The "ThoughtScore" Project

[traitor]

Wow, fantastic progress.

I love your self critique approach. You're really taking it seriously to self improve, and you're achieving it with gusto. congrats

[Grimreaper]

hello mate reading through this thread i can honestly say you have improved alot, its that noticeable lol keep up the good work some good details coming out of these works .

ps. i updated on my transformer if you wanna see.

[blenditall]

Woah... sudden improvements...
I was just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, Ok stuff, Ok stuff, Ok stuff... and then BAM it's like you had a blender epiphany or something.

[noidtluom]

Hello again, guys.

Sorry, I know my progress is quite slow, but I've got so many other things I also want to do (yes, programming is addictive), and school exams and such are really taking up a lot of my time. I really need a proper computer to do Blender stuff on. I haven't touched Blender in so long due to the fact that the only computer I have is a 240MB RAM laptop with a crappy built-in graphics card. Blender is getting quite laggy when I edit my meshes.

Anyways, here I am with another update.

OK, where to start...
I started with a more relaxed attitude, and decided to have fun a bit with the material of the Space Station. I probably wasn't very successful, but I kinda enjoyed the result, take a look:


After that, I decided to see what the station would look like in the movie itself. I still have a lot of work to do on the lighting to make it look more "dramatic", and I also have to texture the station. Comments appreciated:


Then moved on to Cicero. I was already pretty happy with what I had, but I was concerned that he did not look like that character he was meant to play. He is meant to a cranky old geezer. Emphasis on "old". I therefore pushed around vertices to get his face to something like this, which I think makes him actually seem "old":


Then started working on his clothes:


...and continued:


Notice the startling similarity to Proog. I think I should stray a bit away from that, and any comments as to how will be much appreciated. Therefore I played around with his face a little bit, changed the colour of his shirt and coat, pushed some vertices around and came about with this:


Then took a bit of a break from Cicero to work on Taras, the next main character in the movie. I looked back at the model, and realised that the way he was modelled really restricted the rigging. I also believed that the model itself could be a lot more ... detailed. So I Googled up some images of full-body armour, redesigned Taras, and started right away:


...continuing with his torso and started blocking out bits of his lower armour:


...drafting out the whole body with opposite colours to identify points of more detail...(haha, looks as though he is Superman or something wearing his underpants on the outside):


...finalising the details and perfecting the material. The background is simply there to show the minor reflectivity of the suit:


Note that his helmet is not ready, and this hasn't been rigged yet. However I'm pretty happy with how he turned out.

Then, I started wondering how to make the forest scene in the beginning. A major problem was my crappy computer. If I was as skilled as the Peach team and had a render farm at my disposal it would be slightly easier, but I was unfortunate. I tried messing around with textured planes for trees and dupliverts, but I failed miserably. I really need to see what's in the SVN builds about grass, I've read a lot about some new grass thing for rendering a lot of grass but I need an introduction (hint: please help me find a place to learn about this!). If you are interested in how I failed, take a look:


I then moved on to how to make clouds. In the beginning of the movie (yeah, I need to release my storyline up here soon) the camera will zoom into the earth from space into the forest and so I need some cool clouds...and BlenderNation provided the answer! A wonderful guy called Alan had developed a cloud generator! I'll need a more powerful computer to generate the type of clouds I want to achieve, but this test was more than enough to tell me that these clouds were perfect (just load, default generate, render. No other edits):


Well, that's about it for now! Looking forward to your comments! I am about to have a whole stack of exams, so I cannot work on this project until after that, which will be in June...so see you in a very long time!

[Nickster]

Its July! One month has gone! C'mon noidtluom!! If i have ever seen some progress, its here! Your work is like, excellent! You have got to continue!

[sebbonaparte]

I just found this thread, and I have to say, in the beginning I thought you were bad (to be totally honest), but you suddenly hit something when you started working on Cicero's realistic skin texturing, and from there on all of your work is looking awesome! Keep up this project, because I really enjoy reading your progress and watching you grow as an artist.

[yogyog]

I really want to hear the storyline - the characters are so diverse.

[noidtluom]

@The Blender-er: Thank you so much for your support! I was a bit when nobody replied

@sebbonaparte: When I started this project I had only about a months experience of Blender. What I normally do when I want to learn a skill is when I'm a very low level, I set myself a crazily ambitious project, then just work slowly up towards it.

@yogyog: Yes, I will be releasing the storyline in the next update probably.

Ok. It's been two months since the last update.

I hope everybody realises this is a long time project. I have no intention of stopping the project, but I also have no intention of devoting all my time to it. I will progress at my own rather slow pace (especially because I have many other projects at the same time).

Ok, where to start. Where to start.
Alright. I took a look at Cicero's mesh again. Needless to say ... it was a pretty messy mesh. Definitely not animation friendly at all. So, what do I do? Yes, that's right. I redid Cicero. For the third time. And the last time. However this time I had a pretty clear idea of what he would look like, I had reference pictures, I had guides from Jonathan Williamson's awesome resources, and I was motivated to try it again. Here's how it turned out after some work and getting the basic shapes:



Continuing work by working up the shapes for the mouth and forehead:



Finishing off the basic shape ... not yet done any tweaking so it still needs a lot of work:



Did a HUGE amount of tweaking and also started to add the basic SSS skin layers as documented by that very interesting article in the BlenderMagazine about how to use skin and SSS:



More and more and more tweaking again ... adding diffuse and bump maps. Also textured the eyes:



Again, nothing much to say here except that this process is basically a LOT of vertex pushing until the shapes look ok. Just move, rotate, look, move again. here I also redid the eye texture:



Removed eye texture for final updates, then made this render. Skin SSS dealed really well with the lighting! Again, lots of minor tweaks here and there:



... and finally, and a LOT of tweaking (again), I started smoothing shapes out to the original sketch I had drawn (sorry didn't scan it) of what I wanted Cicero to look like. If there's anything I learnt here that could easily be told, don't just start on an object and expect it to turn out perfect. Get an image in your mind of what you want to create, and a lot better if you are able to sketch it too. Here's the final FINISHED Cicero. You know what? This is wallpaper size!



Alright. Since I didn't want to rework the clothes on Cicero (save that for the next update), I decided to work on Taras. Again, Taras' mesh as you can see was based upon MakeHuman, and not to be rude, but MakeHuman isn't exactly the friendliest mesh for animations. Therefore I took up my pencil and paper, collected about a dozen reference pictures (like from games, starcraft, unreal tournament, star wars, bioshock, etc) and sketched out what I wanted him to look like.

Here's the model done:



... and after adding materials and minor edits here and there:



Note that though it might look slightly out of proportion, these proportions are perfect (matched upon the virtruvian man) and the reason it might look a bit weird is because of how the person fits in the armour. However I think that when animating his movements the armour won't look too oversized. The reason I chose for this bulky armour is because I didn't want to design an armour made for combat. This movie is not made for action. (oooh, watch out, spoilers!) The suit is meant to be able to sustain the internal environment of the person and adjust to any external environment. Hence the many tubes, and the rather explicit crotch guard (idea taken from starcraft). Any game fans (except for Halo) who enjoy games which feature some heavily armoured guy should recognise several ideas taken from various areas of the armour. Alright, enough waffle about that, I also rendered with bloom node a full wallpaper sized image. Set it as your wallpaper!



Ok, then I went back to work on the space station. I added materials, did a whole bunch of nasty fixups to allow for easy animation to rotate each of the wheel levels. I also had to remake the Earth (thank you KevinW for your wonderful planet resources and material references). Then I took my storyline, and remade what I imagined to be one of the first scenes in the movie. Wonderful! I think it's ready. Here is a render, wallpaper size just ready for your computer.



In my storyboard I also required a one-man transport pod. Therefore I decided to start designing it. A year ago some friends and I joined a space settlement design competition and we learnt a huge amount on these cool design stuff and technical info. Therefore I used some of this information to design the pod. Here you can see a start on the heat shield and the basic framework as well as shock absorbers.



Stabiliser fins and cooling liquid pipes as well as actual pod added. The design is meant to be so that the pod has the ability to snap in half, to release the pod.



Ok, I didn't want to go into too much detail for this, as in the movie this pod is barely shown for more than 5-10 seconds, and during that time ... it's moving REALLY fast or silhouetted against something else. So here it is in place with the Earth. As you probably noticed, I got some glowy ideas from Creature Factory's trailer.



Then I decided, alright. In my movie, I need a forest, it's one of the first scenes, but I haven't even started making it! Oh no! What do I do but start making it. I tried out many tree generators such as PlantNG, L-System, Gen3, Peach's tree gen, and also third party tools but in the end I stuck with Gen3. pretty awesome application. This was a HUGE challenge. My computer is an old 5 year laptop with crappy inbuilt graphics card and 1gig RAM, not a huge renderfarm. I started with this render, made about 10 trees, then it just epic crashed. Even with everything set on bounding box, selecing an object had a lag of about 20 seconds IF I'M LUCKY. If I'm not lucky, my computer crashes. Wow - Linux crashing? No way! Even once I decided to switch to a much higher end nVidia graphics card with 2 gig RAM and brand new laptop (not mine) to help make the scene, but it was running Windows and crashed more than twice as much. Maybe Windows is too weak to support this.

Anyway, here's how it turned out:



Alright. I had a general idea of what was going on, so I deleted a half the trees, then rendered the tree and mapped it as an alpha texture to a plane then duplicated the plane, rotate 90 degrees to form a cross of the texture. This is a very useful trick. Placed about 10 of them in the background, repositioned the light, added a couple close to the camera, added some forest floor plants and a dirt texture for a secondary ground, and also a forest textured mapped plane in the background which you can hardly see. Here's how it turned out:



Then in my movie, the forest also has to have a scene where it keeps on focusing and unfocusing (imagine somebody being knocked out, that kinda thing). So I had to check whether or not it blurred nicely and didn't end up looking like a green abstract painting. Needless to say it turned out pretty good!



In that scene, the focusing object will be Taras kneeling down at the very center of that tiny forest clearing. Just letting you know so that you have an idea of what is going on there. However, I'm very pleased with how that forest turned out!

Ok. I've typed 98 lines of text. Until the next update then guys! Thanks for your support, and appreciate any comments.

[NakedDrummer]

Wow...

I really like the way you you do all that stuff, and btw.... Cicero is great. kinda reminds me of that NVidia Head, they used for Graphic Cards Power Demo or something...

Keep on doing great work :-)

[Nickster]

How can you not love yourself after making such realistic things? It's not fair, the texturing is too dificult! Its just that I can't colour that well, especially on a computer. You have got to tell me how you did the texturing on Cicero! He (as well as you) are just too awesome! Do a tutorial, or atleast post the UV part.

And please post some updates, I really like your work!

[Topcat]

I must say your renders have increased in detail and complexity! Even I can see that from simply scrolling through your pictures at speed!

[TheANIMAL]

Polorix is closed, i'd love to see the pictures. Can you re-upload?

[musk]

Yes please reupload (best is to attach to this forum) and could you go through your posts and remove the links as the login popup is really annoying.

[hessiess]

Please can you remove all the links to Polorix.net. They make this thread imposable to browse due to the phethera of pop-ups .

[Len]

Hey Noidtluom! About friggin time you updated your image links dude!! :P Polorix was creating HAVOC! You've made some kick-ass progress on your project, I am PLEASANTLY surprised!

Man that forest looks so real, incredible job bro! You're very talented.

[hessiess]

Your skin material looks good, except the mirrored texture is making it look weird.

[dudewithasock]

Holy cow, I just saw this thread, and am amazed at the awesome progress in only three pages. Keep up the fantastic work, noidtluom.

[noidtluom]

It's now almost the end of June 09, and I have not touched Blender in ages. Aaaaagggeeeessss.

Blame it all on the other areas of life.

@NakedDrummer, @Nickster, @Topcat, @Len, @hessies: Thank you for all your comments...and yes I took some time off to update the thread's images.

Unfortunate to say but I have not been able to make much progress at all. I am currently at a standstill with this clip for the beginning of the movie:
Click to watch it: http://vimeo.com/3955331

I really don't know how to continue it. I am not happy at all with it other than the earth-zooming-out section (which I plan to add some small text overlayed above) and think it needs a redo.

Sorry for the rather crappy and anticlimatic update. My Blender work has really stalled and I don't know how to boost it up again.

Any tips?

[Guiseppe]

Dont stop this project man!! It turned out very well.

I really like the scene very professional!



Sorry for the rather crappy and anticlimatic update. My Blender work has really stalled and I don't know how to boost it up again.:


Well how did you start? This project has evolved exponentially, and you had so much energy in the start.

[WWK]

wow those models are incredible . Thats a beautiful material on the suits how did you make them?