I can finally say that this project is finished! It’s been a really intensive period at the end but I’m happy to say that we reached our goals and finished the film.
You can read our post mortem of the project here:
And watch the final result here:
We hope you all enjoyed it and that the readers of this blog have found it interesting, thank you for your time and comments!
Rocket Man Group
Long time since I wrote something here on the blog, sorry for that. The last couple of weeks have been really hectic for us, working early morning to late night seven days a week, that’s crunchtime!
What I have been doing since the last time is focusing on the recording of the live footage, organizing this, finding the best shots, planning what to use for the film and such things. We we’re planning to use a camera crane to get smooth and nice shots, but unfortunately that didn’t work out. And due to the lack of time and working with a five year old girl, some of the shots didn’t turn out as good as we hoped.
So there was much work stabilizing the material and getting the best possible result after tracking.
After that I did the matchmoving, which I can explain a bit more.
Matchmoving is the technique that you use to blend CG images with live footage. It’s the process of creating a camera that mimics the live footage camera as closely as possible, camera settings, position and perspective is very important for a good matchmove. After you have finished setting up the camera in your 3d software you use that camera to render out the CG to blend correctly with the live footage.
To do this I’ve used a 3d tracking program, and manual matchmoving for the static shots.
Planning the shots thoroughly is a really good thing to do, you will save a lot of time covering up your tracks in post, and you will get a better result faster if you have a good planning. Which I of course have learned the hard way =) But experience working with bad material makes you a better VFX artist in the future, working with good material is so much easier.
We have been working hard to render out all of the CG shots, it’s around 30 shots that needs to be set up right and rendered. And of course all of them didn’t turn out as we hoped the first time. So this has taken a lot of time and we have been running around between all of the computers we have borrowed from our classmates. The renderlist that we made was crucial to organize this work and fortunately it all turned out really well. And we could then turn to the compositing of all of it, enhancing the look and feel of the movie.
I’ve also been in close contact with Andreas Grenholm who have written and recorded the music and sound effects for the film. The music is so important and takes the film to the next level, I think it turned out great and I’m really satisfied with Andreas work.
I’m proud of our results even if we could have done things differently, but we have learned a lot and reached our goals for this project. I will return with a project wrap up and post mortem later, the film will be available to download soon, feel free to write your thoughts here. Thank you for your time and interest in our project.
MS3 Delivery
This is not the final movie, it will be updated shortly.
The last scenes are rendering and post work and music will be added.
//Rocket Man Group
Here’s the second vechicle, the idea was that the characters built the rocket themselves. The top engines are based on the Boeing 777 commercial aircraft, the ones at the bottom are F-1 rocket engines. The child actors name is “nova” hence the name on the rocket. I’ve written a couple of expressions for the engines, and now me and Olle are working on the particles for it.
//mike
Environment
As the subject says, the environment is now all done, I spent the last two day creating the background which we wanted to be in paper or at least have a feel of paper to it. This to relate to the fact that it’s a book the environment is located in. Had some design problems but I think I solved them and I’m pretty happy with how it finally turned out.
The tree was created a week or two ago, it was something I hadn’t done before which of course led some testing. Tried among other things particle system with sprites but ended up with using an instancer instancing poly leafs on a particles emitted from a poly surface (formed as I wanted the foliage to look like). Obviously this led to a lot of polys but nothing that wasn’t manageable.
The props and junk in the scene are from an old project I made here at gsCEPT and Mike’s bike.
The rest of the work on the environment since the last post has been pretty straight forward (texturing the fence and the crane and modeling and texturing the tank).
Lighting
Did some light testing earlier and decided to use final gather, so now the day light setup consists of one dome with a ramp simulating the light from the blue sky, a directional light for the sun and some bounce light to light up shadows here and there. The night setup is pretty similar in terms of the light it consists of; there is still den sky dome, much darker of course, the sun light is replaced with a moon light and some additional lights for the moon light on the hills in the background.
Rendering
Today I’m going to start the first real render that we are going to use in the final movie. Did a test render for to day and it looks promising in terms of flickering and artifacts in the light and textures. So I’m hoping this will go pretty painless especially since we have very little time.
Render Layers
The film will be rendered in about 5 to 7 layers. I’m using 4 layers for the environment one for the sky, one for clouds, one for the hills and one for the rest (the actual yard and everything on it). The last one is the only one I’m using final gather on. Then the characters and moving objects will be on one layer that I will use rebuilding final gather on in contrast to the environment layer which of course will save a lot of time rendering the environment. As for the final layer I might add an occlusion pass to boost some shadows in some scenes if needed.
//Olov
Another scene is pretty much complete, I’ll hopefully have time to finetune some things before we render. But now I’ve moved on and started on the next scene wich will be the one where they ride the motorcycle. Got to work fast if we want to get finished in time =)
//Tim
here’s a playblast of the first scene where we are introduced to the man and the monkey. It’s pretty much done but there’s always room for improvements. Since we are running out of time I’ll move on and if there is time, go back and work on it some more.
//Tim
Here are some renders of the motorcycle in two different light setups. Although some parts need a bit more dirt I am pretty satisfied with the result. The wheel spin is controlled with expressions. I also created expressions for the exhaustsystem, engine and sidecar so that they vibrate when the motorcycle is moved. We decided that there propably wont be any rigging invovled (given the fact that the motorcycle will take up at most 10% of the frame). Now, Continuing with the rocket.
Hope you like it.
//mike
This is an image showing the rocketman and the monkey together. While we are working on the animations we wanted to give you a better idea of how the interaction between the two characters may look in the final result. We are aiming at maintaining this kind of production quality throughout the whole short.
//Mehmet & Tim
Been a while since I posted any progress on the environment. Here is a quick render of how it looks at the moment, the shed is all done, the ground texture is almost done might add some more dirt after I added grass and rocks, the crane is modeled and UVmapped and the fence around the yard is modeled. As you can see there is some previz objects in this render (the tree and the tank). I put them in to get a better feel of how the yard will end up, but of course there will be a lot more junk and scarp also.
I’m a little behind in the time plan, mainly because I’ve been working with my showreel and things related to that. But I don’t think there will be any problems making the deadline even though there is clearly some work to be done.
//Olov