I am here to give a small update on “Silk”, it has not been forgotten and I have not given up on it, actually quite the opposite, I have been very busy on it and have got quite the list of things done.
I wanted to share some renders (before and after composting), some screenshots and a test animation of a particularly difficult shot that I had to finish.
One thing I have done is installed Kitsu on my old system that is now more of a server, for those that don’t know Kitsu is a production tracker for things like this…
This has helped me out IMMENSELY! Not only do I NOT have to remember what shots I have done, in what stage they are at, I have a quick web page that I just have to go and look at. Before I had installed Kitsu I had to go through the files, see what stage they were in to remember “Oh yeah! That is what I was doing!”… very ineffective, time consuming and not very productive. Now all I have to do is look at the page, and do some clicks and I get an update on my progress, or I set an update on my progress. Now I could have done one better and installed the Blender Studio Kitsu addon for the production, but I would have had to set up an SVN server, get THAT configured, get the assets configured in such a way that the addon would work… and so on and so forth… no I decided to that I was already knee deep in the mire that I wanted to just have my directory structure as it is and just work out the shots, not worry about assets and even more server related technicalities. It was a days work just to get Kitsu running.
I had to fix the opening shot because of the small bit of geometry that you can see in the top right corner… this bit is actually way below the shot area, in terms of physical space and is lit because of the sun light I have in the scene. I am not sure what I changed in the camera area but as I was reviewing the scene this popped up in view… either way I worked on the camera animation a bit and now it is gone.
The shots for Seq 004 had to be rendered again because of a small technical glitch that I simply forgot about. The cables that you see drooping off the sides of the walls? The history of these is that they were built for Renderman, each object can have a Subdivision surface applied to them without having to do it in Blender, at least back in the RIBMosaic / Blender days of 2009… well I never did this to them when I rebooted the project a few years ago and they continued to be this way until I had the bright idea to apply the SUbD Modifier to them and lo and behold they look %100 better. Because I have switched to EEVEE for the final render I did not have to wait a few days to see the results, at best it was an hour combined, I hit render and did other things for a bit while my computer chugged out the frames.
Here you can see the spider in action, sort of, as it is traversing across it’s webbing. I have a better image somewhere but I could not for the life of me find it… I think… (I have a LOT of images) anyways…
Here is another shot of the same sequence just at another angle. I had to take liberties with the lighting to get the spider silk strands to look better than they did with just the default lighting setup, in this shot I have a light off to the right side of the camera to highlight the spider and another light off to the left to do the same but to also highlight the strands… otherwise they look black and very not “silky”… I just turned down the Diffuse and Volume lighting to 0.
This is an early render (it has since been rendered again for technical reasons) of Seq 009, Shot 001… this is a 2 second shot of the spider in the line of the train, about ready to be hit… The reason for the rendering again and of course I don’t have a PNG of that render is because the silk could barely be seen and the camera in ALL other shots except this one had 6 blades, so the Depth of Field looked very different than the rest.
This was actually taken tonight during a testing, this webbing is actually a cloth simulation. The train comes and rips it apart, I didn’t have to do anything other than make a series of boxes (that are invisible to render) as collision objects, attach them to the train objects and then animate it moving at high speed and the simulation itself tore the webbing apart. It was pretty cool.
This shot of course took a lot of work to get done. The first shot I did of this didn’t have the oomph I needed to show that maybe these move the air and are heavy. Of course this is all just for visuals and in all reality I have seen plenty of trains not blow dust around like this (snow on the other hand is different I think)… I had to create a cone emitter object, parent it to the train object, then through trail and error made a simulation of dust by creating large icospheres and then using an animated volume shader to create the “dust”.
Here I have a quick video of that shot.
The shader for the above shot.
Another thing I wanted to bring up that might anger some Blender users is that for the longest time I had been using Blender’s Compositor for compositing my shots. Well I decided that I wanted to try to Natron again for this short. One reason is that I wanted to get my hands dirty on a true compositor and I felt that while Blender’s is powerful enough for what I am doing, it lacked in certain areas. I am sure some of you will be offended and I am sorry if that does… and yes I know that had the compositor not been added to Blender then certain things like MultiLayer OpenEXR files wouldn’t exist. Trust me I know, I was there many many years ago when Blender first GOT the compositor, it was a glorious thing to play with. Plus I am not the only one that uses other compositing software for the final product, I see many of you guys using other software. Anyways off my soap box lol…
I unfortunately do not have any screenshots of my composites yet, I will in the future I think, considering how LONG this film is taking, but you have to remember I am just a one man band working on this now.