PShop and shifted the gamma to make it brighter and now the scenes look even better than before ^ ^ The SUCK thing is I already sent about 70 shots to render with the floor texture that I'll have to fix... BUT they haven't rendered yet so its no big deal... it would hav

Teh SECRET of Japanese animation!

THATS the SECRET! GAINAXING!!! Now I often wondered why all these anime shows I liked had either one or ALL of the female characters sporting huge boobs that bounced all over the place... Like in GunXSword, Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Gurren Lagaan, now in the Book of Bantorra I r watching now.....I was like hmmm well it's on in primetime in Japan so I guess to get ratings thats what they have to do? Then I read about fan service and all that... BUT thats not the secret... YOU see... GAINAXING is a mysterious power than can be used by you to cover up all the problems in your shots *for male viewers... So like say I animated this shot of these two samurai d00ds fighting and I did a crappy job that I'm totally embarrassed about... NO PROBLEM just add a character in the corner of the shot Gainaxing! No one will see the crappy swordfight animation because they will be staring at the hypnotic boobs... So thats all YOU HAVE TO DO for your animations! And its totally easy! Cinema 4d ha

Pacing yourself...

Well it seems the only problem I'm having so far is working too hard 0_o This week I've been dealing a bit with burnout... but I'm still working... took a day off and have been making sure to sleep enough because as much as I'd like to think so.... I M not a machine that can keep working indefinitely without sleep or food.... So I eased back off the quota for a bit so I dont make my self sick or something before I go to Paris... I left a week open before I leave for my Xmas vacation so now that I'm not working that hard as I recover this week I'll just work then to make up for it.... BUT the shots are coming out awesome ^ ^ Looks amazing n'aLL that... Also my hard drive issues are not so pressing anymore... After the second sequence finished rendering I delete the shot folders off the render server and that free'd up about 500 gigs of space... there was a HUGE texture file sequence used in a bunch of those shots that probably was taking up all that space

A different strategy + notes

So on this film what I'm going to do is edit the film without sound... I mean the shots are already timed for the dialogue and the like as I animated to the dialogue but I gave them all a little extra head and tail... Why r I doing this? I like building things from the bottom up... like making sure something can stand on its own before I add another level on top of it... So I'm going to make sure the film works visually before adding in music, dialogue and sound design... and well also before the skies and other extra stuff is added in the compositing phase... right now I'm cutting the raw shots that don't have skies, atmospheric fx, post processing etc... Running my 4 quad render boxes + 8 core render server 24 hours/day for a month adds about $125 to the power bill... So budget that in before you start your cg film... I started work at 2pm today and finished just now at 2am... I'm going to posting a like casting call thang here for the voice acting soon... So if y

ErrorS keep them LoW+ notes

So the second sequence of the film that I finished animating weeks ago finally finished rendering... here some notes... It was 117 shots which in a RAW unedited form was 18 minutes and 45 seconds long... Those shots took up 125gigs of space.... Two EXR sequences for each shot.... the RGBA and the Depth pass from Zblur Out of those 117 shots there were errors with 14 of the shots... mostly all flickering texture issues probably because I had them set to alias or something... there was only one animation error, some weird ik glitch I didn't notice in the preview... So when a sequence finished rendering... I backup and organize the renders and the project files... then I import the all into AE making folders for each shot and a folder to keep the error notes so I can come back later and fix them before I composite... Also some of the "errors" are that I realized a few shots need artificial fill lights... I say "artificial" because all the environments are lit with

They can't all be heroeS

The fancy shots you see in trailers for animated films are probably mostly all "hero shots"... not that they have heroes in them... its just an animation term for a fancy or complex shot... They tend to slow things down when working because well... they are more complicated.... So lets say a normal shot is a character looking up and saying a line.... and a hero shot is like a character running at another, slicing his head off which rolls on the floor then jumping through a window.... I've found I can kick out 1-3 hero shots per day... I've done up to 20 normal shots a day... if they were all heroes I would finish in 2020... luckily there's lots of villains so I try to finish before 2011 ^ ^

What film festivals and can do for YOU and ME

Physical film festivals have been dying a slow death of irrelevance as the interweb gains ultimate power but they are still useful to filmmakers for getting some press BUT I still think the way most of them in US work is BULLSHIT Wanna know why the "indie" filmmaking scene is mostly rich kids who go to expensive film schools? Here's how it goes... You pay a fee... $50 - $100 for a feature A) You get rejected AND they are nice enough to keep your money B) You get accepted THEN they send you a page of EXACT technical specs you must meet so they can screen your film Example: "We are the Strange" was HD.... so my cheapest full quality option was HDCAM which cost about $1,500.00 for one copy When the film screens at the festival... people PAY to see your film yet you get NOTHING and yeah you just had to pay out of your pocket to make a tape for them AND you had to pay for your flight and lodging to attend the festival. So why would a filmmaker do this? To get exposur

Knowing what you want....

Since I'm working so fast now I'm wondering why I was so slow in the past.... Most of it had to do with not knowing what I wanted... NOW I am much more prepared and confident so I just make a decision and go because I know I did all the hard time refining and researching so I know what I'm going to do is on the right track... in the past I jumped into doing things before the ideas, concepts and everything else had enough time to marinate.... You have to dig deep to get the good stuff... What kills you is second guessing... Now when I'm about to final a shot and send it to render... my tweaker self starts to rise up and cast doubts but then I say out loud "I'm down with this" and I click the button to send it off.... What has really helped as well has been my new workflow where if there are any problems after shots are rendered I make a note in the same folder as the shot and I will fix them when everything is done.... In the past it would bore into my brai

After one month: Many many terabytes

Finished another sequence today... I'm through 3 of about 40.... I haven't done an exact count yet but I think I could through over 200 shots in the first month... The render's are about 140 shots behind me though 0_0 On average 4-8 shots finish rendering a day....but I add 7-14 new shots per day as well... All and all I'm pretty happy with the way things are going... one looming problem I can see is storage space... the first 6 minutes that were rendered took 59 gigs of space.... The film will be about 120 minutes so figure that out 0_0 AND thats just for the 3d renders.... then I need to comp all the shots and render them to a 10bit video file etc... So yeh its a good thing drives are relatively cheap...its too bad a 2tb drive is the biggest you can get though... I could use a few 4tb drives... BUT thats not a problem right NOW so I won't let it eat my brain...I just make a note then I'll deal with it when the drives are %80 full.... then I'll probably try