Wednesday 25 April 2012

Animatic/Work in Progress

The video above sets out what I am aiming to do for my final film for the uni term. Its not turned out to be the most beautiful film but I have a few weeks to finish it and tweak bits and pieces. I was hoping to put in more animated pieces using the detailed model I have but am having to look at doing more parts of the film in after effects because of being limited by long rendering times from the model.

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Glowing Pods Video Test



The video was a test for the glowing pods sequence to go into my final video. It is supposed to imitate a timelapse of the building at night. The pods are flickering a bit too fast at the moment, I was intending for them to be lighting up individually as if someone was going inside them working out and then the glowing stops when they leave.

I used the still renders from the previous post and composited them together in After Effects. I used the Trapcode Plugin Shine on the pods to give them a better glowing effect. I used the Trapcode 3D Stroke Plugin to create the car lights, on top of this I applied the Starglow Plugin to make the car lights glow and the Wavewarp effect to add random movement to the lights. I used the a png file created from my selections render to create a mask to make the car lights reflections in the windows of the building [and the sky reflections]. The sky was some stock timelapse footage. I applied a gradient to the lower part of it and adjusted the hue to match my video.

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Glowing Pods Sequence






These are a few of the still images of a sequence I will be using in my film of the energy pods glowing at night as they are used by gym members. The green and purple image is a selection sets render allowing me to select the glass and pod materials to easily edit them in post processing.

Saturday 14 April 2012

Blender

Just about got the whole model into blender now. The lighting has been tricky to set up for this scene. I have only applied two materials so far, the metal mesh which uses an alpha map and the translucent material for the pods above. I had to delete the metal mesh walkway from the floor above as it was creating really noisy light effects as the environment light passed through it. The render took about 50mins so I'm still going to have to look at other ways of speeding up the process. I had to increase the samples from the default 3 to 14 to reduce other noise in the image but there is still a bit of noise - this is slowing down the render significantly. I still have a lot of other materials to apply so the rendering is going to get even slower - not sure this is a very practical way of making the video as a second of animated footage is going to take a day to render...


Friday 13 April 2012

Blender and Sketchup again...

After spending the last week trying to export my sketchup file to a format that I can import into blender I have finally got the entire model into blender... but the file is 1.8GB! Blender doesn't recognise the instances of componenets that were created in sketchup meaning every piece of geometry in the model becomes part of a huge mesh in blender.

To get the model into blender I had to break it down into 20 smaller parts in sketchup before exporting each part as an .obj file. I then had to import each of these parts individually into blender but couldn't get them to import properly into blender 2.6 or 2.62 (the most recent version) so had to go back to version 2.49 to import them. I then saved these as .blend files and appended each one into a master blender model - the model that is 1.8GB - without textures. The model is too slow to do anything with so I am going to try linking the different parts of the model into a master file rather than appending them - linking references the other file whereas appending makes a new local version of the file within the new model. Hopefully doing this will mean the model runs faster, I will be able to apply textures and materials in the smaller models and they will be referenced into the master model... that's the plan anyway.

Wednesday 11 April 2012

Twixtor - Slow Mo

I really want to have a play with a copy of Twixtor to experiment with slow mo effects. Twixtor tracks the motion in a video and then creates intermediate frames creating an artificial but convincing super slow mo effect.

Tuesday 3 April 2012

Mini Skimboard Edit

The sea was flat so i got the skimboard out for a quick session. Made a quick edit to reacquaint myself with the video software before starting on my uni video.