100th Post!!!

W00t.

I didn't get a great deal of time to work on the animatic but I was able to get started. Here's a still from the first scene, not a rendered shot, just a screengrab of the Maya windows.

(The top shot is a split of the scene and perspective cameras and the bottom is a close-up of the little birdies. They've a long way to go before they reach co-star status.)

As I work on the shots for the animatic, I think I'm going to do a little more lighting than I'd originally planned on. I think it'll help in the sense that it'll give us a better idea of the levels of modeling & shading required on our geometry, plus it'll start to give these shots a little bit of emotion, which is never a bad thing.

That means the animatic will go a tad bit more slowly than it might otherwise, but ideally some of the lighting choices will then transfer over to the final shots, saving time on the backend. Or something like that.

Cheers.

Moving Onto The Animatic

Looks like I'm on a weekly update schedule, which I'm not very proud of but it's a schedule at least.

So, the brief is in the hands of an artist I've worked with before. He's giving it a quick pass for clarity and to assess the reasonableness of what I want to get versus what I'm paying. It's not that I have no money to spend on an artist but it's more along the lines of, I'm offering one day's day rate and asking for, probably, more than one day's worth of work. Nevertheless, it's very important to me that I am offering paid work. All of the time in this industry you see "offers" for people to do free work because it'll "look great on their reel/portfolio." Now, I've done free, low-budget and work-in-trade but on this thing, I don't want to go that way. If an artist I already had a relationship with offered to do the concept art in trade I'd probably go for it, but I'm not going to approach someone I don't know hoping that they're in the mood to throw me some charity. This film is, for me, a real project and I intend to treat anyone who works for me on it professionally.

Enough time on the soapbox. One place I am planning on going for some free help is the CG Society forums. Now that the storyboard is considerably tighter (though probably not "done") I feel like it's time to get the animatic cranking. Earlier, before our change of direction, we brushed past the animatic but I think that this time it's important to make one. It'll help us really suss out our shots, it'll suggest which shots are just plane lame and can be cut and it'll give us an idea of whether or not the structure of the scenes makes any sense. In order to work on the animatic, I returned to look at the camera rig I was building a few months ago. That's what I'm going to be asking for some help with. I'm pretty happy with that I've built but it's not working exactly as intended. I'm hoping someone up there can throw some pointers my way.

I'll post screens and the MEL script once it's in a place I'm happy with.

Cheers.

Back On The Horse

Well, the project's slowly creaking back into motion.

I'm kicking out a playblast in the background as I type this. I'm not using the camera rig that I've been struggling with for the past several weeks. Meh.

Once this playblast is finished, I'll be kicking it over to James and we're going to get started modeling buildings. Ooooooo. I'm excited to be modeling soon. The playblast had to come first, though, so that we'd know exactly what needs modeling and what corners we can cut (literally, in many cases).

I'm not going to post the quicktime that comes out of the playblast, because I just don't like the Google Video embed that happens. It's ugly. Oh well.

And the 'blast is done and I'm outta here for now.

More updates to come.

More gray buildings and...Cylons?!?!?!?

The real big news is nothing at all to do with this scene. It's that I just watched the last three episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Holy crap! I was freakin' blown away.

Well, my heart rate has slowed somewhat and I've stopped repeating "oh my god" over and over again...but oh my god! That was some dramatic tv.

Attached is a tiny update, a screen grab of the alleyway shot where I've been adding geometry and trying to plus out just enough to work for the animatic. I'm modeling in a very poly-inefficient way, knowing that the vast majority of these buildings will be rebuilt for final. Still, it irks me to pump out such crap-tastic shots. The rationale, of course, is that if I polish these things, then we look at the animatic and hate them, well, then I'll have wasted my time.

Top shot is camera view, bottom is perspective camera.

So here ya go. Cheers.

The end of the weekend

Screens posted, as promised.

I had nearly no time at all to get work done on this thing today.

The biggest part of my day was spent at the rock gym, setting in the bouldering section. I climbed pretty well, better at least than I've climbed lately. After a couple rather large falls, though, my back is utterly pretzeled. Ugh.

So all that was fun, but it wasn't the film. I forced myself to open up the file and start painting up geometry. I only worked on one shot, which crashed the hell out of Maya when I first started. Ultimately I figured out that I had to turn everything off before subdividing my mesh. Polycount on the scene has gotta be out of hand, but for some reason it doesn't show in my HUD, so I don't really know what it is.

Anyway, I painted in a hill and lattice-transformed the appropriate buildings. The reference shot for this scene is:


















which isn't mine, but something I found on Flickr. Flickr = the best photo-reference site in the world. I'm browsing Flickr nearly every day looking for shots for either the film or for work.

So, yeah, the geometry in the scene is pretty crap-tastic, but that's kind of the point. Everything that we determine to be in-camera, once the animatic is finished, will be rebuilt much more cleanly. A keen eye will note that every window and door is identical, that'll change too.

...So, bummer that I didn't get more done, but I'm happy with what there is.

More to come.

Buildings, Buildings, Buildings - All in fabulous grayscale!

...I am aching to get out of flat, gray animatic world.

Got a fair amount of good work done today, moving cameras around the city, pacing shots, trying to figure out if the first act of the film works at all. I think it does, but not being able use the girl made some shots hard to evaluate. Right now, unpopulated, only the shots where the camera's moving look good. The locked shots, where the girl will be moving look, well, dull.

In the grand scheme of things that's no big deal. One big part of this phase of the animatic is to establish topology. At the moment, all the streets are dead flat planes. There's not even a degree of elevation which calls a lot of attention to the unreal-ness of the space. In a real city there are small rises, hills that were never razed, depressions, streets that are banked for rainwater run-off...that's the next thing to add to the scene.

In between shots I've been surfing the CGSociety.org forums, particularly the character modeling threads and my next project, after this, is gonna be some whacked out game/movie character.

Will probably post a screen of the city tomorrow.

Didn't get much done tonight

I'm blaming it on a late start and residual tiredness from the week.

I sat down around 11:30, intending to block out the first few shots and output some playblasts - thus starting the animated part of the animatic. Early on, 2nd shot of the night, I ran into some trouble with the mesh on the main character model. It's not a show stopper, but I'll have to move on without the model over the course of the weekend.

James is lead char. modeler/rigger/char. TD on this thing and I'm pretty sure that if I tried to dive into his mesh/rig, I'd screw it way more than I'd actually help it.

Eh, c'est la vie. It's just past 1am now and I'll probably try to figure out one more shot before I call it a night. More tomorrow. Much more tomorrow.










(Image is my little workspace, active camera on the right. The end of the move on shot #02 is what's framed up. At least, it's what shot #02 looks like as of 1am this evening.

Oh, and all the geometry is mad-low-rez, for blocking purposes only. Once we figure out what buildings are actually in each shot, they'll be rebuilt/textured/lit, etc.)