the room_03

The last couple of days I was really getting into the animation and final tweaking of the room scene.
And since of today I am happy with how it looks.
The still posted here is from the animation so it all looks like this.

I am pretty happy with that.
I exported enough vray matte ID passes with it so I could tweak the coloring of Timmy in nuke.
Also I used a different render technique for the background than for the character, vray has some different methods for those and the bruteforce one for the character worked great without to much hassle, so I was glad for that.

It was a fun task to come up with a nice grade.
This looks cool but it will not mean this is the final grade of the movie.
That will evolve over time fcuz but for now I am happy to get something worth while.
I am really looking forward to spend some time with the project and since it is almost x-mas time I can and therefore will.
I want to finish the in house scenes and play with'm to get a feeling for the animation.
Since this is my first real animation I am eager to dive in and I love to work on the detail which you have to put in the animation it to get it to come across as believable as possible.

So more to follow soon.
Have a great x-mass!

Nick

the room_02

I have animated my first scene incl Timmy and I am rendering it right now.
I am rendering the background separate from the foreground.
Just finding a workflow to get those scenes rendered correctly and fast.

This is a still from the first animation scene.

I am comping this in Nuke, I love the channel workflow but since fusion is free to use I will switch to that compositor.
It will take some time to get that workflow down but it is a cool piece of software for serious comping and I have used it back at filmschool so good to see it becoming available for free or the pro version for a good price.

There is a lot to be done so I will occasionally put some imagery on this blog.

Bye.

the room_01

I couldn't contain myself and revamped the room:D

another render

I am almost done with the rigging so I made some poses:D
Can't do that without a composit:D

character character fix

I had a bit time last weekend so I made some screenshots of what I was doing.
First of all, I love the new interaction tag c4d 16 has come up with.

After seeing the introduction of the tag we where like omg this is a bit to late but awesome.
So I went on with the facial rig but there was something wrong with the main bone, it was twisted so I was thinking should I fix this all or try the interaction tag.

The second it was fcuz and I was looking at the tutorial of Chris Schmidt(http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/page/3/) and copied some of the expresso in my setup and it was kinda working.
A lot of trial and error with hooking up the posemorphs with expresso but eventually it worked out.
I modelled a bunch of poses and connected them and it works great.

You can assign a posemorph to a selection of the model.
And when you move your cursor it measures the distance traveled and maps that to a resulting percentage of the posemorph.

I realy love the fact that I could do it, I am by all means not a technical guy and I struggle with everything.

I used the sculpt tools to enhance and position my facial expressions.
Those work great.
I also love the fact that it is not destructive, you don't have to weight nothing, you can keep adding poses and alter as you see fit.

I will make an animation soon but for now some stills I made.
These are more of the model, I redid the painting of the face again.
My new workflow is this, I texture it in photoshop/bodypaint in standard c4d texture/shader mode.
Then I save the texture and it updates the texture that I use in my vray scene.

There are some minor things to be done but I am almost ready to start animating with this character.

See you soon!

back to the village

Soo finally I had some time to catch up with my project, I was doing some abstract 3d animation in between so that had to be done first gotto pay them c4d yearly upgrades...

I was thinking about what I was going to do and since I was waiting for c4d 16, I was going for texturing the village.
Furthermore I decided that I would start the light situation of the village just before magic hour and later on as the story progresses let the darkness play its roll.
So I have got a render and it is not there yet but it is good enough to show.

So I have used my village setup and started to throw on some textures, nothing fancy, just cubic mapping, it will work not on all places so I will have to fix some things eventually.
I have to fix the windows a bit, and the placement of the trees in the back to.
My lighting setup is fairly simple, an Hdri for global light and a physical sun light for direction of light and shadows.
I use GI, I tried without but I find this one nicer and it renders faster.
Also I put some trees in it and used a multimatte to colour correct it a bit.
Some snow has been added in post, I think that is best done in post or separate, these are long render times so if an animation where to be rendered it would be shitty if one snowflake would ruin it because it would go to fast or whatever.
Also I used optical flares to give it some feel of where the sun was coming from.
This I will eventually do with an external comp tag or light and use the 3D position to feed the flares position.

Render time is between 4 and 5 minutes and I find that a good starting position.
I will fill op the rest of the houses with textures soon and I am happy to see the textures work and give it an unique look to it.

Cheerio

Turntable_01

Some small things still to fix but this sexy boy is almost ready to die:D
Check out the turntable!!!

https://vimeo.com/101620758

Rigged that puppy

Sooo, finaly I rigged Timmy again but this time I will stick with it till the end...:D
Niels, also rigged the face and he did a really good job on that so I owe him lots of thanx for that!!!
The texturing is as good as done, perhaps some minor material tweaks but that is of no concern right now.
I had set it up to render and it kept crashing.
So I did send the file to Stefan, the guy from Vray to check my file out and he fixed it, I don't know exactly what he fixed but thing work right now.

This render here is just fast lit and no global illumination or ambient occlusion are present, still it looks really nice!

So here it is.
A turntable is coming up somewhere this week.

I did a little bit of color correcting, added some depth of field and gave it a little glow.

See ya.

new workstation and such

So it has been a while, but fcuz not without any work done.
I bought a super high end workstation so I am good for the years to come.
It is a 20 core machine so all the render power I can afford.
For the time I have it is nice to have a machine that works fast and gives me more instant feedback.
Also I like the improvements of the new vray 1.9 a lot of speedups in texture preview etc.

A colleague of mine is working on the facial rig of timmy so that is awesome and I had setup a flyover scene with 3d tree models instead of cards, the cards where ok but still did not have the detail I was hoping for.
The scene(370 frames) took 3days to render without GI and I am really happy with it.
I included motion blur in the render since I had a testrender and revision motionblur just gave to many artifacts.

This is a still of the flyover.
This will be the last render in a long time since animation and textureing is up next.

making things awesome

At the moment I am finishing the look of Timmy, I constantly feel it is not quit finished but I think I will never be completely satisfied.
So I will spend one more week on the texturing and than I will start rigging the character.
After completing Timmy I will start on Kathy but I guess I will be spending some extra time on whatever kind of rigging.
I also want a nice facial rig so I have to dive deep into things to make it work.

Also I bought a new computer, it is assembled as we speak and it will be the best awesome machine I will ever lay my fingers on.
Unfortunately it will be a windows machine but for 3D I have no other option.
It will have 2 times 10 cores so 40 threads and a great videocard, some solid state drives and all the good stuff that comes with it.

I will post a picture as soon as I have the thing:D

For now I will leave you with some stills of the revised Timmy.
I btw will use the cage deformer to drive a higher dense mesh of the jacket, I don't trust those displacement maps.
I redid the boots, tweaked the head some more, gave him more hair and some other minor things.

anamatic_v4

Sooo it has been a while, again...

I have tweaked the anamatic a bit cuz the ending was not quit what I had in mind.
I solved this and I am ok with this version for now.
Soooo I must show it to some people still and am doing this slowly.
I hope to have those comments within the next 2 weeks and than I will see what I will do with them.

Also I made some changes in the timmy benson model, I tweaked the eyes some more and am texturing the model with better textures.
After that I will get into rigging the puppet from scratch and get some nice facial rig setup or whatnot.

So lots to do!

anamatic_v3

I made it through last weekend, after pushing myself not to watch stupid yet awesome youtube vids.
The first complete version of the anamatic is done.
That is step 1 in a thousand but hey another step closer.
It was hard to find nice ways to tell the story and I am certain this will not be the last version.
Next weekend I will add music to make an atmosphere and start to delete and add shots/time/awesome camera moves etc.
So that will be fun, I am glad to have a rough sketch and now be able to view it as a whole.

After that when I think the idea comes across I will view it with some other people to get their opinion and do absolutely nothing with that:D
Noooo, it will be good to get some perspective.

Aight, closing up, see ya.

Nick

anamatic_V2

Sooo, a week straight into the anamatic and I am still bussy:D
I am at about 4 and a half minutes so I am getting SH!T done.
It is cool to watch the anamatic as it is, I am happy with it so far.
The shots are really cool, they look super nice.

So these are some of the shots, it works super nice to watch them all in one sequence, you directly find out if it works or not.
Sooo, I have got an hour left today and tomorrow I want to get really far with it all.

Mooooore to come.

story almost done/ start anamatic

So again it has been a while, I was involved in a commercial so I had February to get shit done.
This is the end result.
https://vimeo.com/88043427

Continuing, as the title displays I have rewritten a big part of my story, I wasn't completely happy with it soooo
whats new.
But this time it is quit ok, still some things to polish but I get the vibe and I am glad to get a good feeling about it.
It is dark, very dark but that is what I like for this short.
It will be slow pased and eventually take up about 8 minutes or so I guess.
Maybe a bit more..

So after the story bit I started to get my head around the way I would start with the anamatic.
I mean, the scenes and all must be named correctly and neat so that took me some time but in the long run this will definitely pay off.

So I made a scene in after effect to neat up my sjjjjit and give me a sense of where I am scene wise.

The animation is not really there, it is more a timing thing, most people would do a storyboard first but since I have my assets almost done I can do this instead, the story flow is in my head and no other people are involved so that is less communication hazard for me:D

Sooo, I have this week of so I hope to make some real progress on this.

Aight, see ya!

starting with the previz

Previz is about to begin, I fist finished the look of a flyover scene and now I am connecting my first 5 shots as one complete long shot.

So from now on I will post probably more previews than "final renders".

Also I fell in love with a new plugin called cm nodes, it makes texture generation more natural and keeps things organized, node based hence the name.
So download that plugin at cmstuff.com, it is awesome.
It is still a work in progress so there is still no good vray compatibility but it is on its way.

Cheers!

preppppin

Last christmassssss, whohohooo...
Well those bells sounded a while agoohoho but yeah, happy new year and what not to all of you.
I had an immense amount of free time which I fcuz did not use completely to my advantage but hey, I rested, watched a lot of movies and got fatter with all those nice meals:D
Sooo back to the program.
I mainly worked on getting my scenes ready to previz.
And that is almost done sooo I guess another month or so and I will be ready to previz this hell.

Also whenever I go to sleep and wake up I always walk through the story in my head and since I was/am not completely happy about certain things I am getting closer every day.
I am making the story and not only the part I will be showing in the short.
There will be something what happens before and after and that also makes the story viable.
But sometimes I doubt about things you will not know when the story will be told.

But yeah, time enough, I have enough work to do before I get into this drama...
These are all things I can fix, the main story line and flow of it stay the same.

So back to what I was doing, making things ready to roll previz wise.
Most of my scenes are done and are waiting to be used but there are some scenes like some forest scenes that I have to make.
Today I made a first step into that.

These are not to big of files unlike the village, that one is the biggest to date.

I also made a transition between the village and forest, soooo when going out of the village it just flows on.

I also worked on my mill scene, still not getting there but it is ready for previz.

Lighting is also a lot of finding out, I have an HDRI and let that one influence the fog and I have a directional light as moonlight, slightly and the lightposts are area lights>>object lighting.
Sooo that can take a huge amount of time tweaking and I am still not happy.
What I do like is the brownish look, I did not like to have it all blue, it is to obvious.
And this will perhaps give it some more unique feel.

 What to do next, what not fcuz, a shitload...
But slowly I am getting there.