Well I’m planning an establishing shot with a roof terrace /garden in teh foreground and a view over london something liek this in the background…
(this one is badly colour corrected from teh original to the sort of palette I want:)
though there will be some punchy orange light from an interior on the left side spilling out into my roof terrace… it’ll look rich!
The shot is soooo low res and I don’t own the rights to it… It’ll be more cinematic to be able to do a camera move too so I thought I’d just build it… (part of the point of this movie is to showcase my skills… this sort of shot helps me pitch for archvis work!)
It has the two hero buildings and Nelson’s column in their too… the rest of teh buildings are more generic and so I’ll re-use some assets from a london street scene I built a couple of years ago (will need some updates though !)
I also Think that at a later point in my film I’d love the dragon curling around that colliseum sign sort of like the end of king kong!
Not sure how that fits in with the plot I’ve written but it could be a poignant end shot to teh movie without making real sense… or just a poster!!!
EDIT: Part of the feel of these scenes I’m working on at the moment is like the Nicole “I love to dance” Kidman’s chanel ad or Charlise Therons’s two Dior ads…
Glossy, expensive and slightly surreal… with a sexy lead and playful imagery…
I also mentioned Great Gatsby before… That blew my mind and I’ve been a big fan of Baz Luhrman for a while… I really want that expensive gloss for this part of teh movie!
Mine will have it’s own twist, especially in the larger context of my short,…
(I’ll re-post my models here so that you don’t have to flip pages for comparison!
…of course teh smart money would have just sourced some higher res images, made a foreground plate of colliseum, a midground card for st martins and a curving panarama card of teh distant city skyline… simple multiplane paralax with teh limited range of motion on teh roofterrace would have been enough!..
crane shots or tracking shots from outside to insdide… the only truly 3d element would have been teh roof terrace in teh foreground
wow, wow, huge thing! the advantage over tracking is that you will be able to move freely, it will look great. and will be a lot of polygons to eat for your computer. … i like the dragaon-king-kong-like curl idea, always loved king kong original, ,
"Glossy, expensive and slightly surreal… with a sexy lead and playful imagery… "
yes, exactely this is the feeling your lady has you sculpted and painted so vividly! thanks for taking the time and show me what you are heading at, it makes me so wonderfully excited to watch your path to make your ideas come true. thank you!
an update of sorts… didn’t get too much time on this today… but made some progress… BI turnarund is so coompelling… I’m almost using ot as a fast previs renderer!
shame about the shading quality… that said when I texture these, add sky, and a bit more lighting I think they could hold up.
Will need to use After effects and frishcluft for better dof… BI compositor is ok but a bit crap on foreground edges…
The good and bad o f this project is taht I can be spontaneous and change ideas an so on…but I am just one man and have a conference to go to next week… would be good to get a more sizable chunk presnetable by then!<br>
Time to fix the blocking issues on teh girl rig a nd model and start blocking more scenes out like this:
nice work on the video… somehow the timing seems off… but I can’t put finger on why… thiis isn’t really a crit thread anyway… so… all the modeling, texturing, and animation work looks great! wish I could get my cloth stuff to look that good…
Hey Norvman, thanks for watching!
yes It’s poor timing… for shots like these to cut together the movement needs to be more continuous…
the animation keys are such a basic block out at this stage… I’ll be doing lots more on that when the sequence matures!
what kills teh feel here is the ease in ease out at the start and ends of teh shots… the camera move starts static and accelerates out and then decelerates in. If the camera was instead moving at a constant rate the cuts would be less jarring… not only that but these are hacked together!.. the composition of teh second exterior night shot is poor right now, but when I addd teh foreground roof terrace and teh light spilling out from the interior the shot will get the foreground interest its sorely needs…
i miss the lightwave tension continuity and bias controls or Aftereffects “easy” keys… ease in ease out shouldn’t need the graph editor to fix!
I should be able to set that in dope sheet view… maybe I can and I just don’t know how yet?
Anyhoo… I want to start blocking the other shots in the sequence, teh ones with teh character in. Again, timing and animtion will likeley be fast and loose… I want to feel the “shape” of teh sequence first and derive an actual shot list… i’m already getting ideas that depart from teh storyboard I drew.
What I mean about spontenaiety is this:
in formal team projects you have to specify everything up front…
here i just have a bunch of notions, things I want to hit in the sequence… but around those the exact shape is pretty loose for trying stuff out when I block the shots…
The way I’ve set up BI now it’s only slightly slower than a GL playthrough. I’m liking how with a tiny amount of time on lihting I can get a much better feel than conventional animatic blockng…
I have a notion to use the tango track “por una cabeza” over this sequence… (the tango song used in “True lies” at the start, or “Scent of a woman” for Al Pacino’s blind tango with teh young girl at the restaurant…
it works really well with the storyboard, especially with the escalation and drama of the reveal…
but I’m concerened it’ll make this feel like a music video… and also I’m ot sure how to pay the music rights (or how much they’ll cost!)
A quick post… slightly frustrated that teh driver system in blender has such a fiddly input window… makes things hard to debug sometimes!
I keep breaking the lips and eyelids… so frustrating… I’ve started doing tests in BI again… even if i don’t go with it for final i’m loving 1920*800 frames rendering in 5-15 seconds in my test… rather than 30 minutes in cycles… of course i;m cheating though…
Starting to look at the types of framing, colour palette and feel… and what i might want in teh shots… also uncovering all teh shortcomings in teh model when you get this close in full HD…
we all see more mistakes when working for longer on a project. you are doing great, your model has a strong basis, look how wonderful the curves and definitions are! you can fix all the issues coming from movement, and you are trying some strong movements, how will you join the neck to the body?
Thanks Doris, I’m just frustrated… I have super fast rendertimes and was hoping to block out an edit… but still have a massive task list to get through before I can do that…
the head is actually easy to attach: these days the shape keys arent an issue and I just need to convert the multires of teh body to a displacement… teh vertices allready match so I’d just have to paint weights for the chest and neck…
the animation keys are such a basic block out at this stage… I’ll be doing lots more on that when the sequence matures!
aaaaa okay… that explains … it… somehow I thought the look of those motions looks familure now I know why… LOL! I have seen them in my own animations when I block them out and before I start fine tunning everything… LOL!
man these are some really nice building / scene renders… i need to do some of that on a story board I have going… these look really great… very very nice lighting… I’m in awe really…
Thankyou Norvman… a few textures will trqnsform them! I can hrdly wait!
I’m still working on teh girl model… 52 shape keys but that’s not the reql work… getting them to blend in comination has taken a lot of iteration…
I still need to do a nose and cheek sneer (two shapes one per side) and a mouth frown (both, left and right) and I’ll finally have ll teh shapes and control I want…
the following images show an artifact from the upper eyelids up shape tht i need to fix too… Today I hope to join thehaed to the body and move on to finalling the clothes… then i can start to block out scenes properly!! can’t wait!
I also did a test pn GI uisng approximate AO (excuse the crazy weird key out of place, but the ligting is quite compellig, especially when you think this is full hd at less thn 20 seconds a frame!!
wonderful progress, oh man, i do love your facial shape keys,i can’t wait to see her really moving. she has such a strong presense, i admire that a lot how you captured it, and keep in every facial pose you create for her … nice work on the surroundings and indoor scene too, my favourite part is, as you know, your wonderful portrait sculpt and how she will integrate into all
I keep working and can see progress… but also I flit about… I’m moving into “demo reel” time and have to focus on getting finished shots… the movie and narritive are less important than variety at the moment…
here’s a space seen I;m going to do some augmented reality/additive data overlays with:
still not finished the girl model… still building and retopoing clothes… then deciding I hate and re do…
a friend said I really should go with sss in this day and age after all the work I’ve put in…
I was dubious because I’ve burned a lot of time on it in the past… but studying Ben Dansie’s sintel light shaders i got this really quickly!
I was happy before at rendering full hd frames in 5-6 seconds in BI, now with sss depending on zoom level it’s 30 -45 seconds a frame that’s without proper particle hair and only super simple minimal backgrounds… I really want to stay under a minute a frame as I;m rendering a lot of stuff… so fingers crossed! but the sss is really worth it I think. (lips look funny now…) lol
[ATTACH=CONFIG]248909[/ATTACH]
body with clothes in progress…
[ATTACH=CONFIG]248910[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH=CONFIG]248911[/ATTACH]
Oh dear It’s all a bit Victorias’ secret…
I’m working on teh kick ass action suit too… (will post at another time!)
Happy accidents: I like this pose but her eyes have gone outside her head…
combining the bra and corset was interesting…
I discovered that the arms are very bad… fixed somewhat with some extra loops around wrists and elbows… shoulders are ok but getting a little bulky when i bring the arms down…
I must say that “transfer weights” is amazing! a real lifesaver for getting clothes to follow the body closely despite radically different topology!
really shoudl mask out those nipples under the bra!.. the bras shot is before I fixed teh wrists up!
wow, you work very hard! so many new work you show… and, i must admit, the more content you show us, the more i am puzzled how this goes all together, you really must have thought a story!
the sss is quite strong, as well as the specularity of her skin. intention? love the clothes, and the new poses are fun too, always vibrant full of energy, great!
