Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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Sunday, 7 March 2010
DVXuser betrayalFEST
Viewing for the latest DVXuser online film festival is now open.
The theme this time is betrayalFEST.
As you know we didn't enter this time (and yes, with the benefit of hindsight, we wish we had!)
Anyhoo, we're greatly looking forward to seeing what our filmmaking colleagues have been up to in the last few months. The quality of films looks very high and for the first time Joe public get to rate the films too. (See here for the rules.)
The films can be downloaded here.
Congrats to all! See you in DVX-land :-)
The theme this time is betrayalFEST.
As you know we didn't enter this time (and yes, with the benefit of hindsight, we wish we had!)
Anyhoo, we're greatly looking forward to seeing what our filmmaking colleagues have been up to in the last few months. The quality of films looks very high and for the first time Joe public get to rate the films too. (See here for the rules.)
The films can be downloaded here.
Congrats to all! See you in DVX-land :-)
Labels: dvx
Monday, 1 March 2010
How to Make a Big Stompy Robot!
About a week ago, Rich discovered a completely awesome short film about Big Stompy Robots and was consequently inspired to practice animating his own. For several days and nights I barely saw him, but today I eventually managed to drag him out for coffee and force him to tell me what exactly he was doing (in words of one syllable that a mere mortal like myself could actually understand):
Step 1: Rich went shopping for a Big Stompy Robot model which would be suitable for animation. He eventually chose a suitable Poser figure, exported it from Poser into Softimage and then broke apart the model into various body parts (poor little thing) that would need animating, eg feet, legs, thighs etc.
Step 2: He then rigged the model. Given that the model has a very unusual joint structure, it took quite a few attempts to make a rig that moved in a realistic motion. The final rig had only three controls: the main centre of gravity for the hips and a control for each foot. This allowed complete animation of movement. (Note for future: Rich intends to later animate the gun barrels and add rocket launchers. Personally I think he’s been playing too much Supreme Commander!)
Step 3: He then added a bump map to the model. This was created by doing a high pass filter in Photoshop on the texture map for the model.
Step4: This involved building a walk cycle animation, which caused lots of fun because Rich didn’t realise that he had put one of the feet on backwards! The result was that the leg moved in all three axis when he tried to animate it, so he had to break the model apart again and re-do the rigging in order to get it right.
Step 5: After animating the walk cycle, Rich loaded the model into the matchmoved footage of our ping pong table (from last time, if you recall) and finished the render. To add a bit of interaction to it, he added a model car (a Mercedes – they really do deserve to be stomped on) and enabled “hard body simulation” in Softimage. This allowed the car to react when the Big Stompy Robot walked into it.
So here’s the result:
Kinda cute, eh? I think it’s kinda dainty-of-foot for something that’s supposed to be so big and scary, so it’s obviously a girl robot. Let’s call her Tippitoes. In fact Tippitoes is so darn cute that I’m thinking of casting her in a future movie. More on that in due course...
Step 1: Rich went shopping for a Big Stompy Robot model which would be suitable for animation. He eventually chose a suitable Poser figure, exported it from Poser into Softimage and then broke apart the model into various body parts (poor little thing) that would need animating, eg feet, legs, thighs etc.
Step 2: He then rigged the model. Given that the model has a very unusual joint structure, it took quite a few attempts to make a rig that moved in a realistic motion. The final rig had only three controls: the main centre of gravity for the hips and a control for each foot. This allowed complete animation of movement. (Note for future: Rich intends to later animate the gun barrels and add rocket launchers. Personally I think he’s been playing too much Supreme Commander!)
Step 3: He then added a bump map to the model. This was created by doing a high pass filter in Photoshop on the texture map for the model.
Step4: This involved building a walk cycle animation, which caused lots of fun because Rich didn’t realise that he had put one of the feet on backwards! The result was that the leg moved in all three axis when he tried to animate it, so he had to break the model apart again and re-do the rigging in order to get it right.
Step 5: After animating the walk cycle, Rich loaded the model into the matchmoved footage of our ping pong table (from last time, if you recall) and finished the render. To add a bit of interaction to it, he added a model car (a Mercedes – they really do deserve to be stomped on) and enabled “hard body simulation” in Softimage. This allowed the car to react when the Big Stompy Robot walked into it.
So here’s the result:
Kinda cute, eh? I think it’s kinda dainty-of-foot for something that’s supposed to be so big and scary, so it’s obviously a girl robot. Let’s call her Tippitoes. In fact Tippitoes is so darn cute that I’m thinking of casting her in a future movie. More on that in due course...
Labels: test, tutorial, visual effects
Thursday, 18 February 2010
The Great Garage Experiment: Part 2
Does anyone remember Part 1 of the Great Garage Experiment from a few weeks ago? No we hadn't forgotten about this gripping VFX project, but the day-job work has been hampering our efforts somewhat, so it has taken Rich slightly longer than usual to complete his experiment.
This time the objective was to matchmove the 3D model of the garage (which we prepared last time, if you recall) into the real world - and to do it convincingly. Alas we never did manage to get any decent footage of a real road (weather and moaning kids did not permit) so...erm...we used footage of our very own table tennis table. Yeah, yeah, I know you don't see too many real garages located on ping-pong tables, but the proof of concept is the same - combining real world and CG so that you can't tell the difference.
The process for aligning the garage on the table was to photograph an HDRI globe (big shiny silver ball – purchased from local garden centre - no expense spared) so that we could capture the environmental lighting of the table and then use image-based lighting for the render. This was so that the lighting and colouring of the render matched the table. The next stage was to put some tracking markers (in this case ping-pong balls) and shoot the video that we wanted to use with a camera on a dolly.
Next we loaded the footage from the camera into SynthEyes and we tracked the ping pong balls so that we obtained a virtual camera which matched the real one. The output of Syntheyes was then loaded into Softimage so that we had a virtual camera in Softimage that matched movement of the camera in the real world. We then loaded in the garage model and positioned it appropriately on the virtual table. We created two render passes, one image based lighting (IBL) and one ambient occlusion (AO). This completed the rendering portion of the experiment.
We then moved to Adobe After Effects CS4 for the compositing stage and we loaded the original camera footage and our two render passes. This gave us three layers. At the bottom we had the original camera footage, overlaid on that was the IBL pass which contained the colour and shadows, and finally on top of all of that was the AO which contained the overall brightness and darkness of parts of the model. After adjusting the various levels of each layer and adding a noise overlay, it was ready for final output:
Personally, I think the result is pretty darn realistic, don't you? Now what would be really cool is if the little toy car on the left there (which is real) would drive itself up into the garage and park itself. The resident visual effects artiste tells me that he is working on it. Stay tuned...
This time the objective was to matchmove the 3D model of the garage (which we prepared last time, if you recall) into the real world - and to do it convincingly. Alas we never did manage to get any decent footage of a real road (weather and moaning kids did not permit) so...erm...we used footage of our very own table tennis table. Yeah, yeah, I know you don't see too many real garages located on ping-pong tables, but the proof of concept is the same - combining real world and CG so that you can't tell the difference.
The process for aligning the garage on the table was to photograph an HDRI globe (big shiny silver ball – purchased from local garden centre - no expense spared) so that we could capture the environmental lighting of the table and then use image-based lighting for the render. This was so that the lighting and colouring of the render matched the table. The next stage was to put some tracking markers (in this case ping-pong balls) and shoot the video that we wanted to use with a camera on a dolly.
Next we loaded the footage from the camera into SynthEyes and we tracked the ping pong balls so that we obtained a virtual camera which matched the real one. The output of Syntheyes was then loaded into Softimage so that we had a virtual camera in Softimage that matched movement of the camera in the real world. We then loaded in the garage model and positioned it appropriately on the virtual table. We created two render passes, one image based lighting (IBL) and one ambient occlusion (AO). This completed the rendering portion of the experiment.
We then moved to Adobe After Effects CS4 for the compositing stage and we loaded the original camera footage and our two render passes. This gave us three layers. At the bottom we had the original camera footage, overlaid on that was the IBL pass which contained the colour and shadows, and finally on top of all of that was the AO which contained the overall brightness and darkness of parts of the model. After adjusting the various levels of each layer and adding a noise overlay, it was ready for final output:
Personally, I think the result is pretty darn realistic, don't you? Now what would be really cool is if the little toy car on the left there (which is real) would drive itself up into the garage and park itself. The resident visual effects artiste tells me that he is working on it. Stay tuned...
Labels: matchmoving, visual effects
Friday, 12 February 2010
On Blogger, Blogging and FTP
Cloud City
About a week ago we received a notification from Blogger that they will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26th of this year. They blamed the decision on "too many engineering resources" required to support FTP sites and said "We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users."
Now there's the understatement of the year!
For most folks who use Blogger, this will not affect them at all. Unfortunately for our little Freekstorm blog, we host our blog on our own servers, but we use the freely-available Blogger code for the blog publishing part, which allows anyone with a Blogger account to leave comments if they wish (not that we're exactly snowed under with them, mind you - in fact if we actually do get a rare and precious comment then it's a real "break out the bubbly" moment!) Anyway, the idea is that not only can we remain part of the thriving Blogger community, but by publishing the blog via FTP this means that all our precious artwork, videos and tutorials are kept on our own servers, not Google's. Plus we can design our own groovy blog graphics, instead of Blogger's grotty standard templates.
Basically Google doesn't have any control over what we can publish or how we publish it. We really like it that way. And I quote our resident VFX artiste: "Hell will freeze over before I host our blog on Google servers. No ruddy way! I'd rather close our blog first!"
So we have until 26th March to decide what to do.
Perhaps it's time to put our resident computer geek to work on designing our own blogging code?
(Poor chap! As if he doesn't have enough to do already!)
Labels: blogging
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