BC's Short film WIP

BC Rice

All pre production is finished for the first series of shots and so I just broke ground on my very first completely CGI short film!

Yay! :D

3DLust

Can't wait to see it !!!

BC Rice

Well it's probably gonna be awhile. ;)

3DLust

Maybe you can post some wip's here? We love to see teasers :)

BC Rice

Ha! Dude are you the one who made Siruis Labs? I'm totally using it in this animation! lol

It's a beast to render (and I'm only using a lowly Pentium D which doesn't help) so I'm having to do transparent PNG sequences over the flat rendered backgrounds, but it's worth it, Siruis is sick!

And yeah, I can probably post a few things as I go.

BC Rice

You can actually see some of Sirius's color scheme even in this first shot. I basically am framing the tones around Sirius.

3DLust

That will be awesome! I can't wait to see it all come together - if you need help with some Sirius Labs rendering, just let me know - we don't want your computer to have a meltdown :) You could setup and save some cameras, and then I could render the scenes for your backdrop :)

I just came across this image today on my hard drive and was thinking about doing some animations - so I think it must be fate :)

BC Rice

Absolutely fate.

I'll hit you up if I need any help rendering, but I'm pretty sure so long as I don't try to physically animate a camera moving through Sirius I should be fine. Basically I'm just filming those shots (and some others) like you would traditional animation with a kind of digital matte painting (Sirius) as the backdrop for the animated characters.

In the lower rez places like the corridors and hanger of the station I can animate pretty much in-scene, but any of the really dense places like Sirius it's all old school. ;)

Oh, and the short film is about robot folk as I didn't want to risk trying to effectively animate living things in Carrara.

WendyLuvsCatz

BC Rice (OMG that is an old grain) I do not have Sirius (sorry 3Dlust) but one handy thing is to render big 360º spherical scenes with the spherical camera zoomed out at 90º and then use them in background with a shadowcatcher plane.
you can only rotate, not pan the camera but it is a way to move around an otherwise unwieldy scene.

BC Rice

Yeah that's essentially what I'm doing except I bring the backgrounds into AE and the PNG transparent sequenced characters (or blue/green screen depending) are overlayed on the backgrounds. You can then create shadows by just duplicating and then twisting the layer in 3D space and blacking out the original layer and then changing its opacity/blur, etc.

I don't think either scenario works perfectly, though, as the undulations in, say, a textured wall isn't going to be perfect, but to the normal eye it's clean enough.

BC Rice

And "old grain"? You mean the computer? Yeah, she's friggin ancient. But I make it do what it do. ;)

WendyLuvsCatz

BC Rice, BC=before Christ Rice=Grain!! yeah my humour pretty sad if I gotta explain my jokes!

BC Rice

omg lol

Honestly, that was so funny went *completely* over my head!

BC Rice

Getting the ship ready to be inserted in the scene! :D

BC Rice

So I'm pretty much finished with the background layer. I've already got the ship animation rendered out, but because I have to do motion tracking, etc, I'm doing the ship's pass in a different composition. In there I'll do the color correction, atmospheric elements and any sort of lens perspective adjustments that might be needed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RWroXnnZno

chris poole

Hey BC Rice,

Funnily : , ) I was listening to Deep Purples Highway Star and watching your WIP and as the engines threw out all those sparks the cymbal crashed at the end of the song, it looked and sounded very cool. Nicely done.

Chris

BC Rice

lol Nice! ;)

So I'm forcing myself to not show the character designs and finished renders because I really want to save it for the film. But basically it's a short about robots, androids, etc. Good times.

I decided that I'm taking each shot to 95% completion, leaving final sound FX, color correction and small touch ups for the end. That way I can make sure everything flows as seamlessly as possible.

Here I have some basic placeholder sound FX on the (near) finished shot just to give it some texture. I'm excited about the next shot because I get to really get a good look at the smuggler ship under some lights out of Carrara as it moves underneath the hovering station thingy. I don't have any of the fancy bells and whistles like trapcode particular or kick ass lens flare packages, so I'm having to make due with what I can scrounge together, but so long as I don't completely embarrass myself, I'll be happy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1rttS_BOOI

chris poole

Sound always adds greatly to any animation, good choice as well, the FX match the size of the vessel and emphasised by the small shuttle approaching.

BC Rice

Using a combination of 3D particles and keyed practical smoke/steam for the ships approach.

Using the trick of attaching glowing lights to the object particles to create a decent steamy smoke effect. In order to have at least some of the smoke in the scene interact with the ship I had to go the 3D route. Like, it's *possible* to create the illusion of smoke interaction within a scene by building a bunch of layers, but this is way faster and is completely effective. I really only need to give the subtle impression of interaction in order to sell the scene I think.