Science Fiction TV series for YouTube

I’ve spent a great deal of time world building. The goal was to create a science fiction universe about 600 years in the future that is scientifically plausible, meaning nothing contained within it can be disproven with present day science. I am really hoping to render using a real-time rendering engine like Eevee or Unreal Engine. To render acceptable quality animations with Cycles would take WAY too long or cost WAY too much money. I have a camcorder and plan to do facial motion capture and I plan on buying a bunch of cameras for triangulating 3D motion capture. As far as episodes go, I may write them all myself but I have also been considering having each episode written by someone different, such as members of some of the Facebook writing groups I am in.

I could use:
3d modelers/texture makers
music composer
animation/rigging/motion capture
voice actors and actresses
episode writers
set designers


Instead of writing a small book describing my universe, here is an example of a popular scifi topic, interstellar travel.

There is warp drive, wormholes, anti-matter drives, fusion drives and laser propelled light sails. From what I’ve read, warp drives and wormholes would require negative mass exotic matter, which may not even be possible, and even if it is possible, it may not be creatable, and if it is creatable, there are still major engineering challenges. For the other options, I made a spread sheet to do some ball park calculations. Beamed Core Anti-matter rockets have three huge problems, production efficiency (which is currently below 0.01% with a theoretical maximum of 50%), which means you would need a Dyson swarm collecting over 5% of the Sun’s energy and converting it into antimatter. Even then, it would take decades to make enough for a single colony ship. The second problem is storage density. Anti-matter is really hard to contain, and the more densely you pack it, the greater the chance it will collide with the wall and annihilate. With current methods, you would need so many storage vessels that the accumulated mass would negate the benefits of using anti-matter. The only option really is to make anti-hydrogen (with positrons) and freeze it and form a snowball, which is diamagnetic and could be levitated (never been done before). The third problem is gamma radiation and waste heat, which is so bad that it melts the nozzle. I even tried a really large wireframe-like nozzle to reduce the surface area being radiated, but I couldn’t get the numbers to work. The next option is fusion drives. It’s big problem is waste heat. Fusion is millions of degrees and the best known material can only handle like 3000 (CERN’s ITER is doing a very tiny amount of fusion, fusion rockets need to be orders of magnitude higher). Making the nozzle a wireframe to reduce surface area and making it larger to allow more radiation to escape, didn’t work. The last option is laser propelled light sails, which are actually faster than anti-matter and fusion drives (assuming best case scenarios for both). A laser propelled light sail could get to the nearest star in 30 years. The problem with it is, that it’s going so fast, crashing it would completely destroy it and could even possibly cause fission. The plan I settled on is to use a laser propelled light sail, with a second sail which can be released, then when it needs to slow down, the laser is bounced off the front light sail, speeding it up and slowing the back light sail and payload down. The payload would be a self-replicating nanomachine, which would replicate exponentially and within a couple decades it would have built a large industry, a satellite network, space stations and artificial incubators. Then colonists could use nanomachines to copy their mind, send the data to the new star, where the mind is activated in a virtual world, while the colonist waits for their new body to be grown. With this approach I was able to colonize 1400 star systems by the year 2600.

Other things I’ve included:

Immortality
Artificial Intelligences
Artificial Reality (like The Matrix)
Augmented Reality
Mind Uploading (and body swapping)
Terraforming of Mars and Venus
Androids
Eugenics
etc

Terraforming Mars and Venus animations:

Realistic Space Station:

Also, if you want more details on the universe itself, you can PM me and I’ll send you a Slack invite and a link to my worldbuilding notes.

DIY Motion Capture Setup (my cheap motion capture research)

Read more about my universe at: http://fu.fractalfederation.com/universe/fractal-federation
(It’s a dense summary but you can find more stuff under the “posts” tab)

I made this video, it’s using a real star database so their coordinates are realistic. The colonization rate is based on laser propelled light sail + self-replicating nanomachine method of interstellar colonization.

This looks really serious! Do you have a summary of the plot/ Characters?
I do some VFX and I think I can “voice act” (Male/ Deep) On my free time with acceptable dead lines.
Here’s the thread where I put some of my work: https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?403192-Vfx-videos-alldone-in-blender

Thanks! Sorry I didn’t respond sooner! I took a break and binged watched a TV series lol so I haven’t been on here or working on anything. Anyways, I haven’t really put much work into characters or plots yet. All I have so far is a list of episode ideas and concepts. Haven’t settled on one yet. I have a universe but there are a lot of different things you could do within that universe. I really wanted something more cookie cutter like Star Trek so I was thinking of setups that would allow that. Like an elite team of problem-solvers/crime fighters that work on the star-system level government and can pick their assignments. Since space is big and the time it would take them to move around would be long, I was thinking they could just have android bodies stashed all over the place and beam their digital minds around. In my future there are a lot of new technologies that I consider inevitable but they could be used in a lot of different ways and there are a lot of different possible cultures/societies that could result. I couldn’t really decide on one so I decided on all of them! My fictional government gives cultures the power to control their society using local law. For example, there are super-AI and some cultures have all their citizens implanted and the AI has access to all their data, does pattern recognition, and uses it to maintain zero crime but also to deduce the “dreams” of the citizens and subtlety manipulate events to make them come true. Other cultures don’t have that. Some have immortality, some dont. Some have fully immersive virtual reality with all five sense and some dont, some like the Amish still don’t even have electricity, some have even legalized gladiator arenas again. A criminal scientist several centuries ago even created a new sentient species, so there are The Avians, humanoids with white wings that have their own culture and town. So basically I was thinking each episode the team would beam to some place on Earth, Venus, Mars or a space station in the Sol system, then solve some problem or crime, and expose the viewer to a diversity of cultures and implementations of technology and science.

Sounds like a dense universe, be careful not to lose yourself in it!
I think you should concentrate on a start point to your story, you already have a good background.
Tell me when you start vreating if you need my help.

I’d like to help with music composition if that’s still available! also have you considered that your logo looks similar to one of Imagine Dragons logos?

Attachments


Nuts! That’s actually very similar.

I really need a music composer, thanks for offering to help! I’ve spent a good deal of time scouring the internet for free music that I could legally use. Not many options that I could find. I was trying to find a good intro song, something epic but not over-the-top, either electronic or classical orchestra or piano or post-rock style. Also, once I have an episode done, I’d need music that sets the mood throughout the episode. I’ve been paying attention to shows and you don’t even realize that there is almost always background music.

Kai Engel is the best artist I’ve found so far, he has a BY NC license (give credit and non-commercial only). http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai_Engel/

Just tested one of my scenes in EEVEE. It’s almost working out-of-the-box! Most of my Cycles materials are working. The meshes with emission nodes aren’t working yet. Also the reflections+glass aren’t working correctly. It’s like they are reflecting only and there is no transparency. Like I have a glass jar and I can’t see the contents and it’s reflection is only reflecting the background/world image and none of the other objects in the scene.

I calculated it would take a year of 24/7 rendering with my $1000 worth of GPUs just to render one 40 minute episode. EEVEE is making it possible! Only 40 minutes with a real-time engine. Also looking forward to Manuel Bastioni Lab’s new muscle system and mesh based hair system.

EEVEE:


CYCLES (1000 samples in 7 minutes):


Nice sushi, I like the bong appetizer.

lol thanks

Looks pretty good but the shadows are kind of harsh. Not sure if that’s what you were going for


CYCLES (5000 Samples in 20 minutes)

Still noisy even at 5000 samples! I read that meshes with emission nodes are the worst with noisy shadows. My lights have glass over a flat mesh with an emission node, maybe that makes it worse. The common benchmark scenes are high quality and render way faster! I have tried normal lights, it does seem to be less noisy. I wonder why the emission node is worse. No matter, I am going to do the final render using EEVEE, Cycles is too slow. Even if I got it down to 1 minute per frame, it would take 24/7 rendering for 40 days to make one episode and I have two GTX 1080s!

hi again

if you needreal or fictional planet /moon textures and heightmaps
or asteroid meshes let me know

Thanks for the offer and thanks again for Venus and Mars!

I’d be interested in this as well, Although I’m also working on organizing another project.

I can also produce planet/asteroid textures.

Thanks for the offer! I could use green maps for Venus and Mars. Right now I am just blending the red/yellow real color pictures with green. I wanted to imitate the real color map of Earth but I couldn’t find a combination of effects in GIMP to get something similar. I am thinking I will have to paint it by hand.



Here is the files for Venus and Mars. Mars images are from USGS and Venus are by JohnVV (direct links and copyright here). I added color to JohnVV’s gray image of Venus. I also have black and white masks for sea level. Here is everything in a rar, download.

Found two different programs that can use the Xbox One Kinect to do markerless motion capture, NI-mate and another program called Kinector. Also found two Blender addons that can use multiple normal cameras and triangulate markers. I think multiple normal cameras will be more versatile.

DIY Motion Capture Setup

Mars had water about 1 bill years ago( maybe even as late as 500 mill ago) but Venus underwent a full resurfacing about 400 Mill years ago

any green / blue Venus ( as in tropical) would be based on current data and what might happen in a few thousand years

I made a spreadsheet to ballpark the terraforming. The sea levels are based on that. I have no idea where there would be deserts, forests, ice caps, etc. I’m not even sure if meteorology is good enough to predict that. Here’s the spreadsheet if you are interested:

No one has volunteered to double check the numbers so there is probably errors.

I found another plugin that uses Kinect:

https://www.wiese.li/index.php?id=kinector

It supports fingers and facial motion capture using the Manuel Bastioni Lab! It just works, it doesn’t require configuring a skeleton.