I know, it's been a while but we've been really busy lately so there are going to be a bunch of updates soon!
I have been doing a lot of tests for an upcoming film project and working with SynthEyes a lot and testing integration of cg characters into live action footage. I also took some time to put a Camera Tracking reel together (which I have been meaning to do for a while now.) Make sure to watch it in HD and full screen!
Also, Please check out the brand new Maya Generalist reel that I (finally) put together.
More to come about the short soon so check back often. Or better yet, add the RSS feed to your email client.
As promised, here is a link to one of the projects that we have been working on here at Tower 26 Films.
Daniel was the editor, colorist and assistant director on a music video for a web series called The Stalker Chronicles. The video is chapter 3 in a 9(?) episode series. Each episode has a different theme and this one was inspired by a blend of Vaudeville, Old World Carnivale, and Silent Films of the early 1900's (specifically George Melies). Jamie Moniz and Genie Willett created, write and produce. They bring different director for each episode - fun, right?!
This episode was directed by our friend Todd Stashwick, who actually requested Daniel for the project. Thanks Todd!
You can watch it below. To watch it in HD, watch it here. But, please, go to their website and check out the rest of the series and click on the episodes there so they get the youtube views that are such a valuable commodity in the digital age that we live in. The first three episodes are up now with more to come soon. The website also has descriptions of the different film and theater styles that they are referencing. They are all really fun so go and check it out.
Thanks for watching!
More soon, so keep checking in.
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Happy New Year!! (I know, I’m almost a month late – when I started writing this it WOULD have been New Years Day)
This is part five of a series of blog posts where I documented my process of taking a scene from the default materials stage to a finished textured and lit piece. If you missed the rest you can find them here:
I know, I said that I would post this the Tuesday after my final was due. What can I say? I’m sorry.
The job that we have been working on took over so we could get it to the clients by the first of the year – today to be exact (remember, I started writing this at the first of the year). We made the deadline and are awaiting feedback on any final tweaks. More on this project soon.
So, here it is, the completed piece. Below it I will also put a “making of” video that shows many of the steps in the process and some of the layers that were composited to make the finished piece. (watch it in HD)
There you have it. Weeks worth of work for 13 seconds of animation (months of work if you count the modeling and animating as well).
For the nerds, geeks, curious and family (obligated) all of the “Making Of” stuff is below. It’s full of tech stuff, data, illustrations and examples. You’ve been warned…
To recap: I started with a scene that was grey with only the default material assigned to everything; I assigned materials that gave each object its color, texture, reflectivity, among many other attributes and then I added lights to create an environment and set a tone. Then came render time...
Rendering – an art unto itself. Of the many ways that you can render a scene it all boils down to, really, two ways – the lazy way and the hard way. To render a scene the lazy way you make sure the scene looks the way you want it, you set a range of frames to render and you start the render. If you have a complicated scene this can take a looooooong time. In my case, to render out one frame with this method (without motion blur or depth of field) took 4 minutes – multiply that by 376 frames and you see that this scene would have taken 25 hours to render. Not as long as the hard way but I only get the scene in one layer – if I want to change or fix anything, I have to start all over again.
To render a scene the hard way you divide the scene up into separate passes – a pass can be anything from a single object that you want on its own layer, all of the reflections for the scene, a character that you want to isolate, the background, shadows… – basically anything you want control over can be rendered out as a separate layer.
Once you have the separate passes (layers) you have to composite them. Which means that you take all of the separate elements and put them together into one seamless piece. This way you can adjust each layer individually – a little darker here, blur that a little bit there, ad a little contrast to that layer…Also, as I said before if you need to change one element you can do that without having to render the entire scene all over again.
Here is a screenshot of the layers it took to put this together:
(as always - click the image to see it bigger)
On the left is the layers palette and on the right is my other monitor with the video image.
In upcoming posts I’ll get into more detail about each stage in the process individually. It’s taken me way too long to post this one so I’ll wrap it up here and let you enjoy the rest of your day.
The nerdy details: 3 computers took a combined total of 76 hours and 1 minute to render all of the separate layers over a period of 4 days. There was a total of 37 render passes 47 Layers in After Effects 131 hand painted photoshop texture files (see below for an example) 39 lights in the scene 6085 frames rendered Average render time per frame - .74 minutes Longest render - environment occlusion pass– 11 frames in 3hr 43min = 20min/frame Average amount of sleep – 3 hours/night.
Pretty soon we will be posting some of the recent work that has been keeping us so busy lately – So keep checking in!
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