argus1000 produced a new animation: NOAH REVISITED

argus1000

I learned 4 things while working on this new movie.

1) SYNC DIALOGUE. I never had done a movie with dialogue before. It alot harder. You have to worry about syncing the dialogue with facial expresions. You have to worry about timing and angles. You have to worry about the movement of the eyes, especially diffcult. I don't pretend to be really successful at it. Moreover, I found the Mimic Pro for Carrara plugin counter-intuitive when it comes to changing the phonemes/visemses manually.

2) COMPOSITING. I learned about basic compositing. The cafeteria scene and the rain scene at the end are composites. In the cafeteria scene, the shot of the main  character is superimposed over the background; in the rain scene, at the end, the main character is superimposed over the rain which is superimposed over the background, using chroma key.

3) DYNAMIC HAIR. Thanks to Jonstark (who is credited), I learned to animate my female character's dynamic hair. I don't pretend to have totally succeeded there either.

4) PHYSICS. Thanks to iClone's Physics Toolbox, I have been able to download a forklift from Google's 3D warehouse and govern it with physics only: simulations of three independant wheels, mast, tilter and forks.

 

 

Jonstark

Wow!  That was seriously impressive!  Must have taken a *ton* of work.  Nice camera work/movement, very smooth and professional.  That forklift was something else, the tires even trembled which really sold the realism.  Tons of trees swaying in the breeze, lots and lots of dialogue (tricky stuff, I'm sure) and scenes of eating (probably just as hard to).  The scene in the cafeteria where he's looking around the room, so many different people (and loved the effects), the overhead shots of the city, with cars moving and the camera sweeping, just seriously impressive and complex work here.  I'm kind of amazed you were able to put this all together and render it all so quickly, what was your render time per frame I wonder?  These don't look like easy scenes to set up, and I know for certain you had to have built many of your own props/sets, like the houseboat itself.  There is a ton of stuff here, very well executed and I'm betting you learned a ton of stuff in putting this all together.  Very impressive!

bigh

gave you a

if I had a wife like that , I would find lots of stuff to do

 

argus1000

Jonstark said:

 what was your render time per frame I wonder? 

Thanks for he show of suport, Jonstark. Yes, it took a lot of work. I usede Carrara's native renderer. The render time varies between 30 sec and 45 secs prer frame between shots with only one figure and shot between 3 or 4 figures. It also depends on the number of objects. The operning shot with a lot of replicators took 3 min per frame. Also, the shots in the cafeteria where I used depth of field took 3 min per frame. Depth of field is murder. But in the overall, renders didn't take that long. Remember: I have a computer with 2 Xeons CPUs for a total of 24 logical cores or nodes: that helps.

 

As for the houseboat, I designed the base myself with the help of Inagoni's Shaper. I downloaded the upper part from Google's 3D warehouse, deconstructed it and applied my own textures.

 

mmoir

That is alot of animation, great job on this. 

 I find when you do stuff like this you are always learning stuff along the way, you basically force yourself to learn new things.

Diomede

Really enjoyed it.  Keep going.

Steve K

Very nice, a good story (always my first priority) and realistic looking characters.  I noticed in the credits a couple of PA's that I also like, First Bastion and Maclean (although I'm disappointed that both have stopped providing Poser format).  Also, the story by Philip K. Dick (a favorite of mine) has a funny item in the Wikipedia entry - published in "Amazing Stories", the agent had annotated it "IT'S NOT SCIENCE FICTION!"  I agree on the dialogue, and in the 48 Hour Film contests, I avoid dialogue.  Partly to save the lip sync time, but also because I'd prefer to "show" rather than "tell".  A favorite quote that I've mentioned here before I think:

"At some point about halfway through 2001: A Space Odyssey here's what everyone should be thinking: 'WTF Stanley Kubrick? There's no more dialogue in this movie? I hate you.' No one thinks that because the film is a complete transfixing masterpiece."

http://gizmodo.com/5864704/film-nerds-are-drooling-over-stanley-kubricks-incredible-early-photography/

argus1000

Thanks everybody for the nice words.

@SteveK

Philip K Dick is my favorite author, He's a refugee from outer space. He's majestically GONE. And Stanley Kubrick has always been my favorite filmmaker.

takezo_3001

I couldn't watch it with the sound on, as the bleedin' forks scraping the plates is like fingernails on the chalkboard to me...Otherwise, it's a good effort, good only because I couldn't take that horrid scraping anymore!