13 Sep

concepts, cleaning and compositing

  / by Andy

And another exciting day at studio orange!
This week we’re busy doing heaps and heaps of concept sketches, tests and all the other thingies that help us mastering the surprisingly difficult task of making a movie – well, our movie! But we’re also wrestling with extremely bland things like cleaning the apartment(s) or figuring out who’s next doing the dishes :)
At this point we’ve done our best settling down and getting used to everything But then… Amsterdam isn’t exactly the other side of the world – well, at least not for me. It’s been easy so far, everyone is extremely friendly, helpful and encouraging.

Currently there’s a lot of research and development happening. From an art director’s point of view this involves everything that defines the final look and feel of the movie: lighting, shading, texturing, a bit of modelling and finally compositing and matte painting!

compositing test compositing test screenshot

Here you can see a little matte painting/compositing test I made. It has virtually nothing to do with our movie, it’s just a prove of concept of how someone can yield great results in a minimum amount of time. The scene was originally modelled in blender, then rendered and taken into gimp. There I added additional details for the rock surfaces, clouds and snow. Then I used blender as a 3D compositing tool to relight the result and combine the (manually UV mapped and displaced) mountain panorama with particle snow flakes and procedurally animated clouds.

Easy! It took one day to make, but the render time was pretty low. I made another test recently and was able to render 50% of an HD frame consisting of 8 separate scene passes in 40 seconds! (on my private dual cpu machine)

Well, of course that’s only a tiny fraction of the things we’re developing at the moment. Yesterday we finally got our missing tables, the studio is more or less entering its fully equipped state, and while I’m writing this, the concept sketches start filling our virtual and physical desktops.
And this is only the beginning… :)

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16 Responses to “concepts, cleaning and compositing”

  1. BArrYZ said on 13 Sep, 2005:

    My compliments for the Demo, it’s absolutly incredibile for a oneday work!

    This reveal the extraordinary capabilities of Blender also in the classic video compositing!

    It requires only some video effect plugin, but it’s already incredible!

    Good work!;-)

    —
    BArrYZ form Rome (Italy)


  2. Jakub Steiner said on 13 Sep, 2005:

    Thanks for saving some time for yet another update. Keep’em coming.

    You guys also need a webcam above the worktable ;)


  3. Elcrapocrew said on 13 Sep, 2005:

    Fantastic! If this is any hint of what the movie is going to look like, as in image quality and all, sign me up for two!! I tip my hat to you gentlemen and I will be watching your future work with great interest…


  4. Joeri said on 14 Sep, 2005:

    I was thinking of a webcam to. (I have a spare one btw).
    Might be nice for the_making_of_ to have have timelaps shot from the webcam…


  5. Rajeev said on 14 Sep, 2005:

    Inspiring!
    Keenly following the whole project with awe and excitement.

    Hope I could do the same (a tiny, tiny, tiny short film) with my limited resources.

    So any tutorial showing the way you achieve those wonderful results will be highly appreciated.

    Thanks
    best wishes

    Rajeev


  6. Toon Scheur said on 14 Sep, 2005:

    Don’t forget to submit this film for best animation shortfilm at the academy awards or at the Sundance festival or something….

    Not kidding! :)


  7. Toon Scheur said on 14 Sep, 2005:

    Oops, now that I’ve read my own response, I see now how sarcastic it sounds. I mean Machina should be submitted, not this tryout :p


  8. BArrYZ said on 14 Sep, 2005:

    I agree with Rajeev. Any Blender project for this demo will be highly appreciated, also to study the advanced compositing technic and create a larger tutorial for all the Blender community.

    Good work, guys!!:-D


  9. Omar said on 14 Sep, 2005:

    hope there’s a little video log
    like special “making-of” which we can watch on several dVds.

    Andy great use of sequencer, okay now people are seeing interest of compositing, maybe a prelude for a multi-pass renderer is being cooked in Ton’s laptop? :)

    cheers


  10. Brian said on 14 Sep, 2005:

    Looks nice! A little dark, but that could be my monitor.


  11. Vaughn Thompson said on 14 Sep, 2005:

    I am amazed I looking forward to see the full effects of blender and the other open source software used to create this stunning one day animation.


  12. Rajorshi said on 15 Sep, 2005:

    i want to involbe in ur project
    i’m an artist
    indian
    using Blender for realistic 3D modeling


  13. Auteuro said on 15 Sep, 2005:

    Thank you so much, Andy, Bassam, Ton, and the rest of the Orange team, for the hard work and generous updates! I love everything about the Orange project; what it stands for, what it’s doing for Blender, the guys involved, etc….it’s such an exciting thing…this is what Open Source is about! Can’t say enough good things about all this. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

    Tony


  14. Elam said on 15 Sep, 2005:

    Andy,
    Would it be possible for you to post the blend file, or at the least post a blend with the particle settings for the snow?


  15. Juan Javier Martínez said on 16 Sep, 2005:

    Wonderful work…incredible matte demo….beautiful….impressive….

    Keep on going!!!

    Cheers,

    Juan Javier Martínez
    Madrid, Spain


  16. Christiaan Bakker said on 22 Sep, 2005:

    WOW! Amazing @ndy

    How did you ever made that

    Wow(only word i can say)WOW,WOW!!!!!

    It looks so Renderman

    It looks almost real

    How did you got it that way

    Everything is perfect


ok