The completed piece...

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:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
A diversion...

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!

Cheers!
Daniel

Stay tuned...

I spent all day yesterday setting up my render passes and rendered my first frame at 8:09 last night. I have two computers rendering around the clock and tomorrow I am borrowing my dad's macBook add to my little "render farm."

OK, it's not really a render farm but I'll explain it all soon. I'll also explain all of my passes - and what a pass is for those of you that don't know what I am talking about - after the piece is up (and I've caught up on my sleep).

Sorry I don't have any images to show right now. It will all pay off if you can hold out a little longer. The project is due on Monday night so I will put it up before that - unless I am rendering up to the last minute and don't have time...

On second thought, I'll post the project on Tuesday morning afternoon evening after I wake up.

Well, if you must have something to look at, here is my final from my first semester in the program.

Stay tuned! (Why do people still say that?)

Cheers!

Daniel

Process part 4...

It's 1:15 in the morning so I'm keping this one short. Part four...process...basic materials...finished piece...

Part One, Part Two, Part Three...

Started:

After Texturing:

This is my first lighting pass:

It still needs some finessing and I need to put the character in and light him as well.

More to come. Stay tuned.

Cheers!

Daniel

Oh! It's officially my birthday now.

Process Part 3...

This is the third part of a series where I'm going through my process of taking a scene from the basic materials to the finished piece. Click here to start at part one. Part two is below this post or you can click here.

Once again, here's where we started:

(click on images to make them bigger)

In part one I researched real-world examples of what we were trying to create. In part two, I began the process of assigning materials to all of the objects in the environment and, in turn, assigned various textures to different attributes of those materials to control their color, reflectivity, texture, etc...

Now, I assigned materials and textures to my character's skin, hair, eyes, teeth, fingernails, and clothes.

Here's where I am now:

I still have to "dirty up" the environment to match the feel of the character but, for now, I have to get to lighting the scene. I have to turn the entire piece by the 14th of December and lighting & rendering will take a while. If I can get it lit with time to spare, I will go back and start to age the environment, starting with the pieces that will make the biggest impact. I also have to populate the shelves with plates, cans, condiments and stuff if there's time.

There won't be.

I'll do it after the semester is over to get it ready for my reel.

More later. Stay tuned in...

Cheers!

Daniel

The process continues...

This is a continuation of an earlier post where I started going through my process of taking a scene in Maya from the basic materials to a fully finished piece.

To refresh your memory here is the scene we started with:

(as always, click on an image to see it bigger)

I did a ton research and found a lot of reference images that I liked and began the process of applying materials and textures to all of the objects in my scene.

Here is where I am now:

As you can see, there is still a long way to go before the texturing is done. Everything looks a little too clean and new. I have to add some dirt and scratches to everything and "bend and dent" the metal appliances a little. It needs a "lived in" feel.

I started to work on that with the copper stew pot and the rest of the pots. They have separate textures applied to modify their color, bump, specular color and reflected color. Here is a close up of the pot with just a straight material applied to it:

The next step, in addition to "dirtying" everything up, is to texture the character - his clothes, skin and hair.

Then I have to light the scene and render it out. So far, a single frame takes 90 seconds to render. The scene is 375 frames long. 375 frames x 1.5 minutes per frame = 562 minutes = 9.375 hours. That will increase once I add the animated character, camera moves, light refraction off of the metal...

It's due on the 12th of December. Ugh.

I gotta get back to work. More later.

Cheers!

Daniel

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...

Our friend Todd Stashwick has, of late, been living a geek's dream life.  He has been a costumed/makeupped(?) demon on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, a Vulcan on Star Trek Enterprise, Dracula on Supernatural, a terminator on Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, and a costumed/super-powered villain on Heroes.

There are trading cards of his character from Buffy and Angel.  Pretty cool right?  Right.  But now the game has changed.  He is in the webcomic for Heroes.  You can check it out here.  Apparently it's chapter 153 so you will have to catch up.  Hurry, I'll wait.  Although I have never seen Heroes (I missed the boat in the beginning and then it was too late to catch up) this looks really cool.  We are going to have to get caught up fast so we can watch it when Todd's episodes start airing.

So, there it is, he is forever immortalized in a comic book.  What is that you say?  It's only a web comic?  Well, I guess you didn't know that at the end of every season they print a graphic novel of the entire season's webcomic, did you?  No, I guess you didn't.  O.K. then.

So to sum up, for the slow ones in the crowd, there is nothing greater for a geek than having yourself immortalized in a comic book.

Except being made into an action figure.

Congratulations Todd.

Cheers!

Daniel

P.S. Somewhere in our apartment is a picture of me as a Simpsons character drawn by an actual Simpsons illustrator.  It was given to me as a gift and I love it.  If I could find it I would show it to you but right now I can not, for the life of me, locate it.

Worldwide web premiere...

People have been asking us when we were going to post our film "Marlena" online.  For those of you who don't know, it is a short film we did back in 2006.  Here it is...enjoy!



We actually shot this film over our wedding anniversary weekend.  We had just bought our Canon XL-2 and were hesitant to spend more money on an anniversary trip.  But then, in a stroke of genius, we decided that if we could turn the trip into a shoot, we could justify going.  We chose Las Vegas and set out to write a film noir (perfect for Vegas) that we could do with just one actor and a one-man crew.

Over the next month, our story began to take shape during nightly brainstorming sessions on walks to the Santa Monica Pier.

"We can't go anywhere for our anniversary this year.  We spent too much on the camera."

"What if we went out of town and made it a shoot?"

"We would have to drive."

"Santa Barbara?  Wait, no.  Vegas!"

"Perfect!"

"So what happens in Vegas?"

"Stays in Vegas."

"Stay on track...stop kidding around."

"How about noir?"

"That works.  And in black and white, too."

"We'd have to shoot it in the hotel room."

"I have my old wedding dress.  And we have a bottle of champagne..."

And from there the seed of a story was planted.  We had been watching a lot of classic film noir and knew it had to be a downer.  But what kind of downer...murder, kidnapping, betrayal?  Things began to fall into place.  Daniel's background as a wedding photographer inspired the use of stills.   We also knew that we couldn't control noise in a hotel, so it would have be told visually,  and remember, one crew member, one actor.

Luckily, we were blessed to have an amazing musician friend, Craig Henry, who in turn, had wonderful musicians in his circle.  The music was an essential element that contributed to the success of our film, and we are eternally grateful for the work that they did.

We built the story around what we had available.  We played to our strengths and interests.  We planned ahead, budgeted, storyboarded and wrote a script.  In the end our film cost us $1398 total.  If you subtract the travel costs, it set us back $849.

Throughout 2007 and 2008 it was accepted into Reno Film Festival, Big Island Film Festival, Crested Butte Reel Fest and Sedona International Film Festival.

Everybody has stories to tell.  A film doesn't have to bankrupt you.  Get creative, plan ahead and you don't have to spend thousands of dollars.  Good luck!

Cheers!

Daniel and Brigitte