Thought to share a bit of what I've been working on lately. It is after all a Softimage project.
Earlier on this month I got a project from a client to build a whole world and mini[/u] series. I'm building the pilot now over a period of a month and a half. Here is a small update on the preproduction phase - showcasing a little on my though processes and what I do to build the project. All of it is mostly ideas and concepts. Many thanks to my brother for doing a lot of the concept artwork for the characters. They are great!
---Software I have used so far for the project:
Pureref (Free or Donation)
Krita (Free)
WPS office (Windows) (Free)
Libre Office (Free and Opensource)
Snipping Tool (Windows) (Free)
Onenote (Free)
Blender (Free and Opensource)
Softimage (EOL) - Softimage Mod Tool (Free)
TrueSpace (Free)
It has been a long two weeks of work since the last update - and a lot of work has been done. So much work that I haven't been able to make a meaningful update!
Nonetheless, I have made a quick collage to showcase some of the progress - by no means does this capture our progress!
Thanks to Memo Cortes and Miguel Stephens for a good chunk of work. They have managed to help with the modeling of the city, traffic and animation of the characters. And thanks to Juan Pablo Rojas for the killer music! The clients are very happy with it - being produced with creative commons music. You couldn't know the wiser! I could not have made such progress without them.
So here is a bullet point list of the progress over the past two weeks.
Created and Finalized Character rig base for all characters (to save time and budget)
Developed randomizer and dynamic characterization system for infinite number of characters
Developed Translucent SSS shaders for Direct X 11 GPU paper
Developed Character textures
Developed Paper textures
Finished modeling the city
Finished modeling and rigging the traffic
Finished shading the city and creating a rough lighting pass
Finished the city layout
Fine tuned rigs with stress tests (important for future productions)
Animated the majority of the animation library clips and characterizations for the necessary characters (they are great!)
Ready cameras, layout and animation libraries to animate each shot accordingly over then next week or so
Ready for the render pipeline development in a week or so
I feel my progress has been slow, but looking back we have done a lot.
Thought to share with you. I have been busy working hard on this project. I am on schedule, but working with just enough wages to cover the costs with a little extra, but doing ok. I am really enjoying this project, but today I was tired. So.. here, thought to share with you guys.
Renders are done in Mach Studio Pro 2. Sometimes I get 15 fps with the way it's looking so far.
Rigging and animation is done in Softimage, and has been pretty good. The rig is a little complicated and used a bit of visual programming with ICE - but they are really a pleasure to work with with the animation. My brother did the animation and they all are pretty good. I am looking forward to putting everything together and making it all look beautiful.
I hope the clients and their possible clients will be super happy with it all.
Well guys. I did it. I did the 2 minute animation and everything is fine! Clients are happy! I had to extend the deadline like 4 times, and took a month extra fintuning things (which came out of my pocket...) but the clients were happy and more than happy with the result for taking the extra time. It was a fun little animation.
I am techinically under a verbal NDA, but I can show it to a select few (cause I'm sure you are half a world away) if you guys agree to keep it somewhat very private!!! Just PM me and you can take a look! ;)
Here are some random facts:
Modeling mostly done in trueSpace, Blender, Softimage then 3Dmax.
Animatic done in Blender
Everything else done in Softimage
Rendering in Machstudio Pro 2 (3 passes for background) and the OpenGL viewport (2 passes for characters)
There were a total of around 40 shots.
At times there were 20 characters on screen - (I really need to learn how to do crowds..)
Each frame has a total of 35 seconds average in total computing power, including all passes and post effects rendering time. Thanks GPU's!
Compositing and editing was done in entirely in Blender.
I put in about 460 hours, meanwhile my brother did 55 and my disciple/student did another 55 hours.
For the characters, I built one generic rig and an ICE randomizer thingy that helped me build many other characters.
The character lineart geometry were done in Blender with the grease pencil, converted to meshes then used in Softimage in the OpenGL viewport.
Many thanks to those who share yours scripts and things, including those who helped with the OpenGL scripts, the ICE wheel compounds and scene examples, the spring scripts, and other every day tools I use, including tutorials.. I couldn't have done it without you.