The Tower Room

Artwork Works in Progress
1

This is a very short music video, where the principle protagonist (Me), is projected onto a flat plane, and the plane is constrained to follow the camera, (Although in this case the camera isn’t going anywhere much. The video itself is a proof of concept for a more ambitious project, which I will post on as it progesses. Also I appear to be suffering from a particularily severe case of lockdown hair.
The video was rendered in 4k using eevee, the keying of the greenscreen was not of the best, but should improve if I pay attention to the lighting more.

The-Tower-Room
The-Tower-Room3840×2160 512 KB

5 Likes
2

This does work nicely so far and the proof of concept succeeded. Overall the lighting matches the scene. Only the candles and their flickering light is absent on you. Especially the flickering from the candle at the top and the light from the candle behind your left shoulder.

The 2,5d image transform is also quite convincing already.
You made me curious, What is modeled in this scene? Is the carpet real, for example? And how about the piano kind of thing (sorry I don’t know the name for this historical instrument)?

3

Hi minoribus, its very nice to speak to you again. In the final version of this there will be several musicians, so I am likely to move the furniture around a bit, as I said in the first post I wasn’t totally happy with the greenscreen so I changed things around in my setup, there will be a more directional light in the next version. Here is a frame from the session I did yesterday. I am also using a new camera so there are multiple learning curves going on.

Greenscreen setup
Greenscreen setup2720×1530 233 KB

Everything in the picture is modelled except the chair I am sitting on, The carpet is a single plane with an alpha channel to get the fringe. The keyboard is a Spinet which is a small harpsichord and is based on a real instrument dating from the early 18th century.

Spinet
Spinet1920×1080 96.5 KB

4

Here is the replacement figure

SetupFig1
SetupFig11920×1080 194 KB

5

Have now added the rest of the backing band. The idea hear is that I will be playing the main part live in a gig with these characters in the background projected onto a screen or a large TV. This would be one version of the video, the other would incude the lead instrument, and would go up on you tube.

Tower room 2
Tower room 21920×1080 209 KB

6

Thanks for your description. I have never worked with a green screen and didn’t get further than buying some green cloth :wink: What I took from tutorials is that uneven lighting and shadows on the green screen can provoke all sort of problems during chroma keying. Adding yourself three times in the background will surely be a nice effect.

7

Being able to use the daylight through the window helped hugely. I redid the keyboard player this afternoon, as the colur grading wasn’t great. Now he looks as good as the other two. (This must be the ultime split personality, but I rather tend to think of these as seperate characters even though they are all me.
I also ought to mention that this is all in Eevee rather than cycles. The finished track will be about 8 minutes in length so you are talking tens of thousands of frames, So unless I spent a lot of money on a renderfarm, cycles would be too slow. Loooking at this Eeevee is quite up to the job, and a godsend for animators. Anyway, here is the test run for the backing track. The next version will have the solo guitar added.

8

Sorry I’m a bit late with this, but… are you aware of my Greenscreen Within Eevee addon? It allows you to greenscreen within material nodes thus saving a whole stage if yr putting greenscreen footage in a scene.

9

No, but I would be interested if you could point me in the right direction :slightly_smiling_face:

10
11

Thanks, I will try it out!

12

Here is the previous video with the lead instrument added.

13

I went back several times between this version and the last version. The orchestration is very rich now with the different instruments. I like it a lot, especially the pacing, the beat and the accentuated end. Kind of a fugue. Even more so when the spinet takes comes in.

The green screening and live footage integration are well done.

14

It is interesting that you mention a fugue, as I am a big fan of Bach, (though technically this is not a fugue), the time signature is 5/8 with occasional changes to 6/8 to finish the phrases. The next section which I am working on at the moment, Is loosely based on a Bulgarian dance tune, eastern European music often uses compound time signatures, which can make for fascinating listening, there is a lovely example of it here

I am pretty pleased with the greenscreen as well. my new arrangement is definitely producing better results.

15

You can tell me what something is, I thought this was Richard Branson in one of his castles.

16

I just looked up Richard Branson and this is what I found,

Mahali Mzuri

Located in Swahili, Kenya, inside the Motorogi Conservancy, this is another elegant and eccentric retreat owned by Branson. I mean, there’s an infinity pool there, so what more do you need to be blown off your feet?

Ulusaba Safari Lodge

This Private Game Lodge is situated near the Kruger National Park in the Sabi Sand Reserve in South Africa. Would you like to guess how many acres of land it spans across? Only 13,500 hectares, could you imagine owning that much land? I sure couldn’t.

The Lodge Verbier

This one’s only a – you guessed it – world-class luxury retreat in Verbier, Switzerland. The lodge has an impressive architectural design with stunning views of the valley and lavish master suites.

Kasbah Tamadot

Kasbah Tamadot is a lavish hotel that Branson purchased back in 1998. It’s located near Marrakech in Morocco and comes bearing a total of 27 luxury suites alongside other amenities.

Branson’s Islands

Branson owns three islands, two of which are located in the British Virgin Islands, with the remaining island located all the way across the globe in Australia.

Necker Island

Necker Island, located in the British Virgin Islands, comprises a whopping 74 acres of land surrounded by sandy beaches and blissfully clear blue oceans. This is where Branson resides, and can you blame him?

Moskito Island

Moskito Island, also located in the British Virgin Island, comprises a sizable 120 acres of land and is a luxury private holiday resort island for holidaymakers. It has three lavish villas called Headland House, Beach Villa, and Mangrove Villa; in total, the three villas can sleep up to 22 people.

Makepeace Island

Located in Noosa, Sunshine Coast, Australia, this 25-acre heart-shaped island was bought by Branson in 2003 as a retreat for his Virgin Australia airline crew, but it’s now open for public lease.

So he may own several islands, but no castles. It is a shame that the one I possess only exists inside of Blender. :upside_down_face:

17

Well this took rather longer than I expected!
I went through several iterations and nothing was looking right. I finally settled on 3 separate locations and did renders based on each. Still wasn’t happy about it so I thought I’d try using some depth-of-field to add a bit of a narrative interest. Sadly the results didn’t look that great, in the meantime I realised that there was a beta version of Bender 2.93 that had rewritten the code for the depth of field and it does look a lot better. I’m still not sure however whether these will be the final versions. I notice that the bass player appears to have inflated in one of the shots!

Concerning the the materials based green scream app it’s a brilliant idea and it works remarkably well. unfortunately for me there was no no matte Blur that could be applied to the edges to smooth them out, and they look rather jagged.( if anybody knows of a way of dealing with this I’d be very grateful because otherwise it’s an absolutely great idea.
In the event I carried on with the image sequences. These also had the advantage that it was very easy to line up the different players so that they were playing in time with each other.

18

A change of tack, the next section has a heavier more electric feel.
Now amongst the instruments that I don’t play are the drums, so the drums on this section are programmed. A drum machine so to speak, so why don’t we have a slightly different kind of drum machine? A robot in fact.

Drummer
Drummer1920×1020 157 KB

This is the setup I use to animate the drums on this section. The strip at the bottom is the audio of the drum track which I have isolated from the main track. On the right is a set of preset poses. The armature is worked up from the BVH. armature that you get when you import motion capture files from the carnegie Mellon institute. (I added fingers), which means that any figures using that base armature can be interchangeable. I have already used this in other projects.

1 Like
19

Here is a short little video of the first part of the drums, this will take a while to finish, as he plays through to the end of the track.

He has also appeared in this video

about 2 minutes in.

20

I have been working on this on and off all week, this is all key framed so it was quite time consuming to do because in addition to the drummer himself all of the drum kit had to be separately animated. It was quite a long and drawn out process given that there is over 3 minutes of music here.
again this has been rendered in Eevee and in spite of the llength it rendered in under an hour, so I’m quite satisfied with the result. The music here is a cut down version with some of the lead instruments missing so that the drummer can be concentrated on. After this I have another round of Greenscreen which I might do tomorrow.