Scenes from a library

In the midst of doing several different things at once for this project and a couple others, one thing that’s been a huge breakthrough for me has been the way I do my character animation. I recently did a little work into learning how to make more elaborate rigs with which to animate my 3D characers. I may have mentioned this before, if not, the “rig” I’m talking about is the skeletal system that animates the 3D model much the same way a real skeleton kinda helps you move around - more or less, there’s probably a better way to describe it...but, what can you do?

This will help me for at least 3 projects I’m working on, the 1st being the contract work I’m doing, the 2nd Dan Caseley’s animated movie (which is going to look so much better now) and of course, The Monkey Rodeo. I’ve done the new rig a few times now and I pretty much have it down, still a few bugs to work out, but I understand the basic principals enough to slap together a rough version for some minor animations.

The point of all this being, yesterday I went to work building the 3D model version of the live action area from The Library Scene. It was pretty simple actually. I own the props, so it was just a matter of some quick measurements an with an hour or so I had a pretty decent mockup of the live action part of the scene (Malice standing in the doorway area, in case you forgot what I was talking about from the last couple posts). Took a little to adjust the lighting just right, still working on that actually.

And finally the last part was a little CG version of Malice - which was very quickly and roughly done. Trust me, up close it ain’t pretty, but from a distance, it looks pretty damned good if I do say so my damned self. I was even able to (again very quickly) slap a rig onto the model, so I can actually do some fairly elaborate movement with the model when the time comes. So now, since I have this, and it looks much better then I originally planned, it allows me to make some of the CG shots a little more elaborate - since I now have a decent background model to work with.

So, despite how muddy the file looks, that’s because of the conversion into this player format, hopefully you can get a bit of a sense of how it’ll look in the scene. I won’t be getting any close to the model then this, changes are the simpleness of it will be obvious the closer the camera gets.

This is the live action - very quickly touched up for
the purposes of showing you how it will look
in the final version.

And a long view of the CG version - you can see from this, there still
needs to be some work done - only the colours really,
everything else I'm happy with.

And in other news

I finally got to test the setup for The White Room fight sequence (thanks to Pete Murphy for the loan of his camera) and I’ll be damned if it isn’t going to look awesome. The test was under less then ideal circumstances and still came out exactly like I’d hoped. In the actual setting, I’ll be shooting it in a 20x20 ft room, at least - and by the way, if you know of any 20x20 rooms with a 10 ft ceiling, please let me know as all my locations are very quickly falling through.

I set this up in my living room, and if you’ve seen it, you know there’s not much room for a 10 foot wide, 10 foot high backdrop, so I settled for 7 feet high - with 1000 watts of light not 5 feet from it, as well as the camera. This caused some glare on the actor, and some shadow on the backdrop. The glare, well, not much I can do about that, but be aware of it while shooting, the shadows are taken care of in post, so no worries there.

This was actually a bit of a longshot this whole setup, it was something I’d just sort of made up thinking it should work, never really having done something like this before I really wasn’t sure. I had to cut some corners, financially speaking, because certain part to a proper backdrop like this are very expensive. Like instead of white backdrops, I had to take unbleached backdrops, the difference is $40, not much for 1, but I needed 2 - and the difference is unnoticeable in the final version.

Hopefully this scene will come together relatively soon, the delays I’m experiencing trying to get started again are starting to annoy the hell out of me - and before anyone asks, it’s shipping delays and lack of finances that are causing the problems, which is just a matter of patience, not much anyone can do about that sort of thing.

So that’s it for now, there might be another update if I make a breakthrough in something in the next couple weeks, otherwise the next thing you’ll probably be seeing in the next 2 weeks is some stuff from The White Room.