Signs of Gods Production Log
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Update
It has been a little while since I have been rendering the scene. Right now I'm rendering as saying that pretty much did not show Kayla be doubled jointed. Allow the reason why I've been hesitant to pose and render would do to some of a concentration issues.
However it is at the point Where I'm approaching a flashback and this will require a little more finesse. In the previous episode, a lot of the flashbacks were showing where Kayla was at and where the bad guys were at storywise. This particular flashback will focus on the why Kayla and Morrigan do not get along. This is an integral to focus on how they grow withen the movie.
This update is also using voice recognition. I'm just seeing if it would be easier to express my thoughts vocally rather then typing it. However it needs to give me more than a headache , I'm probably will just type it out next time.
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Signs of God Pt 1: Youtube
The edited version for Youtube and others. -
Other changes
As you may have noticed from the last post I did, there were some changes I made to the production flow using xPresso. However, that was not the only thing I have change.
There are times when I have done a scene and decided to redo it. The bathroom scene is one such case. Here the set from the previous attempt:
In theory, there really isn’t a problem with it. I couldn’t find the one where I did with Morrigan, but the lighting in this scene seems a little..blah. Yes, GI can improve it, but I have to consider how long it takes to render. On average, I do not like scene that take more than 2 minutes per frame.
That was the reason I change to a quad core system with 4 GB of memory..to get away from long per frames. It is also why I like Cinema 4D renderer ..it mixes raytrace and scanline to speed it up. Scanline goes a lot faster than Raytrace, so when an item doesn’t need it (it is really for Transparency, Reflection, Refraction, and another one I cannot remember. So if an object does not need that, it can just be scanned.
One thing apparent in this picture is the light distribution. Not perfect by any stretch, but I placed the lights in positions to try to simulate a one light GI solution.
The biggest thing that should be looked at here is the skin.
If you compare the skin between the first picture in this post and this one: She looks more alive in the latter. The only complaint I had was the armpits, but they are not that big of an issue to reload a figure with correct weight map and hope that she will position the same way.
. Yes, I know about the water: it is a hit and miss on my part. -
Working slowly on this segment. The reason for slowly is I am not having one of the best weeks headache wise, and sitting down is..not very comfortable at times.:) Never the less, I produced this using Cinema4D using xPresso. One person is thinking "Hey, this has a very Silent Hill feel to it"..of course, I hardly played those games. Maybe that was just me. And in the nicest way possible, I was told I am a disturbed individual. Woot woot! I am very much sane and all that, but creating disturbing images can be a challenging part in art. If I did what popular culture wanted ,I would get very bored...very quickly.
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Where I am with Episode 1
Name of Set Animated Rendered PostWorked Vocals SFX Music Video Lock Audio Lock Column2 Total 2 Years 100% 100% 100% 100% N/A 0 1 1 01:00 83% Terror Open 100% 100% 100% 100% N/A 0 1 1 01:49 83% Crime Scene 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% N/A 1 1 01:11 100% Flight of the Goddess 100% 100% 100% N/A 100% 0 1 1 00:55 83% Examine Death 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 0 1 1 03:42 83% Morning Confrontation 50% 50% 0% 50% 50% 0 0 0 01:30 33% An Angered Demon 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 0 1 1 01:12 83% Crescent Moon 100% 100% 0% 100% 100% 0 1 1 02:02 67%
With this type of progress, it might be surprising I am taking a 2 week break. There are few group projects that take some precendence, but I am in a good place now movie wise. When group projects are done, I will have more time to finish up morning confrontation, and whatever left.:) -
Optimizing
One problem I have noticed lately is setting up the animation in Cinema4d. This is even more so with more then 2 characters. A LARGE part of that problem is that the maps are large, which eats up a lot more memory. As I cannot afford to purchase more memory at this point, I am optimizing the characters themselves.
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Kayla conducting magic (Poser Cinema 4d Animation)
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I am coming to a close on episode 1. I am even considering pushing the hallway scene to episode 2 to have some conclusion. Haven't decided yet.
However, one thing I have been doing is re-rendering the diner scene with better lighting. There were also some mistakes in this scene, so I am cleaning that up as well.This scene will be seen in its entirety in both versions..as nothing..scandalous occurred.:)
I have sent out a call for musicians, and I must say I got more than I anticipated. I am going to have to consider each one, and see what the right fit for the movie is. -
Progress
Here is Madison approaching a bit of her demon form. One thing that Cinema4d does not allow is for me to keyframe texture maps (or at least 10.5 doesn’t), so I had to get a little creative here. I first opened a luminence channel on her eyes, and then added a glow. Was this in the script? No..well, the fact she is part demon ..that in the script, this particular segment, no. Imagine if this was live action. The makeups, the latex, the contacts, and of course the Adobe AE to make it more..omnious.
This particular image came out well in a Depth of Field perspective. We have enough distance between Kayla and Madison, so I could shift the focus.
Technically, I did not HAVE to use volumtric light here, but I didn’t think it could hurt either.
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Creating Brigit
The lighting kind of stinks in this one, but it was a test shot. This is Brigit for the movie (Yes, the goddess of motherhood, witchcraft, and home). Although the script was written, rewritten, and redone a total of 12-13 times, there was one consistent factor: I needed Brigit to appear as a crone. The rational comes from that Madison was a goddess/demon..they don’t age..or they don’t age significantly. Madison may have grown into full grown woman, she will remain that for eternity. Technically, Brigit could remain like that as well, but she has the same trinity of forms as I read about all Celtic goddesses: The Maiden, The Mother, the Crone. One thing I learned from human observation: some choose to hate what cannot be explained.
Another way to look at it is a comment from a poster on facebook in regards to reboots of comics. “They should be chronologically so old, they should not be appearing as they do.” The only exception in the Marvel universe would be Wolverine because of Celluar regeneration. But it kind of brings home the thought I had about Brigit raising her daughter appearing as a mortal. If Brigit never appeared to age, she would have one of few options:
1. Move from town to town to avoid suspicions.
2. Face the suspicion and bring the whole Salem witch trial hysteria back.
3. Or age herself to appear consistent with someone who is chronologically has a 24 year old daughter.
I think the first option tends to be weak. I saw it done in Twilight, and I am going “If you are doing that, than why appear open to the public? A lot of effort...” Storywise, the first option can be challenging to sell, and there needs to be extenuating circumstances. Someone is living as a protected witness, or they are hiding from the <choose a person to hide from>. In the end, this can make the younglin distant and such. Asides from witness protection, this sometimes only works if the person is alone and doesn’t lay down any roots. Remains mostly off the grid, which I found confusing with the Twilight series.
One way I would describe Madison is that she is like a Pitbull (or any other “vicious” dog they labelled over the years). She has the opportunity to be the nastiest creature to walk the earth, but it depends on the upbringing that shapes her attitude and restraint. By having a supportive mother who allowed Madison to establish roots, and belong with certain portions of the community, it helps avoid the potential that Madison’s demonic side could present. So option 1 is out.
There really isn’t a reason to explain the story problem with number 2. It would have the same impact as number 1. Madison would grow cold, callous, and think less of humans.
The third option seemed the most rational course to take. Someone walks into a shop, and sees Madison and Brigit, they can be seen as mother and daughter..rather than looking like sisters. While many seem to confuse my mom being my sister (I look a little older than I am, and she looks younger than she is), it depends on the community how this perception would be. The one thing that was stressed when I was at Target “Perception is reality”. She could take a risk of looking like Madison’s older sister, but she decides it is better risk management to maintain her crone form to protect her daughter from otherwise conservative small town folks.
So when I saw Ida by RebelMommy, I got it. It made the almost perfect figure I needed to sell this.
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Switching
I probably recently mentioned I was considering on going to Adobe Production Premium CS5, and I have committed to a subscription. Previously, I was using Sony Vegas 9, and probably will still use it for certain occasions (the trick is not what tools you have, it is how you use them.)
The biggest deal with getting into Adobe is the amount of integration. Vegas is a compositor, but it has it limitations to what it will do. If I wanted to split a rendered image up into say 4 passes and modifed them: there wasn’t an easy way to do it. Whereas Adobe After Effects is designed to do that.
So if you are wondering “Well, why didn’t you get Adobe After Effects”, and that is a fair question. One of the biggest reasons is integration. Also I had the ability to get the video clips into Photoshop for some manipulation. With AE, Photoshop, and Premiere, it would have came close to 129 dollars a month for a subscription…so getting Production Premium for 93 is a better deal..and it is a lot better than an outright price of 1,666.00.
Right now, I am working on the title sequence again. I had change the story a LITTLE from the original script. It sometimes happened, and fortunately no additional dialogue needed..but I wanted to tie in Rite of Passage with the current state Kayla is in.
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Testing
As someone so used to vegas and sound forge, adobe has presented some challenges in the trial. However...I am seeing unqiue advantages
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Improving
One thing I find exhilitarting about doing animation projects: learning new things. For starters I couldn't figure out how in the world to populate objects into particles. After finally using google..I figured it out and applying it to a special effect within the rendering program itself. Wee! The next thing I will be learning is using adobe illustrator files for..text inside the program. In the long run..hoping it would improve a few things
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Crescent Moon Scene
This scene is actually progressing a little better than I thought it would. Aside from a lighting correction I want to do for 90 frames (out of 304) in one clip, it is actually turning out quite nice. Right now in Poser, I have a 558 frame (roughly 18 seconds) I am tweaking with hair movements and eye-movements.Ideally, I would love to have breathing, but the clothes that Madison is wearing doesn’t have inhale. While there are tools that take care of that, it kind of gets messy sometimes.
The biggest challenge here is resources. In one part of this clip, there were 3 Victoria 4 and one Michael 3 Lo-Res (or Michael 2 Lo-Res, I don’t remember). The memory count went up to 2 GBs. Youch.
I am thinking I am going to re-do the bathroom scene due to lighting inconsistencies. I have not decided yet.
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Some..shots
Been busy making new scenes and getting them through. Of course, on occasion, I do an occasional pinup, and here is one using Victoria from the movie.
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I am trying to ax murder my computer
While it’s not obvious in the picture, there were quite a few high-res figures in. I still really don’t understand Daz3D reluctance to make low-res version of these figures..the characters in Rite of Passage turned out mostly all right (if you didn’t notice it, yes..they were low-res version of the Vicky 3 and Mike 3 characters with a few exceptions.
Anyhoo, this is a scene where I got a damsel trapped in a corner…by three football player looking guys (sorta…).
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AGH!
As a person with a technical background, the last thing I like is for things NOT to work. I have officially had it with Poserfusion just causing Cinema4D “Not Responding”…so..I just started seeing what I did with previous scenes without that plugin installed, and going from that point. My biggest problem before was the lighting I did with the bathroom with poserfusion I had the way I liked, and forgot how I did..well…got that fixed and re-rendering. Also re-rendering a problematic clip as well.
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Oh no I said too much…
Actually, that is just from an REM song. >.>
Did complete one third of a set of scenes. Not so sure about lighting, but I have the original Pzz (the files that contain the animations themselves), so I can re-render them at a later time while I decide.
One of the things that held me back this week was trying to get every done without pushing myself too much. I found out what happen when too much happens at once (trip to the ER). However, I am making progress regardless.
And yes I do change the songs once in awhile..now listening to New Divide to get my mood pumping.
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Getting back to business
Either the blood clots are resolving, or I am managing to work around them. Currently have 1 minute and 15 seconds of continuous footage for this scene I have stopped doing a few weeks ago. Progress, and hoping to get more progress down soon.
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A mild delay
Someone mention “I am taking my time with the movie.” Wellllll…I am the type of person who likes to get it done right. If I am “blah”, it won’t happen. What’s going on? Well, I couldn’t do anything between April 29th to May 6th due to hospitalization. Blood clots in my head and all that. This leads to the problem. The location they are (right now only partial and not in immediate danger so long as I take the correct meds) in prevent spinal fluid from absorbing properly…imagine the pressure being caused. This causes me to lose focus, and that is what I need to animate. Right now, I am…good. I am re-rendering a scene because I forgot to put the tattoos on prior to rendering (if I had been paying attention like I should, it wouldn’t be a problem.
) I do plan to animate soon though.. -
Back to..umm..can’t say work;)
It is Sunday..I don’t WORK on Sundays.
But I am back to rendering at least..showing a towel clad demi-goddess…. -
Where I disappeared…
If anybody tried to contact me in the last..oh say…few weeks and did not hear from me, I have been out of comission. I have finally open Poser again after experiencing problem with my health, and going to attempt to pick up where I left off with a scene I started.
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Troubleshooting…ugh
Apparently, they do not feel I troubleshoot enough at work.
It took me awhile to figure out this problem because there was not an OBVIOUS issue stated. Hopefully, I do have it fixed and can start rendering scenes again.
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Progress…
I think I am just about at the point where a particular chapter is completed for the movie. Right now, doing a quick test render to see how it looks..and then go into final render. After that, the chapter known as thrown out is complete.
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Creeper Bathroom Bird!!
Sometimes birds are useful..:)What can I say..
