City movie background.

Artwork Works in Progress
#1

This is a frame from a ~22 second short video a friend and I are doing as our final for our Film class. It will not demonstrate our knowledge of film in any way (apart from the fact that we can key out a green screen) but it will definitely show that we can do CG backgrounds for next semester.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v210/thelonesoldier/blender/City.jpg
City.jpg720×480

Been working on this for a long time, not so much this particular scene but trying to get everything shot and so forth. Anyway, the background is basically done now, at least for the purposes of it being due on Monday. Feel free to comment and critique anything, or make suggestions. I don’t think I’ll be able to make many changes before Monday but I’ll try if I’m able. Basically, the video is just a teaser for my school’s video yearbook, which will hopefully have at least several sequences with fully 3D backgrounds.

This is the original reason I got into Blender. This is the whole reason I started modeling: to make 3D backgrounds for film. I’m really amazed at how well everything is going and the fact that I’m actually able to do this.

The girl and the desk are footage, the rest is Blender. I motion tracked the footage with Icarus and keyed out the green screen in Final Cut Pro. THe whole sequence is still rendering and won’t be done until some time tomorrow, and then I will have to do some touchup in Final Cut. We might end up having to make some changes and rerender over Sunday night, and then throw everything together in class Monday morning.

I’m sure there’s lots of little things wrong with the scene, and I think the building at the end of the street doesn’t touch the ground. The lighting is a little weird and the OSA is at 4 because that renders faster. Still, I’m very happy with it. It looks infitely better that what I had originally.

I did all the foreground stuff and the buildings along the visible street (except the one at the very end). My partner did the buildings in the background. We did the textures together, and he did the final animation on the buildings (they “grow” up out of the ground).

I’ll probably post the final movie later, most likely on Monday afternoon. I’ll continue to make changes and make it better after we turn it in just so I’ll have the best video I possibly can.

#2

I’m assuming your at a Mac lab…if you can, see if you can enable Xgrid on a couple machines…that should help speed up render time if your doing a movie sequence compared to a digital map painting. Just google blender 3d +xgrid. Or if you can steal a couple windows machine, set up an xgrid controller and download the xgridagent-java from sourceforge…

Just remember to save the files as TGA’s…then use FCP to import the number stills into a video clip.

Over all though, very nice. B&W is a good color choice too, much easier to match.

#3

Thanks.

We’re really all over the place. We have three PowerMac G5s at school, two dual 2.3ghz and a single 1.8 which is too slow for rendering. We also have a lab of Pentium 4 2.4s (no hyperthreading). But for this project we’re doing it on my friend’s P4 3.2ghz HT, his mom’s P4 2.8ghz, and one of the good Macs. We’re just rendering AVIs in chunk.

I hadn’t heard of Xgrid, I’ll look into it later. I’d prefer to get a single rediculously fast computer like the Quad 2.5ghz G5, which might be a possibilty. I don’t know if Blender can actually use all four cores though.

edit: Oh, I suppose I should clarify that since it’s the weekend, the school computers are at school (except the G5 I brought home) and we are not.

#4

If your rendering to a video format, Quicktime supports TGA compressed .mov files meaning you can render an Alpha Layer. Not such a big deal when your rendering a background, but makes compositing CGI action with live film, (say an airplane filing overhead) much easier.

Xgrid is an open standard that if you didn’t know about it, you’d never hear about it. Apple has done little to promote it, but it makes setting up a render farm for Blender simple.

While the Xgrid Client packaged with OS 10.3 or 10.4 will allow you to create an adhoc controller and a small grid, you really need something with OSX-server and Xgrid Admin to make it work smoothly.

From a couple years of working with other 3D packages professionally, having a choice between one Quadcore mac and say 10 Mac Minis to be used in a cluster…I’ll take the 10 Mac Mini’s any day.

#5

If your rendering to a video format, Quicktime supports TGA compressed .mov files meaning you can render an Alpha Layer. Not such a big deal when your rendering a background, but makes compositing CGI action with live film, (say an airplane filing overhead) much easier.

I’d been wondering about that. I’m sure that could be very useful, thanks for mentioning it.

From a couple years of working with other 3D packages professionally, having a choice between one Quadcore mac and say 10 Mac Minis to be used in a cluster…I’ll take the 10 Mac Mini’s any day.

But a single computer would be more useful for test renders, and faster during editing. I’ve also been having problems with Final Cut running extremely slowly with this project, I’m not sure if that’s because of the green-screen keying (which I haven’t done before) or an issue with AVI JPEGs.

Thanks for the suggestions, though. I’ll see what we can do in the future.

#6

Wow, I really like the look. Reminds me of Sin City.

#7

Thanks, Enriq. That was our inspiration.

I can’t decide where to host it. Putfile and Filefront take all rights to your video, Megaupload sucks, and Google Video has typos in their Terms of Service, which scares me.

#8

you try myfilehut.com?

#9

Doesn’t mention rights at all, which isn’t necessarily good.

#10

if you e-mail it to [email protected], i’ll happily host it for you! I run my own server thing here, and you can keep all rights to your movie. But I won’t be hurt if you don’t, I’m sure there are better options out there, this is just quick :stuck_out_tongue:

#11

not a problem…

Word of Advice: FCP seems to handle quicktime files much better than AVI’s.

#12

if you e-mail it to [email protected], i’ll happily host it for you! I run my own server thing here, and you can keep all rights to your movie. But I won’t be hurt if you don’t, I’m sure there are better options out there, this is just quick

I might take you up on that. I’ll see what happens tomorrow.

Word of Advice: FCP seems to handle quicktime files much better than AVI’s.

Yeah, I know, that’s not usually the case though, it just happens sometimes. They worked fine, anyway. It was just the keying that was bogging it down.

#13

This looks great. I did some similar stuff for a film I shot last summer, mostly for tracer fire for guns, but for that it was rather the other way around, the bullets were animated over a green world color and then layered on top of our video.

Mind explaining exactly what you meant be ‘video yearbook’. I mean, I know the concept obviously but how is the school going about doing that, I’m curious.

Can’t wait to see :smiley:

#14

Thanks.

Yeah, I’ve noticed that several people have composited CG characters or objects into real environments. It was interesting to do it the other way around.

The video yearbook is a VHS or DVD with features for all major school events. This is mostly sports (for example, a Football video, a soccer video, etc) but also for dances, assemblies, etc. To spice it up, there will be little short stories 30 seconds - 2 minutes long between each section that tie them together. Those stories are where we’d be using CG.

#15

What about www.ourmedia.org? I don’t think they try to retain any rights to the video uploads.

#16

OurMedia works good, I have all of my short films hosted on it. I’ve had problems uploading a few times but in the end I was able to get all my stuff up and once its up it’s up for good. Pretty good load times and download speeds as well.

As far as the license, you can pick exactly what type of license you want it to be under. Creative Commons for example. Good suggestion Draco, I would reccommend that site as well.

#17

Ourmedia works nicely. Thanks for suggesting it.

Here is the Finished Project thread.