so I figured although i’m kinda in the middle of demo reels or whatever that I would go ahead and post up what I’m showing at the quarterlies show tonight.  so here it is until I get my new website up and rollin.. logging off of this blog for real this time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

same drill as always with the video.—–>

Well actually my sound guy didn’t quite get all the details in the audio finished but it is still pretty finished.  Also the more I look at it the more I maybe wanna get one more interation of animation but shit i dunno.  Here it is. either way this is what will be shown at the VSFX Quarterlies Wednesday March 11, 2009 at the Arnold Hall Auditorium on Bull Street.  Just a little advertising there.

In the midst of attempting to find the plugins directory today with wordpress so I could install the flash video player/embedder and magically make my videos viewable in blog.  I realized that there is a WordPress.COM and a WordPress.ORG whereas the .COM is all in browser type of CMS stuff. the .ORG is an actual standalone that apparently you can use plugins with and have a whole slew of more control.  Thought that was cool and when my new website it posted in a week i’ll be running the standalone blog with my custom made Theme, blam bodda ding!!  anyways………………….

Either right click and save link as or just click the video to view—>

laters possibly for the last time on this blog………….. loggggiiiinnnggg OFF!

i was just looking at the post and thought it would be cool to post both of the thumbnails from last week to this week to see the difference.  My decisions with the fur being more bald on the cephalathorax was to enable the body markings to show through more but some people didn’t like it, i personally do but I also wanted to show off those textures a bit more and overall the adjustments made have also allowed the detail to be more easily visible from the distance of the camera.

i think that is kinda cool for the time being..

I still have some personal issues with a few things and have gotten some good suggestions from others but I ask myself when is enough, enough?  So I’ve decided to see what everyone thinks who has followed this project and well, I guess i’ll leave it up to you guys to decide whether or not it is finished.  This feed has posts enabled so let me know what you think is and isn’t working with it so I can take some different angles into consideration.  Thanks look forward to seeing some comments.  Enjoy!  In the meantime I’ll be chipping away at the breakdown so all of those that don’t know how it was done can see what’s good behind the scenes I guess you could say…

Click the image to view Quicktime ———->

until next time…….

Travis

First off I wanna say that Joe Pasquale’s Studio 1 class KICKS ASS!!!!  We have so many talented people in this class, so here’s the link and go check out some of these projects including Video Game Levels (BETTER THAN THE GAME DEPARTMENT), creatures (more rediculous than mine), animation shorts (U571 and lens flare textures haha that’s for you Chris and Jordan), Liquor (LOTS OF LIQUOR),  renderfarms, and about anything else awesome you can think of!! NOW THATS SOME $@&^!!  Keep up the good work everyone, it’s almost over and I can’t wait either.

This is just some thoughts on some things.

Class 15 presentation also went personally well and I’m feeling confident that the project is after all going to turn out the way I had planned it would from the beginning.  I’m glad I stuck with it non-stop this weekend to meet the goal I wanted for this class because the mid-term presentation from a few weeks ago ended up being quite the failure (and exploration) for me.  I realize that I have ended up back at the beginning with this project, shooting the same yellow early morning light shining through the blinds that I had imagined the spider lit in my mind.  It’s wierd how that works but I quote myself at my unprepared presentation during midterm saying “how I always cut my own feet out from under me by choosing to experiment at the worst times (Studio I)” and how I need to stop doing it.  But I can honestly and always will say that I’m glad to welcome new challenges allowing me to explore new found perspectives in all aspects of the art of visual effects.  Ultimately this usually winds up leading me back to what I know best but expands my horizons at the same time.  Positive thinking for me today I guess.

So everyone, if you liked that render, get ready to see the final in a few weeks with the sound and everything FINISHED!  Wow, I’ll actually be able to say that soon.  I’m stoked to fix the problems and can’t forget to THANK A TON TON TON to Mason Gardner for the animation and his proffessor Cheryl Cabrera for recommending him.

until next time……..  the infamoumas breakdowns……….

WELLLLLLLLL, the time has come.  Finally I have put together a preComped render of the spider.  Got the animation from Mason last night around 5pm and started grinding out setting up all of the Renderman and Mental Ray render layers in the same file before saving two separate for the farm.  So I have finally ultimately optimized and fixed my pipeline.  I finished rendering all 12 layers or somewhere around there and comping about an hour ago.  So I would say the results came fast and I am happy with the result for the given amount of time I have put in since last night.  I am still working out a few issues with Renderman on the fur passes including reflection, mattes, etc.  So I will be working out those issues this week.  I AM SMILING THOUGH!!!  Which is a good sign with 3 weeks left for tweaking and fixing.  So here you go, ENJOY!  As always breakdown and info posts will come soon after the results postings.

————————-> Click thumbnail to view Quicktime (15.4mb) High Quality

until next time…………….

Well I have finally gotten my plate all ready to roll and the track 95 percent of the way done.  Also I have shot the files over to Mason Gardner who will be animating the spider for me, I can’t wait to see it.  Heres this plate for now though, no color grading yet just straight off of the HVX200.  I WONT go into details, unfortunately who knows what kind of consequences I could face, but I will just say that it was a real pain in the a$$ to shoot this as a handheld tripod/homeade monopod shot instead of being able to have access to the actual equipment a director would use for this shot aka steadycam, crane, dolly, anything would have been useful.  So our ability to access all the great equipment really made this shot possible……………………  haha.  Anyways I still was able to make it look sweet and I’m happy with it, when the color grade is done it will look much sweeter.

Click the thumbnail to view video:

until next time……

Here is just a quick preview of the spider with the fur comped with shadows and all that good stuff.  It is a little bandy and theres some artifacts from the compression but I can’t give you all the detail views right away or it will spoil the final result!

Click on the image to view the video:

I’ll be posting some stuff later on from my shoot I did last night for the background plate.  There were many things that were successful and a few things that weren’t, many due to time restrictions on the equipment checkout.  Tomorrow night I’ll take advantage of the overnight checkout so I have plenty of time to get what I want.  I think most successful in the shoot was the lighting setup, this was everything I had anticipated and more.  Soooo until then….

Well after the last couple of weeks of experimentation with my environment I have came to a harsh but timely realization that I picked a bad time (Studio 1) to learn a new program and try to incorporate it into my pipeline.  The biggest problem that I have found with Vue is that it primarily caters to WIDE lenses instead of MACRO.  And the whole goal with this project was to have the spider very close to the camera so we can see the gritty details I have so diligently spent my time on.  All of Vue’s algorithms for their materials I found actually reach a maximum resolution which is weird, and also they are based off of the resolution of the terrain they are applied to, which anything about 4096 creates almost billions of polygons and crashes.  And on top of that, the pixelation was still there.  Also upping these resolutions this high up’s then render times.  I also experimented with a manual setup of LOD for distance to camera and optimized it some.  Ultimately it was not feasible to render this without a farm, and I feel that what I still needed to learn for optimization would have taken me longer than I have.  Here is a render of a terrain I had custom built, this is pretty much the result of all the things I experimented with in the last view weeks (that I could actually get rendered) minus custom ecoSystems and what not.  Volumetrics are also another thing to stay away from, using sprites as an alternative for atmospheric affects.

Soooooooo.  I’m doing a live action composite of the spider now, AGAIN!  So Joe wanted to see a scary spider from the beginning, and what can I say, I did too.  The problem was coming up with a concept that would be aesthetically pleasing but also portray the fear and give the audience a good view of the entire occurance.  This has been long thinking and after some inspiring discussion I have come up with something.  I checked out the HVX and a lighting kit last night, unsuccesfully shooting some background tests, I am now back to research as to how I will acheive the lighting and camera that I want, ex. gels, dolly, crane, etc.  So between Wednesday ad the weekend I will be getting a hold of the camera again and hopefully have some footage of my background concept for you’re viewing pleasure.  When I get this footage shot and ready I will also include some color grading samples for final Look DEV..  This shot will also require tracking which will be simple but I will keep progress of that posted to.

Here’s a sample of the Fur development so far, I ended up rebuilding all of the descriptions and using multiple descriptions on each part to add more realism.  This render is kinda crappy WIP, but by tomorrow I will have a new one with nicer lighting and shadows and it will be comped over some skin surface FINALLY, so we can see what the spider really looks like for a change.  My goal is to have a turntable posted by class at 11a.m. tomorrow.  So HERE is the fur only..

…………. Ok well I guess wordpress doesn’t like Quicktime files, what a surprise.  So just click the link and it should get you over to my server to view it.

lata

Alright, so I’ve been working, working, working and not blogging, blogging, blogging the progress of that work.  I’m going to make these quick because I have more things to get ready for tomorrow.  So this is a post of a semi-finished “texture breakdown” for Jordan Rempel’s sub project and I’m actually really close to being completely finished with that.  I now know why I like to model in single pieces, low poly or not.  The sub consists of about a 100 seperate peieces, luckily some of them can share UV’s, but this proved to be a fun and tedious job to UV and texture.  This image doesn’t contain every single piece but some of the bigger ones that I spent more time on.  Head over to his blog to check out some of the sweet renders he has coming out already, two wide shots finished I believe.  So here is the image, click on it to view larger, although it is only 1200×1260 or something like that, so kinda low res but high quality.

the finalizations  of the sub to come mid-week……