Yes, it’s 25 to 31 May. And yet another long weekend to boot!

This week I started cutting on the second draft of layout.

The goal is to get it under five minutes. This week’s first two graphics are screencaps of the edit before and after cutting. I’ve done the screencap with the cursor sitting at the same shot so you can see just how much footage has been lopped off the front: lots. Still a lot of rewriting to do as well.

Also this week I’ve been looking at how to get prettier boomsmashes through the cunning use of Blender Internal. Blender has two rendering systems – a snazzy path tracer called Cycles and an oldschool renderer called Blender Internal (BI). Because of its relative maturity, BI has much better integration with OpenGL – amongst other things, you can get actual calculated lighting and shadows in the viewport with shadows, something you don’t get from Cycles (yet) without flicking over into Rendered mode.

As demonstrated in the other two images for this week, it’s possible to create a single material which outputs to both the Cycles and BI renderers. Setting up AMITS with switchy materials means going back through all the assets and adding a BI-compatible version of the material, but from memory there’s all of maybe a dozen materials in the whole film and none of them involve texture-mapping. Is it worth it for better viewport and prettier playblasts boomsmashes? I think so. 🙂

I also want to rework that damn burrow. The dodgy clump of kangaroo crap I’ve got as a placeholder has to go. To this end, I’ve been doing some research on desert caves (Google Image search for pilbara caves). One of this weekend’s jobs is concept art for a new-look burrow.

So if I can do that plus model and temp-material that burrow, get characters and scenery going in BI, cobble together a dozen or so new shots to reflect the story changes and paste them into the edit, rerecord the intro music at 180BPM instead of 160BPM.. good thing it’s a long weekend!