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.
Congrats on another big milestone! You should feel very proud of how far this has come, the frames you’ve posted look fabulous, and I think her hair turned out very well!
It may be too late since you’ve already purchased the recorder, but as a recording engineer in my past life, I would highly recommend using a better microphone with a large diaphragm for a solo vocal recording. Mic quality and a/d converter quality affect the recording quality much more than the sample and bit rates of the recorder (in my humble opinion).
Just for the record, if I was going to record an important vocal such as this, I would probably rent/buy a decent large diaphragm condenser mic along with an external preamp/compressor. Then the output of that premap (could be analog, could be digital) could go into whatever recorder you want to use. Along with the pop filter and an acoustically dry room, you would be set. I realize you may not have the budget, but just wanted to describe a “best case” scenario. After all this work, don’t cheap out on the audio!!
Cheers,
Todd
Thanks a lot Todd. I wasn’t aware that you had an audio past .
You are right about me having no budget, but I try to compensate this with a lot of work and some good connections .
As it turns out, the recording won’t take place this weekend, as Julia just got sick. We will try a week later. So I certainly will try to see if I can manage to get hold of some better microphone. But the reviews of the Zoom H1 microphone are not so bad after all.
Congrats on another big milestone! You should feel very proud of how far this has come, the frames you’ve posted look fabulous, and I think her hair turned out very well!
It may be too late since you’ve already purchased the recorder, but as a recording engineer in my past life, I would highly recommend using a better microphone with a large diaphragm for a solo vocal recording. Mic quality and a/d converter quality affect the recording quality much more than the sample and bit rates of the recorder (in my humble opinion).
Just for the record, if I was going to record an important vocal such as this, I would probably rent/buy a decent large diaphragm condenser mic along with an external preamp/compressor. Then the output of that preamp (could be analog, could be digital) could go into whatever recorder you want to use. Along with the pop filter and an acoustically dry room, you would be set. I realize you may not have the budget, but just wanted to describe a “best case” scenario. After all this work, don’t cheap out on the audio!!
Cheers,
Todd
Looking very nice so far. It might be pointing out that although cheap recorders like the Zoom you have will record at 24bits per sample the you only get 15-16 bits effectively before you hit the noise floor. This means you won’t have as much headroom as you would think so making sure you get descent levels during the recording (without clipping) is important.
Thanks for the input. My intention was to use a high input level just short of clipping to get the most out of the raw material for later sound processing.
You defintly know how to keep the thrill goning 😀
but how on earth did get soo wonderfull long hair out of blender ….
make me a bit … well i realy dont know?
Thanks Christoph 🙂
Getting static hair out of blender isn’t that hard (if you know how to do it 😉 ).
The real pain is using it with animation and collision.
But that will all be revealed once I release all my assets and production files. And in one way or another the whole knowledge of actually doing it will be available as well. But all in time …
ohh yahr Simulation….
don’t do movies with children (believ me I know what thand means), Animals and don’t ever do simulations ….
and I know no project wich use the hair simlator in that dimension…. so I am very exited to take a sneak peak 😀