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.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under After Effects, Blender, Wendell, Animation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.