zaterdag 30 december 2017

next up

Sooo,

It is the time of the year that I have roughly 8 days to spend on Timmy. The past months I was super busy with some freelance work and another short movie. This short movie is a real filmed thingy and the edit is finished now. I still have to write some voice-overs for it and some additional shooting will take place in January. That will go smoothly I guess, also I have to finish some visual effects shots for it. I thought when we decided to do the short movie that it would not take so long as it did now.
But hey, that's how we learn. But the good thing is that I did something I never really had the courage to do someday. I always wanted to do shorts in my heart but after doing it it has given me so much knowledge and drive to do lots more.
Buuuut I have to get with the program and decided that I would do another one after WKTB is finished. Sooo I have do go deep and finish this thing. I have another week to work on it since it is vacation time and that is my favorite time of the year:D I wanted to do some more animation these last days but I am kinda happy with how the animation looks right now. I think I just have to go and make all the shots nice with more detail and textures etc and start rendering the damn thing.
My animation skills are not the best but I have done my best to get it as far as I could on pure feeling. I have the animation bible but I don't want to read it and follow everything in there. It is not advisable but hey I am a stubborn man and I have to invent the wheel my own way. It is not the way to go but I wanted it to be my thing on my terms. So the end result will not be pixar quality but a quality I will be happy with.

So from now on the fun begins and it is all about look and feel:D

I will dump some screenshots here when I have some.
Oh yeah some render news, at work we are trying cycles, I really like that in combo with x-particles and the settings are kinda sweet. Nevertheless I will render my short with octane still, I am curious how redshift will do the job so perhaps I will do a shootout between the 2, everything that works faster is better I guess since I have about 11 minutes of animation to render.
Oh yeah, love the x-particles update, those guys know what we love and I am glad they came up with cycles and made that available for us c4d users and get some nice results out of that.

Thats it, lets get to work.

Nick

donderdag 3 augustus 2017

wait for it

Hey there, again it has been a while since I posted anything on here. Well I haven't been sleeping for sure so what happened in the meantime..
I am working through the shots that need more love animation wise so that will take like another year I guess... but I am working on it.
But another thing I also have been working on besides freelancing like a mtfrfckr last 3 months is another short.
This short movie is a traditional short so are about to start filming it next week. It will encompass 3 days of shooting and the story is about the relationship of a boy and an older man in the not so far future. The world has changed but they did not and are in constant danger of being found.
I will post some more about that when I am finishing the film.

But now I have vacation and I will spend a lot of time on the short, I will try to squeeze in some wktb time cuz I want to finish this fucker asap. But that aint gonna happen so be patient with me.
What I fount out about myself last year is that I really really like telling stories and that this is something I like to pursue in the future. So I want to get this wktb short out of the way cuz I have some great ideas that can't be done now.

Strugglin aaah, but its a good struggle!

I'll keep y'all posted.


zondag 30 april 2017

fly

Hey there,

I thought lets put an update on here, it has been a while fcuz.
So good newsss by the way, I got engaged last week..we where in Italy for a short vacation and I phaaped the question! After almost 14 years it is about time to seal the deal so to speak.

But that aside I am working hard on my short fcuz and I am taking care of the flythrough.
It is a 2.0 version, I rendered it with octane on direct lighting settings.
The pathtracing option was to noisy for me and for a quick satisfying fix I was content with the first option. In post this fast moving camera shot can be tweaked to my hearts content.
And with that a screenshot is added fcuz.

So as many people hear and read and try to figure out what renderer to use I am also constantly struggling with that question. As you can read in the beginning of this blog I bought vray with the promise of having an ipr.. that came after 4 years or so and I was frustrated by the amount of issues I got myself into. So I completely abandoned vray, worst 700 euro's ever spend. And now recently all these renders came out and I am so interested but also in a big project like I am working on I can spend my time better that to do so.
What I decided was that a mega high end realistic look was not necessary and that my main thing was having access to a GI renderer without flickering in animation without hassle. Octane got my attention and also Arnold. I really like the super tight integration of Arnold and C4D but I have to be realistic that I can't afford to have this complete short rendered on a renderfarm..that is gonna cost a lot.

So Since Octane is really fast but has fcuz the issue that if the gpu is full like I have now, I have a 780ti with 3GB and that is a nice card but 3 gigs is not ok so I ordered a titan with 11 gigs and I hope I can insert that beast in my machine. And if needed I will buy a second computer with 2 more cards and that must be sufficient and that is more than I can afford with a wedding coming up:D

So like that greyscalegorilla dude says Arnold is da shit it is true but I cant afford to render everything on there so Octane even with its limitations is logically the only choice I have so far and perhaps redshift will be great who knows but shots are looking nice and feedback is ok so I am happy with this option for now.

Also I am doing some cloudshot, I probably try to do that with arnold but we will see. I checked a tutorial on Entagma, it has lots of Houdini tutorials and I think my brain can't handle Houdini I followed along with them just to make a nice cloud..and that cloud I will scatter to my hearts content to create a nice cloudscape before the flight through continues with the stuff in the screenshot above.

Due to the limited space for now on my graphics card I had to break the flight through up in 4 pieces and that will work nicely..sooo back to it, next up is animation of Timmy entering the room to get the ball of doom:D

Cheerio

zaterdag 11 maart 2017

almost full

Last time I made a post I was halfway there and now I am almost done...
And so far I am content with the result. I've come to the conclusion that I am at 80 percent of the awesomeness of most of the shots, some are better than others fcuz.
Every iteration makes it better so I think that when I have concluded the first complete draft it is still some work in the animation dept left, but that is ok

So what else did I do, well I redesigned the cabin in the woods, it is a horror short so there has to be a cabin in the woods, I had an rough idea so I made it look nice and there is still some work left but it goes nice with what I wanted it to be.

Also a part of the movie is a frozen moment where story lines are explained. For one why a frozen moment, well if I think about past events they are always frozen, it is a still not a movie clip that why and it works great for explaining some things. I had this shot for over 3 years in my head figuring out how to do it but I went in and it came together nicely so I am really happy with that being resolved.

Another thing I figured out was how to get decent snow on my forester plugin trees by 3d quackers.
It has a build in snow generator but that just didn't cut it detail wise so I used the mesher of x-particles which will give more control over metaballs than the built in version. That worked out great and I am super happy with that cuz I saw a great pack of 3d stock trees with snow for 150 dollars but they are to heavy geometry wise so this will do great.

Another thing I am wondering about as it comes closer every week is what to do with the rendering..
I want to use octane but I think I have to invest some more in an extra rig or something, I think I wait first and see how long the eventual shots take on 1 or 2 cards in my main rig. And then I will decide..

I will need another 2 months to finish this first draft to my hearts content so here is a still of the frozen moment..spoilerrr

zondag 8 januari 2017

Half

Been real busy with the project lately, I have put some real hard work in it for the past weeks. Sooo I am happy to say that I am halfway animating the darn thing. Not all the animation is worth mentioning for now but it is 90 percent there and that is good enough for me for now.
I will keep on doing this amount of work for the upcoming months and hopefully I will have a first draft ready within a few months. After that I will have to make the new beginning and the middle part which is not so much an animation animation thingy but more of a camera challenge.
I am working with my new laptop(dell xps15) and am doing some research for the new beginning with the flyover. There will be a gazzilion trees in there so I am trying out octane and that works great. But it is still a long way to go like all work for this project.

But I am optimistic that it will be great!
It won't be a pixar animation but the was never my goal, it was to make my vibe come to life in an animation and that is what it will be!