This weekend we managed to do the recording with Julia for Ara’s Song.

Thanks to my friend Michael Raich, who generously offered his small multimedia room for this purpose.

The whole recording took about 2 hours for the 1 minute song.

The image above show Julia and me discussing some rhythmically demanding parts.

I have now about 10 full takes of this song and will clean it up a bit before putting it forward to Mikkel and Phil for further processing

What I have now to do is the still missing lip syncing for Ara’s Song. After this I will power up the render machine for a (hopefully) last time for this movie.

While waiting for the sound and music work to continue, I use the time to work on various things to have ready for the release.

One of these tasks is to create 3D printable models of Ara and the dragon. The title image of this post shows the current state of these models. Note that this is still a render. I have yet to optimize the models to minimize the cost. The final statues will be carefully hand painted.

To keep within a manageable price range, the statues are now 7cm (Ara) and 10cm (dragon) in height. Not very big, but as the volume increases by the power of 3, so does the price

These statues will be part of a special ‘thank you’ package, which each of the team will receive.

Once the movie is released, I will see if enough interest is there, to produce a bonus package with a DVD, the statues and a full movie poster which could be purchased directly from me.

Another task that is ahead of me, is to produce a Making-Of video, covering the whole process of creation of this short from the very beginnings to its final release. This is not an in depth tutorial but more of an overview of the evolution of Ara’s Tale.

My plan is also to rent a cinema hall for a real movie premiere here in Innsbruck. If this works out, I plan to show the movie and the Making-Of on the big screen . Lets hope the financing works out for this …

And last but not least I finally find time again to invest more time in my love for photography. My photographic handling is a bit rusted now, but I really enjoy this and are combining this with my mountain bike trips, although carrying those extra 9+ kg up the treks is quite a challenge …

As a diversion from the tons of Ara’s Tale images, see here for some impressions from my recent trips:

I declare the visual development for Ara’s Tale as finished.

This is not 100% true, but I declare it nonetheless. Actually I still have to do the lipsyncing for two shots. This will be done after Ara’s Song is recorded, which will happen this very weekend.

The lipsyncing part should not interfere with any visual developments done so far. I just have to adjust the lip movements to Julia’s voice, feed the shots into my render pipeline and be done with it. You can be sure to hear if this turns out to be different

For the sound recording, I purchased a very simple but quite capable recorder device, a Zoom H1. It records uncompressed WAVs at a sample rate of up to 96kHz and 24 bits.

I got some very helpful tips from Mikkel on how to approach this recording. One of his tips was how to build yourself a cheap popfilter, which is an essential tool for the song recording. You may know the filters from images, where a big round net is positioned in front of the microphone.

Here is mine: built using an old badminton racket and a pantyhose !

This filter works amazingly well. With this type of professional gear the recording session with Julia should go like a breeze

And finally, I put some stills directly taken from the picture locked directory for you here on the blog. Looking at them as stills reveals quite some problems an shortcomings, but used in the actual movie they work pretty well.

Finally all render/compositing jobs are done and I have now the full 1080p footage ready.

I still do have the intermediate multilayer renderpasses for each shot, in case there is the need to revisit some compositing tasks. The storage demand is quite huge for these (a single frame typically has ~140MB) , but it already saved me a lot of time and trouble. I guess I will only delete them once the movie is eventually released

The compositing pass creates the final frames which are delivered as OpenEXR files. Here we typically have 23 MB per frame.

I did some intense testing and exploring on how to best tackle the color grading workflow. As I now did a very close look to the whole color behaviour, I noticed that initially I had wrongly calibrated my monitor and had done the primary color grading in the compositing on a display with a gamma setting of 2.4. That means, that on a correctly calibrated display, the movie displays too bright and flat.

My initial idea was to apply the appropriate gamma correction in blender, but as already mentioned in my previous post, I decided to try out DaVinci Resolve Lite. The new problem that this did create, was that I had to switch to Windows to work with this software. That in itself wouldn’t be a big problem, but I soon found out that the display driver under Windows acts quite differently to the one under Linux. In fact I didn’t manage, to get the same color dynamic under both OSes. I got the gamma setting ok, but for the white and black point I had absolutely no chance to get it to work correctly under Windows. The solution would be of course do buy a real hardware calibration tool, but that is not an option right now and I have to find an other way.

This different behaviour made me a bit uneasy and I did numerous tests on both platforms to learn how these differences show in the final color grading. That was when I learned that my monitor has a gamma drift over time. When freshly turned on, I need a correction of 1.20 and after 4-5 hrs I am down to 1.05.

What I do now, is to constantly check the actual gamma value ( using the cool test images at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/) and apply a correction if necessary. Its a bit tedious, but with this I get relatively reproducible results.

What got me a bit frustrated were the tests I did on my 40″ FulHD TV. It provides a load of settings, none of which seems to have anything to do with a gamma 2.2 setting … Most settings have blown out highlights or oversharpening. The 100Hz feature destroys completely the movie feeling. I really wonder how this movie will look like on the various displays when eventually released. This is something that is completely out of my control.

Anyway, for all those interested, I have a 2 shot sequence in 1080p for you to download and look at. I would really be interested how this sequence looks like on your individual display. With a correct gamma 2.2 display, you should see a relatively dark movie with stark contrast, but there is no completely black area. You should still be able to see features even in the darkest spots. But these dark spots should really be dark and not misty white washed. Please have a look and tell me how your viewing experience is and what display settings you have.

Test Sequence

This is one of the rare shots from our shooting during production

The render machine is running and purring and I already have 80% of the movie in 1080p rendered out. As of this writing the remaining render time will be ~48hrs.

During the course of this final rendering, all sorts of little nasty and quite unexpected problems surfaced, which forced me to tweak and investigate to force the render to be what I wanted it to be.

It seems that running with everything fully turned on, you start to experience all the bugs which you wont get in a decent and small production. One especially mysterious problem was e.g., that exactly one frame out of 250 came out totally black out of compositing. All the frames before and after where perfectly fine, just this single one had some special ‘features’. Tracking down the problem revealed at first, that a blur node with fast gaussian produced a black image. Even switching to Gaussian or Flat produced black blocky artefacts in the result.

In the end I found the problem to be one layer fed into a Hue/Saturation/Value node to cause this whole problem. When exchanging this node with an RGB node everything worked fine again.

My thought was that once the rendering was done I have a final movie in terms of visual appearance as the colour correction was already done in compositing. I did quite some reading and testing in the past couple of weeks and am now convinced, that a final colour correction pass is in order.

Initially I wanted to do this with blender, but at it stands now, only primary color correction is possible in an easy way. Any secondary colour correction needs a huge amount of tricking and fiddling around, and I quite frankly do not have the patience to do this at this stage. I want the job to be done.

I looked for alternatives and unfortunately Lightworks is not yet available for Linux. This will be a piece of software I will really like to try out.

I found no other real solutions in the Linux world. But there is a free ( but not open source) alternative for the Windows platform: DaVinci Resolve. The free version lets you do everything the full blown version does but is restricted to 1080p maximum Resolution, not a real problem for me here

I already played around and tested various aspects on actual footage from Ara’s Tale and must say that this is a joy to work with and it gives me yet another tool to enhance the visual storytelling.

My workflow now is to render out the movie to DPX image sequences and feed those into the DaVinci software. The output will be DPX again and those will be the final picture locked frames. From there I will use ffmpeg to encode to the various formats I have in mind for distribution.

The music and sound work is also going quite smoothly. Mikkel has started to deliver the first sounds and FX and the first integration tests are sounding really phenomenal! There is still a lot of work ahead, but it’s quite clear the the end result will be absolutely beautiful.

And as a last note, I plan to do more regular mini updates through my google+ account. For those who want to follow there here is my link.

Martin Lubich at google+

Now that my render machine is spitting out frame by frame, I had some time to work on the movie poster for Ara’s Tale.

Enjoy and spread it !

UPDATE (15.3.2012): I have now added a link to the high res version of the poster.

Movie Poster high resolution

]]> http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/2012/03/movie-poster/feed/ 11 http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/2012/03/render/ http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/2012/03/render/#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:23:02 +0000 loramel http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/?p=1367 Continue reading →]]>

Finally I have (virtually) pressed the big RENDER button on my render machine and with this I have started the last part of the visual voyage for Ara’s Tale.

Since my last post I have worked through all the remaining todo’s and checked each shot file for problems and consistency. Where I knew of better solutions to problems, I applied those to older shot files. I also consolidated all the naming conventions, which greatly eases the creation of various helper scripts for the final rendering.

It was a very interesting experience to go through all the files again and ensure that all my standards are adhered by each shot. This is where a real checklist comes in very handy.

While going through each shot, I did test renders and compositing for 1 or two frames and with this I kept track of the total estimate in rendertime and more importantly the final size of the renderpass files.

Now I know the exact numbers:

total rendertime : 350 hrs ( on my render machine)
total filesize : 2,4 TB

With this knowledge I have created scripts which will allow me to automate the render process almost to 100%. There is yet one problem to solve: I am short of ~250  GB of harddisk space, so I will have to get some more space. ( Unfortunately the harddisk prices have risen considerably since the disastrous thailand floods some months ago).

The Music for Ara’s Tale is right on track too. Phil managed to create the first 250 seconds of the score and I can tell you: its everything I have dreamed of and then even more.

Now lets hope my render machine is up to the task and I have a 1080p picture locked footage in 14 days from today.

Stay tuned …

ps: and this post’s title image was my first go with the cycles render engine …

Finally the long awaited major milestone is here !

All major visual development is done and I have edited the movie to a final cut. This is not yet a picture lock, but what I call a timelock. Now the path is clear for Mikkel and Phil to do their magic and add sound and music to this movie.

And to all visitors from Inzing, a deeply heartfelt ‘Hello’ to you

Now that the edit is done I have exact numbers on the running time of the movie. Without the credits it runs 7:23 min or 11339 frames at 25fps, which is quite a good match to my estimates from 2010.

Speaking of numbers, here is the actual table of hours spent so far on the project:

----------------------------------------------
   5:34    01-Script
  43:54    02-Storyboard
  73:54    03-Concept Art
  14:48    04-Animatics
 152:45    05-Modeling
  76:57    06-Rigging
 189:17    07-Animation
 261:00    08-Texturing
 228:11    09-Simulation
  51:48    10-Project Management
 131:54    11-Research
  16:29    Editing
 290:46    Lighting/Compositing
----------------------------------------------
1537:17 Total

Now a lot of tedious little bits of work still has to be done. Apart from a lot of fixing, I plan to spend some time on developing a proper logo, movie poster and finally give the official movie site a long needed overhaul. And not to forget, I am reallylooking forward to the song recording with Julia Schaller for Ara’s Song.

For the technically interested and maybe as a small glimpse at the various bits of work ahead of me, I give you an extract from my current todo list:

*** !!!! ALL shots !!!! ****
- reimport camera and make sure that the camera when made local only
  has the object and NOT data made local
  doing this will result in the focus control not working any more
  ( all shots currently have no focus control !!! )
- in case there is an 'all' renderlayer used, check if z buffer is
  correct in all major camera angles. sc02.shot18 had weird
  z values for later angles. If this is the case use manual
  z-combine (math minimum) from individual layers

*** all shots with closeup hair ***
- try to use same settings as in shot sc02.shot11b

*** all shots with sss extra layers ***
- check if new approach used in sc02.shot12 is better suited 

*** !!!!! All compositing shots !!!!!!
- check if camera has the same focus as in the animation blend
file. it seems that the lens control does not import
correctly from 2.49 to 2.6x

*** Scene 1 ***

sc01.shtot3a, sc01.shtot3c, sc01.shtot3g, sc01.shtot5b
    - add nose lamps

sc01.shot03a, sc01.shot04a, sc01.shot05a
    - try to add rays and more depth mist to shot

sc01.shot03c, sc01.shot03c:
    - use reflection for the eyes ( see sc02.shot12 for how todo it)

*** Scene 2 ***

all main scene shots:
    - use particle edit mode to draw loose rocks instead of
      weight painting
    - use noise modifier for back glow compositing
    - probably use noise modifier for main/cage light
    
sc02.shtot2a
    - add nose lamps

sc02.shot03,sc02.shot05,sc02.shot06:
    - use mist animation instead of smoke simulation for mist
      ascending above ledge

sc02.shot06:
    - fix alpha issues with hair and cage in compositing
    
sc02.shot08:
    - add more rocks to the mouth of the canyon. Now it does not
      correspond to the shot in sc02.shot05

sc02.shot08a:
    - fix strange cloth deformation at left foot
        --> make left foot collider a bit longer to prevent
            collision with edge, which seems to cause this problem

sc02.shot17:
    - make dragon appear a bit later -> remove this ghosting effect
    - use sss on dragon
    
sc02.shot18:
    - fix dragon's tongue. It vanishes sometimes into the gums.
    - use sss on dragon
    - cage light is too strong on dragon -> has too articfical
      lighting feel to it
    
sc02.shot21b:
    - maybe use wind setup for hair from shot sc02.shot21d

sc02.shot28a:
    - flickering hair shadow problem -> probably have to use
      separate hair layer to get proper hair mask
    
sc02.shot28d:
    - make eyes a bit darker
    
sc02.shot28f:
    - cage material is too dark and flat -> revert to original
      light cage material but with normal maps subdued to avoid
      flicker

I am talking about Ara’s Tale of course. For any other visions, apocalyptic and otherwise, I just refer to here.

And that does not imply that there is any apocalypse waiting regarding Ara’s Tale, quite on the contrary.

The teaser released about one year ago, stated a release date for the final film of 2011, but well, that was a bit optimistic ( again ).

What I can say now, is, that visually I am nearing completion. Shot production is down to 6 shots left, all of them relatively straight forward. Nothing in comparison to the latest vfx heavy shots I had to fight with.

After that, I have a small todo list of fixes for some shots. Parallel to that I will do the final edit on the movie, which will result in a time locked ( if this is a correct term) version of Ara’s Tale. A perfect base for Phil and Mikkel to start working on the score and the sound fx and final mix.

But to complicate things a bit, I have enrolled in an 8 week cgworkshop course on creature texturing with Mari. 2 weeks are now almost done and its a huge fun and learning experience for me. And as I want to make the best out of this course I will invest quite some time into it. That will call for some balancing of my available free time, but it works quite well so far.

With all that said, I expect the time locked version to be ready by end of february. This will certainly be worth an extra post.

I have no real clue how demanding the audio work will be, but from a CG point of view, I see the time after february a bit more relaxing, as then everything should be in place ( minus some fixes ). The rendering of the 1080p shots can be done easily while working with Phil and Mikkel on the sound. Current estimates predict a rendertime of 28 days. This does not include the managing overhead of tackling the 3TB of data …

So from a visual standpoint the movie in full resolution will be finished by the end of april. That lets one hope, that it might be possible to have a finished movie at its 3rd anniversary at the end of July.

But I guess its safe to say it will be ready in 2012.

Otherwise it would be its own kind of apocalypse.

With this post I want to summarize and share my experiences I had using the particle system in current blender 2.61.

The current production phase calls for a lot of vfx, mostly to be done using dynamic particles. I will not go into detail as to what exactly the shots are, but I think just describing the overall concepts and approaches will give you an enough complete picture.

It soon was clear, that using the particle system from 2.49 was out of the question, as I needed some effects rendered using the volume shading with point density input from various particle systems.

So the first task was to export all the camera animation as well as all the objects and animations for the other needed parts. It turned out, that blender 2.61 does a decent job in importing old 2.49 files. At first look, everything looked ok. On deeper inspection though, I noticed broken rig setups regarding constraints and drivers across multiple armatures.

The effect was, that the resulting animation wasn’t exactly the same as in the original 2.49 version. Fortunately, the vfx work needed here did not call for pixel accuracy, so after a few manual tweaks I accepted the setup.

The next task was to come up with a solution and workflow to tackle the needed vfx work. The shots in question require several layers of moving particles, partly rendered as instanced objects and partly as volumes.My intention and need was to be totally in control on how those particles moved. I had a very precise picture in mind how the whole system should behave and move over time. With one word, I wanted to animate the overall behaviour of the  particles in a very controlled and predictable manner. But the individual particles should expose a random and chaotic appearance.

An example would be e.g. a tornado, where I control the overall shape and movement but let the system fill in the chaos. Or another example are the vfx used for the death eaters in the harry potter movies. ( That does not hint at any tornado being used in the shots … )

My first idea was to use keyed particles, as those seemed very controllable in various aspects. What I did not realize then, was that they are too deterministic. The interpolation of the particles between the used keys is linear and gives a decisively unchaotic appearance. I was under he impression that random fluctuations and external force fields could be overlayed, but alas, that is not the case. Any physical properties are turned off as soon as keyed particles are used.

Well, that made it clear then to use the physics type particles and use force fields of all sorts to get the desired results. Well, there went the controllable and predictable attributes …

The headaches using this approach are manifold. Let me just list some of the shortcomings using this approach:

• The animatable properties of particle systems are rather limited.
• Controlling particle properties through textures work, but any animation of the  textures themselves is completely ignored and noneffective.
• Force fields have to be animated by hand. The animated properties act indirectly on the movement of the particles and thus you have to guess the outcome.
• Multiple force fields with overlapping effects are even harder to control
• Trying to animate a moving particle stream along a path could be done using a curve force field, but you loose ( to a big degree) the interaction with other force fields and are left with something similar to the keyed approach.
• To see the effects, you have to rerun the simulation every time you change anything.

The last point on the list wouldn’t be such a problem, if the cache system worked reliable. It happened very often, that I didn’t see any changes allthough I tweaked the force field animation a lot. Even freeing the cache didn’t work. Only changing some basic parameters (like changing the numbers of particles) I was able to reset the cache.

And I had to do this for a lot of particle systems all at once, thus multiplying the amount of time needed to get a result which at least had some resemblance to my original concept.

The next surprises came when actually rendering out those particles. Each particle system was rendered out to a different render layer all with various lights and masking applied. It turned out that 2 of my 8 particle systems didn’t render at all. They showed up very nicely when rendering the single layer alone, but would vanish as soon as all the layers were activated. Setting up those particle systems from scratch solved this problem. Another glitch was that the masking I set up in one layer was also active in another one, and thus ruining the render of that layer. Unfortunately I have not found any workaround for this one.

Another glitch is if you want to have a vector blur pass done. Allthough a lot of warning messages are produced in the console about missing objects in the speed table I got my vector passes. They look nice for 90% of the frames. But for some frames you get huge spikes in velocity for individual particles, which results in sudden long streaks in the compositor.

All in all, I have to do 3 shots with this type of heavy vfx, and I am halfway through. This should give you an idea how time consuming this whole process is.

The verdict on the current state of particles in blender is quite clear: a nice toy if used in demonstrations or simple setups. As soon as you ramp up the complexity and requirements you will have to face serious limitations. I would not use the term ‘production ready’ for the current implementation. And sadly the same has to be said about hair and cloth as well …

Well, sorry for the long rant-like text. I just had to make room in my head to be able to go on My hope now is, that the 3rd shot requiring this sort of vfx will benefit from the experience gained so far, but one thing is for sure: compromises will have to be made …