Ara's Tale - short film wip

#81

Sorry for the late reply, I somehow didn’t get any notification email :hmm:

For keeping track of my times I use the timetracker include in the KDE Kontact Suite under Linux. I created tasks and subtasks for the various types of work involved and just activate the timer when working on an specific item.

So there is still some manual work involved but the extra effort has no practical impact.

I do have to remember to start the timer though which I sometimes fail to do and where I have to put in the times afterwards.

#82

30 down, 30 more to go ( shots that is … )

That means visually Ara’s Tale has reached 50% completion.

The last 3 shots where very demanding in various aspects and thus took much longer than anticipated.

One shot is a camera move starting from an extreme closeup on Ara going back all the way until she is seen standing on the platform and a vista of the canyon below. This created interesting challenges in lighting and compositing.

Another topic was to create believable moving mist.

In the end I used alpha mapped live footage from various clouds around mountains. Developing a proper workflow for creating usable alpha mapped shots in various speeds took some time, but now they are ready to be used in some of the following shots.

It’s just funny that as soon as there are interesting cloud formations, I get this overwhleming urge to fetch my DSLR and shoot more footage

Anyway here are some stills from the new shots done.The one used as top image is another one.

The last two shots are also the first shots of Ara’s song. Three more shots and this sequence is ready and Phil can work on composing the song, which will be sung by a young soprano singer I have fortunately be able to get an agreement with.

And after that
its time to start finalizing the dragon. So prepare for some texturing posts in the future

#83 
                         [[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/sc02.shot14.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/sc02.shot14.jpg)

Today it is exactly 2 years, that the first work on Ara’s Tale was started. It was a very (very) rough sketch of Ara and the dragon (a shot which I have not shown here) done in mypaint.

These 2 years translate to 1261 hrs of work which sounds impressive (if not even oppressive), or 4 minutes of finished edited movie, which sounds less impressive (but even more oppressive) .

Now that I have 60% of the movie more or less finished visually ( and some preliminary music for some parts ) it starts to feel like a real film, something I actually enjoy watching. This in itself is hugely rewarding and gives enough motivation to tackle the next major part: bringing the dragon to real life.

In this post I have included 3 more images from the shots I’ve done recently.

For the dragon I plan to create some time lapse sculpting and texturing videos, which might be of interest and fun to watch.

There are still 3 minutes left to create, but those will be done much quicker and a release in 2011 is still targeted, although I will miss (again) the suzanne festival in october

#84

Awesome! Keep it up. :thumbsup:

#85

Thanks Brettzies.

I intend to :slight_smile:

#86


The days since my last post have been quite busy in regard to Ara’s Tale.

E.g. there was the nice surprise, that I won the blenderday award. I had 3 shots from Ara’s Tale submitted and this got me the award. This movie is already getting awards before it is released …

Then there was a lot of work regarding Ara’s Song. This song has always been a central piece of the movie and ever since I wrote this part of the script I dreaded the time when finally the decision had to be made who should sing this song.

My original wish was to have a young female singer ( around 12 years) to match Ara in the movie. I soon recognized that this would remain just that, a wish.

As I had the sequence of Ara’s Song visually ready and edited, Phil could already start to compose the song and he created a wonderful quiet piece which just begs to be sung by a human voice… He used a computer generated female voice, and while astonishingly good to have an idea for the song, it fell very short in comparison to a real human voice.

Luck stroke again and by sheer accident I discovered, that a coworker of mine has a daughter who sings in a choir as soprano singer. After some quick information exchange I got the agreement from Julia (that’s the singer’s name).

She is perfect, and
she is not yet 12 years old. What more can I say

Quite some work was then involved to get Phil and Julia synchronized, but now it looks like this will be just perfect. ( there is still this little annoyance of actually recording the song
)

For this reason it took a bit longer to start work on the dragon, but finally I got there. And not only this, I also recorded the sculpting process of the head as a timelapse.

It is always astonishing how much work such side tasks actually consume. Doing the recording, finding the correct balance between length and speed and fiddling with video encoding. And one important aspect also needed its time, but I really wanted this to be in this video.

The whole sculpting process has a music score to it. The score is written by Phillipe Rey, a french composer and the one doing the score for Ara’s Tale. And while watching the timelapse you can enjoy Phil’s music and get a hint of what he is capable of and how his talent will have a huge impact on the final movie.

Here we go, dragon head sculpting sculpting worth ~ 4-5 hrs packed into 30 minutes. ( one small note: the title saying that level 2 with 1 mio vertices is now active is a bit too early )

dragon head sculpting timelapse

#87 
     [[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/dragon_mari.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/dragon_mari.jpg)

Allthough I am still only at the beginning of texturing the dragon, there is quite some recorded screen material to be used as a timelapse screencast.

Once again, progress is slower than I would have it, but at least its there . Summer, real life and my first freelance jobs are taking their toll. Also, there is no music added to the timelapse, I just didn’t find the extra time to do this.

What took longer than anticipated, was to lock down the exact color palette to use for the dragon. I had some color sketches from the preproduction phase which gave the general direction, but to find the right balance was challenging. With a combination of testrenders and quick compositing with the real environment I gradually approached, what I envisioned in the beginning. With small hue variations and careful overpainting the basic palette was then locked down.

The timelapse shows the overall progress on painting the diffuse map for the dragon’s body. Its starts from defining the base color distribution. Then I use separate channels in Mari to paint some details in.

One channel is used for the veins. I separated this channel to be able to use it as template for the bump map later on. With this I can assure that the bumps follow exactly the painted veins.

Another channel is then used for the tiny details and variations the skin shows.

The diffuse part is not yet finished, but I decided to show the state as it is right now.

Some notes on the UV layout and planning of the texture sizes:

A thorough analysis of the shots, where the dragon is seen, shows that the wings will populate most of the screen space when the dragon is seen in total. The rest of the body takes up a relatively small space.This results in two patches, one for the wings and one for the body (without the head), which will both use 4K maps for the different channels.

Then there are closeup shots of the dragon’s head and one shot in particular where the front part of the head is seen and the camera moves in until only the nose part uses ~60% of screen space. This results in two patches for the head, where the front part will use 8K maps.

The shot analysis also gives a good idea on how detailed the textures have to be.

The wings e.g are in constant motion and therefore a lot of motion blur will be applied in post. Adding too much of details would be a waste of time, but as you can see in the timelapse, I sometimes forget about this,
painting with Mari is so much fun

The head textures will have to be very detailed though, and my guess is, that I will spent a lot of time there

Well here is the timelapse video:

dragon painting timelapse

2 weeks of summer vacation are now on schedule and right after that work on Ara’s Tale can resume,

I hope.

#88

After some time another update

I thought I share some test renders from the current state of texturing the dragon and already playing around with the material/shading setup.

The basic building blocks are done with quite some polishing work still left. Doing the test renders, helps me to better estimate which changes are really necessary.

As already mentioned before, the dragon will mostly be seen in total and the body/wings texturing should be optimized for this. Here are some renders showing that setup.

I already discovered that I had spent to much effort on details which will never be seen. It just carried me away, which is a nice experience but in no way efficient . See here for a more closer shot. This part will never be seen in such a closeup and all the details you see are mostly lost on the viewer.

There is one shot in the movie where the neck is shown in more detail. The following render tries to catch this.

What took me a bit by surprise was the effect of the displacement modifier on the dragon mesh during animation. This is an area were I have to add some corrective shapekeys to prevent strange distortions, especially in the chest/shoulder area.

This work so far was again a precious learning experience. I have now a better idea how to texture the head, how the tools work for me. With the head I can then go on quite unrestrained in regards to detail, as there are closeup shots of the head and one extreme closeup shot of the snout.

#89

Amazing as always Martin, this is a lovely beast :bounce:
About details that wil never be seen, it’s only for your own pleasure and helps keeping your motivation intact so it’s important as well even if it’s time consuming … That will give you material to show in the making of :thumbsup:

Keep it up

#90

Wow. great progress! Making a short is quite an undertaking… I’m finding that out for myself! Im really impressed with your environment work!

#91


As promised here is a timelapse ( with some comments ) showing the process of painting the color map for the dragon’s head.

The diffuse color map is now finished (almost finished, the mouth   interior is still to be done). And I am currently working on the bump   and specular maps, which will be shown in yet another timelapse.


Painting the color map was fun again and I am definitely looking   forward to when all the maps are in place and I can start to tweak the   material and shaders to get a first look at the dragon.


Timing is also quite ok, as I still have 34 days left from my time   limited Mari license. This should be enough to finish the dragon and   maybe fix the various odds and ends on the other models as well.

And here is the link to the timelapse video:

Painting the dragon’s head

#92 
                         [[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/dragonhead_rendertest_01.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/dragonhead_rendertest_01.jpg)

Finally I have done all the remaining texture maps for the dragon’s head. What comes now is creating the material/shader setup for the final shots.

I have also recorded the texture painting process for the bump maps and the final result and am now in the process of putting all together. Expect a new blender/Mari diary soon.

The image above is the result of the first iteration of material/shader tests with quite some more to come. I had hoped for a straight-forward workflow, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. I spent too much time already in fixing problems with visible seams caused by normal maps.

All texture maps work fine without showing any seams. But there is one exception: the normal map I created in blender by baking the highres sculpt. I did various rebakes, with different settings, both using the old method (selected to active) as well as the new one (multires bake). I got different results but never a seamless one.

What helped a lot, was to load the normal maps inside Mari and apply the bleed operation and manually paint over the seams and try to heal them. That gave me the results I have now. In the image above you only notice it, if you know where to look, but have a look at the following closeup of the snout area. Here the seams are quite noticeable ( at least in a still
) .

[[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/snout_detail.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/snout_detail.jpg)

This type of closeup shot will be used in one shot of the movie and is the main reason for the insanely high texture resolution I have to use for the snout area. The final shot will have an even closer setup.

I will try to get rid of the seams and then will do the teeth and the eyes. This shouldn’t take too long ( I hope [img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif[/img]  ) and then all should be prepared for doing the final shots.

And finally for the interested the current state of hours spent:

Time    Task ----------------------------------------------    
   5:34    01-Script   
  43:54    02-Storyboard     
  73:54    03-Concept Art   
  14:48    04-Animatics  
 152:45    05-Modeling   
  76:37    06-Rigging  
 179:53    07-Animation  
 255:02    08-Texturing  
 173:36    09-Simulation     
  33:40    10-Project Management  
 131:54    11-Research   
 208:44    Lighting/Compositing  ----------------------------------------------  
 1356:50 Total
#93

I apologize for the long delay before uploading the promised bump painting timelapse.
Two events have caused the delay:
[ol]
[li]the update to the new kubuntu 11.10 version[/li][li]me having a brand new nexus s smartphone[/li][/ol]
Number 2 obviously and predictably takes away a lot of time , but number 2 was unexpected and extremely tiresome.

I do not want to start a rant here, but lets just say: if you are planning an upgrade to the next ubuntu version, just wait a bit before doing so, especially if you are using the kdepim suite.

Well, back on topic.

This (most certainly) last installment for a long time of my blender/mari diary series shows parts of my bump painting workflow I used for the dragon’s head. Unfortunately some parts do not show very well on the video, but I think you will get the idea.

link to timelapse video

I have now finished painting the eyes and have to tweak the dragon’s mesh a bit for the eyes to fit best, now that they are properly textured.

The above mentioned obstacles cost me almost 2 weeks, with various glitches still surfacing all the time, but I am back on track, albeit a bit slowly

#94

next update:

After a lot of time texturing and shading this beast, I have now reached a point where I am ready to use the dragon for production.

There will be two shots where additional tweaking will be necessary but for all the other dragon shots I have now reached a usable state.

There are still some issues, but these are mainly visible in still images.

I also did a quick test animation to see how the dragon behaves when its moving.

Dragon Test Animation

The lighting is basic and there is no SSS used in this animation, but   I am quite satisfied with the overall result. It will work very well in   the shots I have to do.

And now, finally, I can really work on those remaining shots

#95

Well done Martin, fantastic job keep up the good work. :bounce:

#96

just have 1 thing to say wow is starting up my own animation to learning houdini/3d coat

#97

Thanks guys for the heads up :).

next update:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     [[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/shot21a_composite.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/shot21a_composite.jpg)

Production of the remaining shots of Ara’s Tale is running under full steam now.

Now with the dragon finished its fun again to do the lighting and compositing for the shots.

I already had the tricks and workflow for all the shots where Ara and the environment is shown. Closeups have a completely different setup than wide shots e.g. For the dragon I had yet to find a good workflow and best practices.

This led to a revision of the linked dragon assets. I now have 3 versions of the dragon, each for a different level of detail. Depending on the shot, I use the most appropriate one. I do this to cut down render time and most importantly memory consumption. With complex shots and 1080p I currently reach a high of ~7GB. I am running 3 frames in parallel on my render machine which has 24 GB, so there is not much room left to play with.

The latest shot I have finished just today was by far the most complex one. And I guess this will hold true for the rest of the shots.

Its a shot with a long camera move covering almost all of the enviroment, partly quite close and also showing Ara and the dragon. That meant throwing in all the effects the evironment needs (clouds, mist, dynamics, sense of scale) and additionally balance this out to highlight the characters in the scene, which demand their own special treatments.

Up to now I was always good with the 20 layers blender provides for organizing all the objects in a scene. For that shot it soon showed, that this was not enough if I was to stick to my tested workflow.

The solution was to split the shot into 2 blender scenes ( one for the environment and one for the characters) and render a multilayer file for each scene. With this I have actually 40 layers at hand, which was plenty enough.

The total number of renderlayers in the combined multilayer files is 21, each one including color, z, alpha, shadow/AO and sometimes index and vector channels.

Putting this all together in the compositor is a tedious task and very iterative. Moreover, to gain the best visual experience, different parts of the shot require slightly different compositing values. This is where the everything-is-animatable paradigm of the new blender series come in very handy.

My workflow for this is to render out key frames ( 5 in this case out of 360) and tune the compositing node setup to the best result for these frames. This in turn triggers changes in the general lighting setup or maybe demands additional renderlayers ( special masks e.g). So its a constant back and forth.

When I am satisfied I turn on the render server and let it render out all of the frames. And after that I let it render out the composite. Thats the first time I actually see the shot in full color and lighting. This typically shows lighting and compositing problems very quickly and another round is due.

If I am lucky, no changes to the rendersetup has to done, which is true 90% of the time. Rendering out just the composite is very fast ( relatively spoken ) and the turn around times are very low. Just as example the 360 frames took ~6hrs to render, whereas a full compositing run is finished after 5 mins.

And this shows very dramatically why I love this type of workflow ( separating all the lighting information into layers written to multilayer files). The final lighting tweaks and tuning/polishing can all be done in the compositor at almost no cost. This invites to do experiments and try different things.

And again, after so much dry talk here are 3 frames directly taken from the movie to show you a bit of what the state of production is. ( The last two frames are from the above mentioned complex shot)

This latest shot took me almost a week to complete. The next ones are simpler again and progress should be faster.

BTW, total mount of time spent is now at 1406 hrs., and I start to feel the wish to finally bring this whole project to a completion

And finally I want to put an almost nostalgic bit at the end of this post:

Looking through the old and very rough concept sketches for Ara’s Tale, I found this one, which dates back to 30. July 2009. It was this image, planned as a still image project, which triggered the whole movie. And if you compare this with the second shot from ones shown above, you should see some resemblance 

 [[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/sc02.shot21a_concept.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/sc02.shot21a_concept.jpg)
#98 
                         [[img]http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/blog_post_title.jpg[/img]](http://www.loramel.net/blender_minutes/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/blog_post_title.jpg)

Confirmed by comments on my recent post on my blog, I will try to refrain as much as possible from displaying potential spoiler images.

As this would mean, to cease showing any images from now on, I thought I could give you some look ‘behind the scenes’ of the type of work I am mainly involved right now concerning Ara’s Tale.

This is especially for you, the small but constant number of followers of this project

The typical workflow right now is to setup a shot for proper lighting and rendering and then render out the frames as multilayer EXR files.

Those are then fed into the compositor where the real lighting work is done.
During the setup on my current shots, I recognized, that this would be a perfect opportunity to show you, what I am doing here. And what’s best, without revealing essential parts of the core story.

Below you see a somewhat compressed look at how I typically setup the lighting and compositing and can follow the progress on an actual shot up t its ‘final’ result.
Well, almost final, as the result in this case is only the base for further VFX work. It is also relatively simple in comparison to other shots I have/had to do, so the total amount of time is short enough to be demonstrated here. ( parts are accelerated though )

Well, here is the screencast

and here is the final shot

#99

This time I deliver a rather dry text-only update:

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:

[ul]
[li]The animatable properties of particle systems are rather limited.[/li][li]Controlling particle properties through textures work, but any animation of the textures themselves is completely ignored and noneffective.[/li][li]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.[/li][li]Multiple force fields with overlapping effects are even harder to control[/li][li]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.[/li][li]To see the effects, you have to rerun the simulation every time you change anything.[/li][/ul]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

#100

It’s been a while since you made an update, man. Keep it coming.