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A moment in the sun Journals Stuff I made

Anyone for 5 to 11 June 2016? Then let’s!

As of last week’s blog drop, I had done first pass layout of 42 shots
out of 80. I’ve now roughed out 55 shots out of 78. (Turns out I’d cut some shots from editorial but not the shot list.) I can watch the film from
almost at the end of Scene 1 all the way to the end credits without
seeing any placeholder drawings. Mint!

A few of this week’s shots needed rough effects work on top of animation –
smoke and lightning, mainly. After mucking around with the proper smoke
simulator for a while and getting nowhere, I went for a metaball-based solution.
It looks passable in viewport and kind of OK in Cycles:

image

Not
realistic, sure, but I neither need nor want complete realism here. This lumpy smoke looks like a good direction and it’ll get more tweaking before final render.

I also reworked Gronky’s final render shaders to add some subtle glossiness.

image

Here is the node setup for Gronky’s skin for people who care about such things. Not shown: Blender Internal tweakery.

image

Five of the shots
left to do are ident/credits and eighteen shots are narrative. There’s a short mid-credits
scene and all but three shots of Scene 1. I’ll get the rest of the layout to 100% coverage with at least first draft quality in time for June even if I knock over one shot every day between now and then.

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you next week!

Categories
Journals

Hello and welcome to 2 to 8 March.

This week I started sketching out the story from end to beginning using crude comics. The final scene takes place at a bus stop. I’ve photographed a few crappy concrete bus shelters around my neighbourhood and done a recognisable model of one, complete with daggy bright orange bus stop marker. I also finished the numbers for the project font. Alas, kerning is still not very exciting.

Today is Sunday, usually my make-movie-stuff day. It got munched by a family gathering. It was also one of those days where I set out to make a node-based procedural hexagon shader in Cycles and ended up creating a nifty halftone shader instead. It’s been known to happen.

Not a hugely eventful week then but things are progressing. 🙂