harkyman.com » Animating with Blender

Snowmen Will Melt Your Heart

admin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:57:54 +0000

I’m completely out of time, so I’ll call it done. Below you have HD embeds of Snowmen Will Melt Your Heart on both Vimeo and youtube. Pick your favorite.

I also made a 1920 x 1080 render of the coda shot for my desktop backgrounds. Gets me in the holiday spirit.

Cheers!

Vimeo:

youtube:

And finally, the 1920 x 1080 still:

Compositing woes on the last shot

admin — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:21:56 +0000

In my last post, I put up a link to a rough render of the last shot of Snowmen and said that it needed effects. Particularly, I wanted to include multiple particle systems for laser blasts, dynamic paint on the ground where the lasers hit the snow, and smoke simulations coming from the impact locations. I ran into some major challenges with rendering and compositing.

The first challenge was that halo particles always render behind faces with z transparency. So, for example, when the snowman blasts the camera directly, it simply doesn’t work with the zTransp sky in the background. Breaking the lasers out into a separate render pass and carefully recompositing fixed that.

The next gripe was that I could not get dynamic paint to render. The object it was supposed to paint on had previously been vertex painted, and the two were not playing nicely together. I had to do some serious workarounds to finally make it happen.

Finally, there were issues with the smoke. The renders were looking okay until I added some defocusing into the mix. The cube object that was the domain for the smoke was screwing up the z values within its volume, which obviously blows up defocus results. Even putting it on its own render layer and disabling it in the main one didn’t solve the problem. In the end, I had to selectively bring objects into a new scene and remove the smoke domain from the main scene, then put renders from multiple scenes together in comp.

While this was frustrating (cost me something like two days of work), I’m actually glad that it happened. The details of the process by which I discovered the problems and experimented to find a solution will make a great case study for the rendering and compositing chapter of Blender Productions, as well as providing some good instructional material for the simulations chapter. As always, my goal in things like this won’t be to necessarily teach about how to solve any specific problem, but how to approach complex problems in general.

Rough render of last shot

admin — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:32:43 +0000

Did a straight to video render last night of the last shot. Still some tweaking to do, and I have to add all of the effects like snow, lasers, smoke etc. I can see the end of the tunnel though!

Run Away! from Roland Hess on Vimeo.

Production still from Shot 1

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:11:09 +0000

In an older post, I put up something from the opening shot. I’ve changed a good amount since then: replaced proxy characters in the background with unique models, tweaked the compositing pipeline, refined the main character, updated set models, etc. This is now pretty close to the final look (older one here):

That’s gonna leave a mark

admin — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:43:36 +0000

Click for full size:

Swirling snow in an overhead shot

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:50:04 +0000

Here’s a very brief (3 second) clip from a rotating overhead shot. Should be viewable in HD:

Shot 7

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 02:16:58 +0000

Did some work on the ground for the main set so that we have blacktop along the edges of the snow now. Click for full size (720p).

Shot 3 Coming Along

admin — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:46:12 +0000

There are only 9 shots in the whole thing, so does this mean I’m 1/3 of the way done? Not quite, but…

Click to embiggenify.

Sets and materials…

admin — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:52:50 +0000

Getting close to materials and settings that I like for render. Still some work to do on sets. Click for full size.

Peek!

Animating with Blender available for Kindle

admin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:08:13 +0000

Very cool news! Animating with Blender is now available for Amazon’s Kindle.

Now, besides being called the “top recommendation” among all books about short animation production by one reviewer, it is also available for perusal on your Kindle or iPhone with Kindle app.

You can bop over to check it out here.