:eek: Didn’t mean to offend the music or the musician. I like the actual music but it didn’t click for me personally as the “right track” for your piece.
There are some very BIG panoramics in the piece that could really use something grand and scary / emotional. IMHO 
Keep up the good work:thumbsup:
I will make a quick getaway now.
Here is the short but sweet Live Action animatic.
We have a rough version that includes virtual tracking markers to pre-viz where the onset tracking markers would be placed, but it didn’t make it to public release.
The shooting is complete, and the word from our camera crew is that it was very successful. An update related to this footage and the shoot will come, but I am not sure specifically when and in what form. Thankfully there are alot of other aspects for us to update you on in the meantime.
Hopefully Update 005 will arrive tomorrow.
Cheers.
For shot 05b, a hero model of the Rio de Janero City Hall is required. While the model will be heavily covered with layers of blowing snow and accululated powder, we wanted solid geometry in place. William Alexander stepped up to the plate.
Using what reference could be found on the web, William began blocking out the model.
Unfortunately camera distortion on references can really skew a project, so William used ePaperPress’ PTLens plugin for Photoshop to correct the perspective. In the plugin, William used stock lens information for a Canon camera and adjusted the focal length until… using a ruler on the monitor…things were straight.
After the core geometry was complete, William decided that he wanted to capture the uniqueness of the architecture by adding the refined details of the human-form and organic sculptures that are prevalent in the reference. Unfortunately it was quite difficult to find acceptable references to model these details.
William asked Cris Palomino to put her imagination and drawing talents to use to extract some interesting and beautiful sketches that could be used for developing geometry for these areas.
As William continues the City Hall model, he also works to get the remainder of the scenes elements in place for camera mapping.
Finally, a recent progress render.
We hope that you are enjoying watching this project unfold as much as we are… Until next update. :thumbs:
Wow,
thats impressive. Looks like you guys have really got the production process working well.
Can’t wait to see your progress.
Rx
-Framestore- and Roux,
Thanks a ton for the kind words. There’s so much cool stuff happening, that I think we’re all just a bit in awe. The entrant WIPs here, across the board, are really shaping up to be great entries, and we’re just hoping to be able to compete.
Update shortly.
Nicely said. I hope everyone is having fun. Each team is showing skill even those working alone.
Maybe when you get a chance you could post a message about how you are organizing your team. How did you do the work brake down and who brings things together?
Thanks for all the interest guys.
As Jason said, the talent and dedication showing through in all the entries to this challenge is simply stunning. It’s exactly what makes participating so worth while and helps motivate us to keep pressing ahead to refine our own little entry. It’s a pleasure to be in such fine company.
As for the team organization, the glue that holds us together is the fact that we’re all PixelCorps members. We’re spread throughout the U.S. and Europe, most of us have never met or worked together before and we all come with diverse skillsets and backgrounds, BUT, we all came into this project having been through some of the same VFX training, with a general awareness of the full FX pipeline, and even share many core elements of the production process from communcations channels, software apps, all the way down to finer details like file naming conventions.
While we’re all artists working on the effects, there are three members that have also taken on organizational and planning tasks to keep things on track. Martin is our Producer, managing the bulk of the scheduling and organization of the project, making sure we have everything needed for each shot moving through the pipe. Cris has stepped up as our Art Director to provide guidence, research materials and rapid responses to the rest of the team when questions about the “look” of things turn up. I think I’m directing the show, but things are moving so fast it’s hard to tell some times. 
From there, everyone else has simply stepped up to voluteer a contribution of some kind. Jason sifts through all the activity on our internal forum threads to provide updates here, each of our digital mattes and hero models has been covered by individual volunteers. As a group, we maintain a list of all the assets needed for each shot, and as items get completed or appear, it seems that someone is always there to voluteer some time to pick it up. You could probably categorize everyone into 3 core areas: 3D (modelling & texturing), Digital Matte, and Live Action (we had an entire sub-group of volunteers step up to fill out a full on-set crew). As the work in these areas develops, there are 3 of us (Philipp, Martin & myself) culling the work into master scene files, comps and edits for final render.
Well, that’s the way things are shaping up at the moment. Things change pretty quickly around here though.
Does this answer the question?
Nice detailed answer thanks very much.
I organized our team of two by putting together an FTP server. Structuring the folders, and defining a naming conversion. Using XReferences in 3D Studio Max so that either of us can make modifications to a scene without effecting the other person. XReferences is just an amazing team tool.
I think when we get to the post-production phase I am entiring into waters unclear to me. I think it makes sense that the editor should be able to cut and plan the final edits without requiring the compositor to finish all the compositing shots. Still, because I’m new to the post-production process I haven’t come up with a way of working in parellel.
Any ideas?
We have three possible options of tools AfterEffects, Premier and Combustion. I have used Combustion in the past, and don’t personally like AfterEffects. Still, what ever gets the job done. What tools are you guys using?
Hey this is looking fantastic! I love the attention to detail you’re giving to the matte work (fixing camera distortion would never even have crossed my mind!)
Keep it up
Thanks again for the kind words. Mustan9, there is a huge mish-mash of apps being used, and I’m not personally sure what the final editing pipeline will become. Hopefully Nick, Phillipp or Martin will have some input on how we plan to tackle that section of the pipe.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Big Freeze challenge is effectively showing CG snow/ice/frost. As our team’s discussions have carried on we’ve come to many conclusions about how different snow, ice and frost look… and they each have many variations due to environmental effects.
Here are some early tests of shading solutions.
Paul Threadgold showed us a variation of ice and frosted ice.
Micheal Rottke demostrates several variations on the theme.
Testing continues on these and other shading techniques, as well as “growing” the frost and ice during the Big Freeze.
Added 6 more team members to the roster. 
It would…after trying to match to wildly different lenses used for the reference pics…that had to be camera matched and camera mapped onto one model. Lost a couple handfuls of hair over that one before the ahhh dooooh moment as to why nothing matched LOL 
WDA aka William Alexander
I just want to take the time for a mushy ‘awwww’ moment. Everybody is doing such a great job on things so far and the progress has been incredible. As I’ve been involved with team situations before I have to say I’m so pleased at how smoothly things are going. Couldn’t ask for better teamates…Everybody on the roster has been great! Just wanted to publicly say that.
Okay okay, get out your tissues.
-Patrick
Yeah, I’m jealous of your XReferences.
Our collaborative CGI tool is C4D, which (to my knowledge) doens’t really have a similar feature for collaborative revisions. Having a computer programming background myself, I miss this. (I’m very new to C4D myself, so maybe the feature is in there somewhere and I just haven’t learned it yet. )
For organization, Philipp setup an FTP server for us, and we’re using the PXC’s internal Wiki and Forums to manage tasks.
Philipp has been handling editing, I believe with FCP.
There are a couple of us using Shake for compositing, but I think someone (Martin?) is using Combustion. Shake is really great for working collaboratively with lots of files and render passes.
Martin and I have been working on building C4D “master scenes” for each shot involve complex camera moves and multiple 3D elements (basically all the cable car shots will be rendered from C4D)
As for other tools … Photoshop (a lot of photoshop) Modo, FormZ, 3dMax, LW, XSI and Matchmover Pro are in the mix. Maybe some others (I think Poser might get used to create CG standins for when our charaters appear in long shots of the cable car).
The work is mostly divided to be very stand-alone up to the compositing stage, so each artist is pretty free to use the tools they’re most comfortable with.
Don’t forget to throw Zbrush in the mix Nick. I’m using it along with Modo for modeling and it’s my main texture tool. 