It’s always a good time for 15 to 21 November 2015. (These seem to make less and less sense every week.)
This week’s main production show-and-tell is to do with motion blur. But first, a little adminstrative notice: I have Disqus comments now. Feel free to use them!
Right. Now for the week that was.
Last Sunday I got The Fear about starting work on the animatic. In a nutshell, I’m not ready yet: the story’s still needs more tightening passes and I hadn’t even figured out what everything’s meant to look like and I forgot that Gronky doesn’t have his good mouth yet and and and. So no progress on the animatic just yet.
Storywise this week I lost Pointy’s character (he briefly became this
charmless jealous horrible bastard) but I’ve found him again and tied this version of him to a post so he doesn’t get away again. Pointy now has a solid character arc, so that needs another
writing pass to hammer it in effectively and scrub any other
wayward bits that don’t belong. Janitorial rewriting, basically.
The ending is still giving me some trouble. Good endings are tricky. I’m zeroing in on something. We shall see!
Some scenes are set enough that I could at least get to work on props. I started making some of the easier props as a warm up and I now have a parabolic mirror on a swivel. Other props are mid-design, including the movie’s mysterious MacGuffin.
On Tuesday, Greg Zaal did a blog post about new motion blur controls in Cycles available in the Blender nightly builds. The controls let you specify whether the blur comes before, after or during the current shot and how opaque the motion blur is at any given point. To my delight I found I could do cartoon-style trailing streaks and sharp leading edges with a bit of compositing. I even made a video about it. So yay again!
I’ve been experimenting with motion blur on and off this week. Last night I got to work with the old “Pointy running into the bus stop” shot from the April animatic. There’s bugs and straight-up motion streaks don’t look too interesting but with a bit of noise applied in composite it looks way nicer. Check out the captioned images attached to this week’s post for more info on how I achieved the effect.
That’s all for now. If you want to leave a comment to chat or ask about stuff, leave comments! It’s always nice to know people are out there.
