GAWD this week has been a GRIND.... grueling shot after grueling shot... I'm really pushing the limits of my hardware+software+aching wrist ^ ^ So the scenes I'm doing this week have like 20 fully animated characters in them... dynamics sims, dynamic hair, particle stuff, heavy SPD + all kinds of shet in like 20 million poly scenes that take 12 gigs of ram to render 0_0
Today I spent 3.5 hours trying to get this mock softbody sim working but I never could so I just faked it with morphs and it looked fine...
STRANGELY enough... these CRAZY scenes are rendering really FAST and they look awesome ^ ^ I turned all my render nodes off except one this week because I HATE PG&E and they HATE ME and because they are not needed for these shots... rendering with the one 8 core box is keeping up just fine.. I'll turn em back on when the shots get crazy and the queue starts stacking up...
ALSO I'm doing April+May's work this month so its been kinda crazy... My mind is still spinning and I'm like SHET the month is OVER?! I've decided to move my schedule up a month because I want to finish a month earlier than I planned so I can spend more time on the end of the film cause those shots are gonna make these I'm doin now look simple 0_o So I need to learn all the tricks I can now...
I did more crowd research... I was able to get a good solution with the Splinespread plugin... the proB was that it can't offset animation coming from IK controllers...it needs straight keys on the affected objects... SO I bought this cheap lil plugin Smart Keyframe Tag (THANKS to your paypal donations! ^ ^) So then you get a character with IK animated er whatever....run that Keyframe tag thang on it and it converts all the animation to keys on the bones etc... then you drop the character into Splinespread and all the clones will be offset... I'll do a proper tutorial later and share they setup as well...
There's so MANY mistakes to be made when making a 3d feature solo like this 0_0 It really is like plugging holes in the hull of your ship... gotta keep those fingers in and also plug the new ones... most ALL of my mistakes are stupid tech gotchas...like ONE that keeps KILLING ME is when I was working on the models and texturing them I used this legacy dirt shader in C4d... it looks fine for stills but when animated it flickers like crazy and makes this blocky pattern thereby ruining the shot... i THOUGHT I eradicated it from all the models but it keeps popping up fucking up my renders so I go on dirt shader hunts going through shots deleting that BASTARD...
The GOOD thing about fucking shit up early on is ^ ^ So early in the film I thought it looked good at the time then later I realized I made a bunch of mistakes so I thought it looked good before but then when I fix it...it looks amazing ^ ^ So yeh... theres some incentive to do teH fixin....
I plan to take 2 weeks off in July so before then I'll fix all the broke shots and hopefully they will all render over that two week period... the last time I took off was on Xmas... So yeh after grinding May and June it will be nice to take a short breather before I come back and PWN THROUGH the rest of the film ^ ^
Dude that Spike action figure is Sweet, Must get one.
ReplyDeleteKinda new here - have you posted any frames from the movie yet?
ReplyDelete~ J
2 weeks off 0_0
ReplyDeletehalf of month 0_0
unbelievable^ ^
^ ^ vacations
hot summer days^ ^
WILL BE RAIN!
marionettes will miss you^ ^
i agree that spike action figure is freakin' sweet. i JUST burnt all 3 dvds of bebop for my new friend holly cuz she recommended samurai champloo to me and i'm already lovin' it. she's never seen bebop and i was like @_@ whoaa get on that! ;D
ReplyDeletesounds like HSM is coming along perfectly! i'm really excited. whenever i read these posts i keep thinking "gawd i'd kill to even watch like 30 seconds of it" lol