Third Exterior Shot Complete

July 3rd, 2009 by Steve | Posted in 3d, progress |

This took about a week and a half, including the conversion to Maya. Render overrides are already breaking, but at least rendering is considerably faster on the farm (an hour instead of days). When renderlayers work, they’re very convenient, but I think there’s a bug in Maya’s UI where, when switching layers, stuff occasionally fails to update in the UI and it breaks an override setting. I could never get the final gather toggle to obey the overrides, though at least with surface settings I can just assign a new surface per layer for things like flashing lights, which I would only want to render in their own pass. Assigning new surfaces works when surface override settings break (and good lord, never try to create a layer override on an attribute with a complicated expression attached to it).

The smoke element was composited in, purchased through always useful Detonation Films. I was planning on adding a few quick bursts of smoke from multiple thrusters, but decided to move on instead. Gotta be your own boss and client.

Later tonight I’ll begin blocking out shot #4, which features the antenna dish smashing into a girder. I’m going to see if I can get away with using deformers before I venture into nCloth/rigid bodies, as the smashing is pretty simple - the dish will just deform/bend a little and break off. Perhaps I can layer a bunch of sparks to cover up the lack of dynamic simulation. Grain it, blur it, ship it!

Flea and Dock both in Maya. Back to work.

June 27th, 2009 by Steve | Posted in 3d, production |

The Dock and the Flea are both in maya and ready for shots. Both meshes, in my opinion, actually gained something through the conversion process, both look more ’substantial’, and I think I like the Maya pass at the lighting setup for the Dock better than the Lightwave version. Writing expressions and being able to create custom attributes was great, and Maya, so far, has behaved as it should. We’ll see once I throw the Flea mesh into the Dock, which will push the scene over 1.5 mil. polys.

I make all of the big decisions shortly after crawling into bed

June 22nd, 2009 by Steve | Posted in Uncategorized |

Because of the absence of Oliver’s render farm, and because of the growing need to get this thing done, I’m converting all of the Lightwave assets to Maya so I can utilize SCAD’s farm. It’s probably what I should have done in the first place, had other various projects not soured me to Maya. But at this point, I’d rather deal with Maya’s quirks and inconsistencies than sit around for 11-hour render passes.

Two Days, Two Shots

June 17th, 2009 by Steve | Posted in production, texturing |

After settling down in the new house, I’ve found the time to complete two leftover comps from this past year: close shots of fingers hitting the glass display buttons. These were troublesome because I had to actually create not only the glass surface + reflections, but the old fashioned soviet push button panels behind them. These weren’t actually that bad, I used some textures I had generated from flickr photos two quarters ago and modeled some of the basic shapes for interactive lighting. The reflections worked out as well, and I was able to track specs of dirt and scratches on the live action glass to get the CG refections to shake when the panel is struck.

Second Exterior Shot Finished

May 20th, 2009 by Steve | Posted in 3d, progress |

Things have been slow because we’ve been moving (and still are). Here’s the second shot. I’m starting on the third today, and then I’ll call it quits for this quarter. It’s been a good run, but things will really start to pick up over the summer when I finish everything that I haven’t finished so far!

Dock Assets Complete - First Exterior Shot Done - Second Shot Coming

May 14th, 2009 by Steve | Posted in 3d, production |

The dock’s been finished just in time for the first shot’s due date (which was earlier this week). Managing multipass rendering in Lightwave turned out to be a nightmare, and took two days just to finagle render passes into different scene files. On the upside, I learned which passes I can consolidate next time. I’m trying to push out one more final shot by next Tuesday with two more shots set up. These last two shots will have dynamics imported as point caches from Houdini, which I’m sure will be absolutely exhilarating to get working. This leaves me with four shots by the end of the quarter, with the pipeline in place to do the remaining 11 shots over the summer.

Lightwave Linux Farm under WINE

May 7th, 2009 by Steve | Posted in Uncategorized |

Lightwave Linux renderfarm is a go! Have to run the nodes under WINE, but there’s no noticeable speed loss. This means I can use the awesomeness that is Oliver’s gigantic 28-cpu renderfarm to render my Lightwave shots.

Flea Model Finished - Dock/Assets In Progress

May 3rd, 2009 by Steve | Posted in 3d, progress, sets |

The hero ship is done (well it was done a week ago, but I’ve been blog-procrastinating). With the ship out of the way and definitely using Lightwave for everything but dynamics, I’ve started constructing the dock superstructure, drawing heavily from industrial reference and the death star tunnel from Return of the Jedi. The plan is to construct a framework that will extend the length of the dock tunnel (this is done, see below), then construct a dozen various pipes, assemblies and doohikies that can be scaled and rotated and placed around the set, per the needs of each shot. In the image of the dock below, the mockup of the Flea has been thrown in for size comparison.

Flea Modeling Update, Pt 7

April 21st, 2009 by Steve | Posted in 3d |

Almost done with the Flea. The mission pod module at the top remains, and some touch up work (replacing the second cargo pod texture with something that isn’t on the first).

Oliver and I have been running tests concerning just using Houdini for dynamics sims and bringing everything back into Lightwave for rendering. More on this later (we have to run some tests).

Flea Modeling Update, Pt 6

April 16th, 2009 by Steve | Posted in 3d, texturing |

I’ve done some work on the engines. I’ve been having an interesting time getting them to fit with the rest of the ship look-wise; I think they’ll have to have harsher edges and some greebles.

Work on the cockpit/head area is proceeding, with texturing almost done. I decided to include an ad for the glass panels that actually cause the ship’s demise, maybe someone will see that and laugh .