Colonel Barker's Tenth Planet 4- working thread

[Colonel Barker]

Hi guys.

I am making a thread here specifically where I can talk about my ongoing attempt to revamp my animation of Tp4.

If anyone wants to talk about it, remind me to keep working etc, this is the place to do it. However there will be NO IMAGES no CLIPS and no ANIMATION from the project posted online. I have uploaded a breif turntable of a character, just to prove it's happening. But that's it.

So, currently working on the project is myself, and Marc Taylor is interested at having a go at the character  textures.

So. What kind of pipline am I going for?

Well, the models are being made in Maya and UV mapped there. I am hoping to have some HQ normal maps made in mudbox in the near future. The characters will be referenced into to  the sets, and I plan to use mocap to produce the facial animation. Hopefully using something that I can use a number of HD cameras to do.

Depending on time, the body animation will be either made as a series of loops animated in the trax editor in Maya or as motion capture. I would prefer the later, however it seems like a lot more physical time.

The project, I hope to have finished by March 2011, in whatever quality I can. I hope to make this the definitive version of  this episode for quite some time, and I don't really have any intention in the near future of going over the episode again.

Why am I doing it?

Frankly, my first version of TP4 I did just ouside of High School. First animation project, the big one. It's recieved a LOT of attention over the years, a lot of hits, endless  requests for DVD's. Pirated about four times onto various torrent sites.

And I hate it, I really do, because as much as I love so much of it (ie the camera angles, cutting, certain elements of animation) the characters and lighting really are significantly bellow par. I want it to LOOK so much better.

And really it's my own fault, I didnt setup any of the animation files properly, so you frankly can't just port over new models using the old animation. Or port in new sets easily to the same shots. To some extend the textures could be updated as could the lighting. But if I do that, it feels like a job half done. I re-rendered and lit the first 5 minutes, and it looks really nice. But there are issues with the characters, the shoulders and necks, not to mention the UV maps, that frankly nice lighting and a AMB-OC pass just won't fix.

So, I am determined to get the project moving again, have it look good. And move on to another episode at some point.

So.. resorces. I have the soundtrack, telesnaps, camera script, floorplans, a lot of behind the scenes photos, I have my own animation and the BBC recon of the story. Enough to cover plenty of material of the origional.

However this time I want to get the cutting right. For example in the first scene with the countdown and pan across the faces ala the end of episode three. That was supposed to be a series of cuts, because the 'repeat' wasn't actually identical what so ever.. very weird.

Right. So, this is the place to discuss the project!

Cheers,
Aaron

[james]

well guess what Aaron  you can now use  mental ray shaders in 3delight just maya shading network export.
all though a little RSL knowledge is a plus
 which equals hair plus sss.

james

[Colonel Barker]

I honestly hadn't considered rendering using mental ray. Despite years of doing 3D, I have never quite understood it or been able to see the difference between using it and not using it.

[james]

yeah a 3delight is a fairly easy renderman to learn.

you can just translate your maya and mentalray materials to 3delight.

not to mention the first license is free (  2 thread only)  it includes  a perfectly seamlessly intergrated  plugin for maya.

so you can use mentalray  sss  and render hair or shave as ricurves  in one renderer with super fast displacements
and  point cloud raytracing  for sss.

just go to dna-research  and try it out.

Its awsome .

go ahead and give it a go 
http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php/step_1

[Colonel Barker]

I will certainly look into it, I really wasn't planning on using dynamic hair or cloth, as I am really not comfortible working with dynamics, and I figure if George Lucas can't use dynamic hair in his animated series, the chance of it working on a project that is just as long with one person with one computer is very.. very unlikly.


EDIT - Actually looking at the site I am still not quite sure what it's about. It seems to be some form of renderer. But I am not quite sure why I would use it rather than the one I currently have...

I suppose that's the problem of sitting on the other end of the pipeline, I tend not to light or render.

[Tea Monster]

It's a Renderman renderer (what Pixar uses), and one of the best 'free' ones. Renderman renderers 'fake' a lot of stuff to give you great looking results at a fraction of the time it would take to render the scene using something like Mental Ray.

Having said that, now that most people have dual and quad cores, a lot of 'home' movies now use stuff like raytracing and hair effects. You'd have to do a test on a few scenes and see what your average time per frame is.

[Colonel Barker]

Cheers, I have a couple of Quad cores here, rendering time has never been a problem for me, as I can never animate more in a day than I seem to be able to render overnight. And when I can I just set it to a second computer...

[Tea Monster]

If you've got a quad core and a few extra CPU's that you can press-gang into rendering duties, I'd start looking up hair sims and so forth. I know Blender is currently capable of simming cloth and hair. You set the hair and cloth with the correct collision properties, and then the program does the rest as the character moves around the set. So if you are using Maya or Max, it should be a doddle.

On the flip side, if you are making it look authentically like a telecine, then you probably won't be able to tell you have raytraced anything. Raytracing works best on reflections, refracted light and shadows, stuff that you can fake with Renderman anyway.

[Colonel Barker]

It is something I have done a number tests using cloth and hair, however I have found none of them have turned out anywhere near what I have needed in the past. I have tried using Shave and a Haircut, however the experience was so painfull I gave up.

I think if someone with any experiance in hair or cloth approached me in regards to the project I would happily let them aboard on it. However in my limited experience of working on various films and games here dynamics is something best left avoided unless you have any kind of passion for it.

I have Maya and that's what I am intending on using. But I would hardely describe cloth simulation, even nCloth simulation as "the program does the rest" in my experience it tends to be a lot of work creating cashes and doing pass after pass for every character, then every characters hair. Some scenes in scene one have 6 characters in shot, that's 12 dynamic elements in one shot.

Not the kind of thing I want to consider approaching until I have someone onboard who can fix issues I may (and will) have with them or it's something that doesn't frustrate me at every turn.

As for telecine, I will be making the approprite pre-recorded shots look like telecine (the model shots, shots of the snow etc) but will be applying a 'video look' to the VTR sequecnes.

Thanks for your thoughts, but I just can't see it happening unless I take a 6 month course in dynamics..

[james]

jc hair   it used to be a free set of scripts , though now it is commercial software as the guy who wrote the scripts

made them into a plugin.  I  still have the old version  of the python scripts  , and I'm quite Interested  doing some  hair tests

and renderings. BTW I own the academic version of Prman though it's renderman studio.
and I find SLIM to be a terrible pain.

3delights IMO  the best  renderman on the market for indies , though it does include the
 mentalray renderman header  and I wonder  how hard it would be implement it as linked lib in aqsis
or for that matter prman.