Spent most of the evening working on finalizing the Dungeon Painting environment. Did the final model and lighting tweaks, though some individual shots will undoubtedly require their own tweaks. Did some test renders, and got it to look pretty sweet. So, tomorrow I can start working on the first half of the flying carpet sequence (the second half is already done).

Spent the rest of the evening writing a dissertation on one of the Giacomo shots. The shot involves a handheld camera tilt from floor to ceiling, with Giacomo (a 2D animated character) dragging a live actor and attacking Wendell (a 3D animated character), while straight at (and ultimately into) the camera. As if this did not provide enough trouble, since we’re not a studio, it’s difficult to communicate with my animator. It would be a lot easier working out these timing issues if we were in the same building, preferably working on computers right next to each other. Then, he could see how it’s being composited, we could do test drawings and test composites real quick and get instant results. As it is, there’s usually a 24 hour turnaround from him getting me some animation, us being able to talk about it, and him being able to make the changes I ask for. Each step, though, makes it better and better. This shot should be finished by tomorrow!

Finished off the Mushroom Painting sequences on Sunday night. Started working on the Dungeon Painting last night, trying to finalize the look of the environment. It’s based off a painting by Danny Schmidt, and was modeled by Philip Yon, who also modeled Wendell. I messed around with the textures and lighting a bit, then rendered this test. I then took it into After Effects and played around with a bunch of different techniques, and came up with this:

It was a landmark week this week, but not quite as productive as I would have hoped.  The good news is that I finished the Wendell compositing!  That means that the creepy little guy is completely done.  It was kinda weird moving on.  I’m sure I’ll wanna tweak some stuff later, but I at least have good versions of all the shots.

My original plan was to go from Wendell straight into the Giacomo fog shots, of which there are ten to do.  However, I dawned on me that those shots won’t really affect the pace of the edit, whereas the flying carpet stuff will.  So, I decided to work on the flying carpet shots in the Mushroom Painting scene, since I had already built that environment.  It’s been interesting trying to get everything to fit in the limited space of that painting, but I think it’s coming along nicely.  Unfortunately, I got sick this week, so I lost a couple of days of productivity.  Hopefully I can catch up next week.

Not much to report this week, besides what I already blogged about.  After finishing the Wendell animation, lots of stuff started coming my way.  A couple of groups wanting to see the business plan for The Little Dream Engine, which will be my first feature film, and some interest in the script itself.  So, it’s mostly been a paperwork week.

I did manage to start working on some of the flying carpet scene inside the Mushroom Painting environment, which I posted about a week or so ago.  This was my first completed shot of the flying carpet (I had done tests before, but nothing finalized yet), so I was a bit worried going in.  However, the worrying was all for naught - it came out great!  It’ll be some time before that whole sequence is done, especially since I need to focus on compositing Wendell, but I’m certainly looking forward to it.

It’s been a long, grueling weekend, but at long last all 47 Wendell shots are animated! Some of them still need to be composited, but the animation is complete — and believe me, that’s the hard part. Most of the composites are simple overlays — he’s not really behind anything. There are a few shots where he’s behind Pupsock, but we had a portable green screen on set for those, so there’s no rotoscope involved. There’s one kinda tricky shot that will need some roto, but not for too many frames.

Unfortunately, I can’t get started compositing today, because of my new workflow. Previously, I would animate, render (in Blender), composite, render (in After Effects) and then call a shot finished. However, I had 13 or 14 shots to do in three days, and I knew that wasn’t gonna cut it — the render times would kill me. Luckily, I had come across a similar problem doing the recomps, and thus had figured out how to write a batch script to render multiple files. So, the workflow for the weekend has been animate, animate, animate until utter exhaustion, then batch render the day’s work overnight. Then keep animating. So, now that I’m done, I’ve just kicked off the batch. There’s about 9 files to render (5 new shots, two shots I re-lit, and one shot that I’m rendering in multiple layers, so I can play with the focus in After Effects), so I don’t think it’ll be done until late tonight.

And I’ll be sleeping tonight. I’ve missed it.