New HD renders

Here are the ships of the line. I didn’t like some of the older 3d space ship modles, so I sat down and did some new models. I like these much better.
They are also much more detailed. The old models were made for 600X800 resolution, but these will stand up to HD 720p very nicely.

The ships are proofing rendered for quality checks.

They were modeled in 3d studio and the textures were created in photoshop.

The planet (Kellvettie Dru) in the background is also a test of the new High def texture maps. As I didn’t like the old planet maps and like these MUCH, Much better.

The fist picture is of a s Stethomite lighter and its bigger cousin, a Stethomite frigate.

The smaller gray ship is The Catatonic Rabbit and Phlub’s star ship, the Manta

The second picture is a close up of the Stethomite lighter.

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Anyway, been doing like 15 hours a day on bluescreening this last week and just wanted to give a shout out to folks and share some insights. I know a lot of you have been doing such work and wonder if you have any tips or tricks you want to share.

Heres what I have going.

So built out a bluescreen room in the new studio. It’s about 10×22 feet with a bit of wall and sides. I didn’t round the corners and that is coming back to haunt me now..

I’m using premier 6.2 and After affects 5.5 stock bluescreen tools.

Some things I have learned in the last few days.

Lighting.

Boy does lighting make the difference! Get that bluescreen light up with LOTS of De-focused, defused lights I just upgraded to a bank of home depot shop lights (the cheap little clamp on units) four on top, four on the bottom. Wax paper over the bulbs to defuse em. It made a WORLD of difference when trying to get an even key…

De-interlacing.

Keying with DV sux! Don’t do anything to your footage (de-interlace) before you key, use fully raw stock. When I de-interlaced in premier, I picked up subtle little rtifices that really threw the keys out of whack!

AF multilayer..

So I was trying to use the stock chroma keyer in AF to do the entire key in one layer. This was not working at all, and for about a day I was getting really frustrated with how the keys were coming out. Then I picked up a trick on some web tutorial explaining that you can key on multiply frames. and boy did this do the trick!

NowI only key out a range of about 20 shaded of blue on each layer and key about fourlayers that way. It makes for a NICE clean edge with no artifacting in the final composite.

Premier vers After effect.

The real time keyer in Premier works great! The rendered keying options don’t work so hot. Still can’t figure that one out and the stock tools in AF work REALLY well, once you get the hang of them. Never being much of an AF guy, I am learning all sorts of tricks. Once I get all schooled dup on AF, I’ll break open the combustion and see how that works out.

Cat paws on the bluescreen.

Cats like to go out and get muddy feet, then when you are not looking, run through the studio and put muddy cat paw prints all over the fresh coat of blue paint. Thus richly deserving a big round of cat spankings. I wonder if I can get a genetically modified cat that is blue in colour…. HMMMMMM..

Anyway, just thought I would shout out.. Starting to really love this bluescreen technique!

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I’ve been working on building out the set and here are some of the pics from today’s build out.
These are for the stop Motion animated portion of the new Kelvetii Dru animation.

This set will make up a six block section of a city, where Yak slugs it out against a platoon of Zombie Natzi SS Storm Trooper Stethomites. This is all shot in front of a blue screen and composited with a 3d rendered background of a bigger city battle going on in the back ground.

This set is constructed of cardboard and glue basically. I took a bunch of old cardboard moving boxes I had and some paint that was on the shelf and started making the city scape. All told it was about 10 feet by 4 feet.

I also rounded up a bunch of architecture textures from my 3d librarys and scalled them out for printing. I then printed them out on photo glossy paper and cut them out and glued them onto the cardboard buildings. This helped in adding lots of details. Windows and door frames images rounded out the exterior details and really helped in selling the whole idea of a city.

I used lots o real pictures of steet signs and standard architecture textures like bricks and metal sidings and such. I found most of these in my pre existing texture libraries and what I couldn’t find I google imaged up.

I would scale these pictures and put about twenty to a 8×10 page in Photoshop and print them out on my inkjet printer.

So far it’s been great fun, great fun indeed, to put this whole project together. I should have the city models built out at the end of the weekend and start actual filming the first of next week.

I feel a few all-nighters brewing up.

Anyway.. Onward, ever onward…

 
Yak Phlem Posing with a slew of prop guns 

A shot of the building in construction.
This is the base paint jobs and
some of the set super structure, built out of cardboard boxes


A longer shot of the overall set in construction.
You can easily see the construction parameters and cardboard boxes.


A close up of a building.  The Brick texture is just a photo printout
cut from glossy photopaper and printed on the inkjet printer and glued
to the side of the building.

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Three pictures of the bovine assault fleet in orbit around kellvetti Dru….

This is a screen grab from the new Yak Phlem cartoon. This is a still shot from an animated sequence.

This shot has the spaceships, a planet and it’s moons and then the background textures.

This entire scene was modeled in 3ds Max 4.0 and the textures were created in both Photoshop and good old trusty Paint shop pro. A program that I use quite a lot. It is just as handy as Photoshop yet requires less computer resources (A.K.A the “Footprint”) then photoshopo, thus freeing memory up for the actual pictures instead of the application.

A key feature when you are dealing with “less” then top of the line computer systems.

The Purple Bovine “greep” class ships were about 10,000 Polygons and were made up of opacity and bmp textures.

The Grey Bovine frigates were much more detailed and have 269k Polygons and the planet were just plain old spheres clocking in at about 100k polygons.

The Larger Bovine frigates were made up of about three different ship models that I found out on the net. I cut them up and pieced them together to come up with this ship design.

All total it took about 15 hours to model out these ships and stage this scene.

The 1.8 gig AMD Atholon with 712 megs of ram and took about 8 minutes to render the entire scene out.

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So this will be the first of many post dealing with the day to day tribulations of getting an animated cartoon out the door and “in the can” as they say.

I create a animated series called Yak Phlem The Anti Hero. I am currently working on a new DVD and am about ¾ of the way through finishing the new story in post production.

This is a hybred stop motion /3d animated sci fi adventure. All the principle photography and 3d animation is done. Now it’s just pulling it all together

There are still a few effects passes that need down and the sound effects added and the final edit done.

In the next few weeks I want to have the final high level things done.

• One stop motion animated pickup shot of yak phlem Of only about 1 minute of final RT of animation.
• This shot then needs a digital composite added from the blue screen. This digital composite needs developed in 3d and textured, light and matched to 2d shot)
• There are six space battle effects passes needed( laser blasts and explosions, engine glow, etc.) Planning to use After Effects and AlamDV for this.
• The complete sound effect tracks and audio passes. Have to record final dialog tracks.
• Final edit and Encode to the DVD which included the DVD menus, and all associated gallery’s and extras, etc.

Seems like a lot of work, but that’s what making movies on a budget is all about. Doing the things you can’t afford to farm out.

Anyway, better get onward with the work.

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