Mend Me Blog

I have just posted a movie that plays it alongside the storyboard. It is pretty interesting to watch as it reveals how scenes went from idea to realisation. It seems to be a little bit out of sync towards the end – not entirely sure why but at the moment I don’t particularly care. Need sleep… but enjoy!

You will find the first version of the Mend Me music video in the downloads section. It has been a sleepless few weeks and there are a lot of things to fix before a final release but I am quite proud of the progress I have made. I now feel completely at home with Blender, there are still a lot more things to learn but general use of most parts are comfortable now. Such a long way to come from when I started and could barely navigate the 3D viewport, missed clicked everything, and was too scared to look at the other window modes!

Still haven’t had much luck trying to iron out the show-stopping texture issues on the Treant. I posted on this forum and have had a few answers but so far I haven’t cracked it yet. I have a horrible feeling that this will have to go on the “next time” list of issues to fix. Such is the learning curve with these things. I still haven’t tried:

1. UV unwrapping the tree – I really don’t want to do that as it will be very difficult and time-consuming
2. Turning on “full OSA” in the material settings – not sure what this is or where it is but might be worth looking at

What I have tried:

1. Systematically isolating texture elements to see what could be causing it – seems like specualrity, displacement, and normal maps all do it
2. This led me to believe it was an issue with my lights so I tried  raising the shadow buffers and various quality parameters of all lights – didn’t help
3. Baking the procedural textures to images
4. Creating new image-based textures

I need to do more testing and will just have to suffer the pain of watching the bloody thing sparkle…

Treant Flicker issue .mov

There is always room for more details. Whether it be in the matte painting of a scene, or the generation and placement of props to, of course, the actual animation. It seems particularly worse for all these outdoor open-area shots. I really need to spend more time on the open field scenes when the butterfly falls through the tree. The grass was a problem as well as the resource-slaughtering “wide tree”. I tried to minimise the shots to frame only the good parts of this set and hoped that the vector blur would counter the poorly textured ground.

I am worried about the look to the forest shot as I am having issues with my matte-circle. I can’t seem to get the proportions looking correct with the UV mapping and dimensions of the image.

Ok this shot completely sucks at the moment. The animation is bad and it leaves most people confused at what just happened because of it. This was always going to be a difficult one as it relied on good animation to work which I didn’t have time to do and effectively this is a placeholder. What needs to be fixed:

• add more about-to-pounce posing to the shot just before where the monster is going to pounce
• zoom the camera quickly at the start to show the pounce
• animate each branch crashing and bouncing off the tree
• add the treant arm

I didn’t have the treant arm in there as I have issues linking it once again and didn’t have time to make a work around.

The final shot is killing my render times with this blastard wide tree in frame. But the landscape looks very empty as it is and the lighting on the tree looks really nice – so I want it in the foreground. But I don’t have time for 2+ minutes per frame here so I decided to look into the compositing nodes again as I remembered that you could load as image into it. After a little bit of work and some wrangling as the order of the filters seemed to make or break it, I finally got it to work and guess what? 20 seconds / frame!!!! Hahahahaha!

This is is one of my favourites. The way the grass turned out and the potential for it impressed me as I was not really expecting the scene to be that special. I am very glad that I did not resort to using a flat image for the grass and instead played with static particles till I got grass that fit with the opening scene. I was not able to get particle combing happening so there is no collision. I had to be careful with the placement of the butterfly so that is looked like it was on the grass but avoided any intersections with the particles.

I learnt another lesson the hard way with this scene: I had my sample buffers on the ray-tracing spot lights too low and thus have a disappointing shadow result. Though i was excited to see that each blade of grass seemed to receive its own shadow. I did a quick test and it seems like it should not be too hard to fix. But I don’t think I will have the time to re-render it unfortunately as this shot took a while.

Well I’m down to the wire and still reeling over the mismatching UV/textures on my main set piece. Coupled with the yet-to-be-solved sparkling tree issue I have to redeem something. So I decided to break the project convention I have adhered to so far in order to just get results. Instead of linking the monster as an asset into another file for animation I will instead forego this object-oriented approach and just get all the other assets into the monster source file (where the textures seem to work).

This proved time-consuming and annoying as the Treant character refused to link properly! Not to mention all the set elements that needed to be at least roughly spatially synchronised. For instance I wanted to be able to edit the lights for this scene but also keep them in roughly the same layout as in the subsequent scene (the boy climbing the tree) for continuity. All of this linking of assets is great till something goes wrong; then it is exponentially harder to work out what the issue is – it should just work, if it works in the source file then that should be replicated in the linked file.

The snippets I have seen from the renders so far indicate that this sacrifice will be worth it even though it will make life down the track harder. I only wish that the monster was properly textured in the chase scene. At least the glowing eyes worked out well.

I had shied away from using my macbook pro for rendering as I had it in my head that the renders might not match across platforms. I have had a lot of issues with the colour and gamma of photoshop files which contributed to this notion. I finally put it to the test and rendered a single frame on both windows and mac, then viewed both files on each machine together. They look identical to me – so I’ve just gained another render node!