Blender Minutes

Allthough the title image is taken at dusk, I chose it to symbolize the mountain of work still ahead of me. It also fits well the current sculpting of the main set of Ara’s Tale. And besides that this is the view from my bedroom and this type of light is only at this time of the year for only a couple of weeks and then only in a 10 minute window, so I got lucky this year.

The start into this year is a bit slow. Real life is hugely interfering with this project and then there is the blank page effect. All shots from the entry set are done and now its back again at the basics – environment modelling and sculpting.

But I managed to get started. The task ahead now is/was the sculpting of the main set. I decided to use a different approach than the one I used for the other set. There I divided the canyon into several objects and sculpted/textured each individually. That gave quite some headaches in the texturing phase where I struggled to reduce the seams to a minimum.

This time I use one object for the main set canyon and ledge. I manually subdivided the regions which will be seen in closeup shots and thus did a very cheap ( and fixed) dynamic sculpting approach.

Instead of dividing the set into several objects and uv unwrap each individually, I created the division using seams and uv unwrapped these individual patches separately. Each patch will receive it own texture when texture painting. Then I will create a separate material for each of the patches and use the corresponding textures. The basic material settings are the same for all these materials.

I already did some feasibility tests and based on these I decided to try this approach. And now with my hardware upgraded, I will also try to test drive Mari on this setup and do a comparison to blender’s texture painting. With a 15 day trial license there should be plenty of time to do this.

Sculpting of the main part is now done. The sculpted mesh has ~850000 vertices and will be used directly as is. No displacement maps and the high frequency details will be done during texturing with bump maps. This amount of vertices is a bit high to work with fluidly in blender 2.49 (due to the infamous performance issue on fermi based consumer cards) but this is not an issue for the actual rendering. Tweaking of the animation will be done with a 50000 vertex mesh as proxy for the real one.

I wanted to have the sculpt of the set fully support the shots I had already done and for this I imported the camera rig and all camera actions of the various shots together with the Ara rig and her actions to the sculpting file. Sculpting is done in 2.5x whereas the animation is done in blender 2.49b. A minor annoyance is that you cannot directly append/link an action from a 2.49 file. You first have to open it in 2.5x save it and then you can append/link it.

With this all done I fine tuned the sculpting by having one viewport with the camera’s view and the an other for sculpting and sometimes sculpting in the camera view as well. This worked out quite well, especially where I had to ensure the correct topology of the terrain where Ara is interacting with it ( she should not be floating or wading through rocks )

See here for some images directly taken from inside blenders viewport to get an idea of the current progress.

Allthough I haven’t done any updates here on my blog, work on Ara’s Tale has continued. Details a bit later, first an announcement.

Circumstances have led to a change of the composition of the team. Leeran Z. Raphaely, responsible for the music so far, will not be able to continue work on the score anymore. A big thank you to Leeran for all his input so far. Check out his site, he is a very capable and promising composer.

Taking up the workload of developing the score is now Philippe Rey, a french composer, who has followed the development of Ara’s Tale in a passive role. This role is now an active one, and a very active one indeed ! A big welcome to the team, Phil.

The work behind the scenes included the start of detailing, modelling and scultping the main set. Progress is a bit slow right now, but that has a reason.

Parallel to this I have edited a short teaser from the material I have so far. This teaser is a first real testdrive for the sound/music collaboration. One of its goals is to find a workflow suitable for everone involved and still guaranteeing high efficiency. This goal is reached quite well so far.

The other goal is to use this teaser to gain a bit more of presence and make Ara’s Tale known to more people out there. Visuals are locked, score is ready and the sound fx are being worked on hard. So the coming week will probably see us working on the final mix, and if all goes well the teaser will be released still in 2010. So stay tuned.

A major milestone is reached !

I have the visuals done for scene 1, 15 shots in total. There may be minor tweaks along the road but nothing serious any more.

Finishing the shots for scene 1 was a testbed for me to discover the needed workflow and techniques to bring the shots to life. It wasn’t clear that I would ever be able to achieve what I had envisioned, but to my delight I am very pleased with the results.

This shows me that the short can be done (with a lot of work of course) and that gives me the motivation to keep on working. Further on I have now the techniques in place to tackle the remaining ~45 shots in an efficient way.

See here for some frames taken directly from the shots.

And here are the first 103 secs of Ara’s Tale. 3 shots in the inner-eye sequence are still from the animatic as they require set 2 to be ready, which it isn’t yet. The shots were rendered at 50% resolution (960×540) so you can easily scale the video up to see more details.

I will now slow down a bit after the heavy workload (and long nights) during the last few days. After that its time to start the modeling and texturing of set 2 and sculpting and texturing the dragon.

That means that updates will most probably be a bit less frequent for the coming weeks.

I also won’t show full shots from now on, but only stills, but I hope to get a trailer/teaser ready sometime early next year.

I thought this would never happen, but slowly something like a production routine is taking hold of Ara’s Tale.

For the past days I was busy working on finalizing 5 more shots and could actually reuse knowledge gained from the previous shots. I now know for the current setup how to achieve the desired effects and how to setup the lighting and needed render layers. The same is true for working with the compositor, where I can now reuse a lot of node groups and techniques created so far.

That doesn’t mean, that its now an automated procedure, but there are no detours and breaks due to unwanted surprises along the road ( … so far ). I can now concentrate more on the look and feel and not bother so much with the technical aspects.

I plan to do 5 more shots and then release a preview of the first 80 secs, which I think will conclude the publicly shown shots.

Depending on the material, there might be some positive effect of doing a teaser/trailer. This could be used as test bed for the collaboration with my sound and music experts, but that really depends on their time schedule and possibilities.

Here are frames from each of the 5 shots I have done the last days. These stills are taken directly from the shots. The resolution of these shots is currently 720p.

After fiddling with the skin shader and lashes for Ara, I thought it a good time to start to experiment with some lighting and compositing work. The main idea being to have an environment to test the different shaders for Ara and to spot some possible problems.

I chose the very first shot as test bed for my experiments.

I use all linked assets into my scene files and the last addition to Ara were her lashes – as separate objects – so I linked those as well and … first surprise ! The lashes imported but never linked correctly to my armature proxy. After some fiddling I decided to completely reimport Ara and associated objects. I have the feeling that I might might be doing this more often in th future, so I made a quick howto for me to not forget all the small little details to get it right.

Next came the baking of the cloth simulation. I had already invested quite some time into this topic, so it should just be a setup-click-and-wait kind of thing.

Ha, so wrong !

I the past I had concentrated on the skirt part of Ara’s dress and quite neglected the upper part. Now I had a wider view and recognized that the current setup just isn’t working. This insight resulted in a separate collider object for the dress, a reworked weight-painting and remodelling of the dress mash and dress colllider as well as a slightly different setup for the cloth simulation itself.

Its better now, but I see now that I will have to refine this from shot to shot.

Ok, next came the lighting setup – no real surprises here (for the moment) – and accompanying the compositing part.

The topics I wanted to cover were

• separate layers for each light group (main, ambient, moon, cage lights ..) for each part (background, Ara, cage) to have maximum freedom for balancing the lighting
• vector blur for all objects
• DoF
• Play around with some nice glow effects
• Find a way to light a night scene with a path in the shadows of moonlight were the main light source is coming from a cage.

Well, the first point in the list was easy. The funny things started when I tried to use the vector blur. I have Ara and the cage on different render layers and combine them using the Z-Combine node. Well when using the vector blur ( or any other blur node) this will not work correctly anymore, as the z information is sharp and not blurred at all ( and this isn’t possible anyway). I have not yet a solution, but I have to somehow create a mask originally derived from the z-buffer of both layers and apply the same filter operations on this mask as well. At least thats my theory for now.

Pure alpha-over will not work, as I have intersections ( Ara holding the cage).

Another thing which is bothering me is that I do not seem to get a vector blur on my background, which is realized as set ( set in the render panel, where you do not have any selection possibilities). I have to investigate this further.

Another immensely annoying thing suddenly popped up again: all seams on Ara’s dress  were clearly visible again. I thought that baking the normal map from bump maps in blender 2.5x was the solution for this ( see this post for more info ). As it turned out, this is not he solution, as blender 2.5x has the same behaviour.

After long ( very long) experimentation I finally found the culprit which causes this:

It seems (no pun intended) that around seams blender is using areas of the texture map beyond the actual uv-mapping, maybe for blending/smoothing purposes. The default setting in texture paint mode for the projection painting is to have a bleed value of 2, which means that blender will paint also 2 extra pixels outside the uv-mapping. This value is ok for color maps but obviously too small when drawing bump maps. An increase to 4 or higher solves the problem – in principle.

What it means for me is that I have to repaint all seams in the bump maps on my relevant models with a higher bleed value.

The DoF point was another source of new work. In the early animation phase I created a camera rig with all nice controls for positioning, targeting and controlling the lens value. What I didn’t think of at that time was to include a control for the focus point as well … Ok, time for a new reimport session for the camera rig.

And finally I quite clearly see that a lot of polishing will have to go to the animation done so far. But that was to be expected.

All in all a very informative and in the end productive weekend. To show you the outcome of all these explorations I have uploaded a 4 sec shot of the shot. It’s a very early glimpse of what is to be expected and still no vfx ( glowing lights) done here. The irony here is that in this clip Ara’s  hands are rendered black due to rendering time constraints.