D I V E

Let me just say that I personally have had a fantastic time working on the project with these blokes and guess what. We’re off on our next adventure working on the D I V E project. Keep up to date with us here http://afterfiveblog.wordpress.com.

Promo: 1st Runners Up!

Just want to say a huge congrats to all the guys involved. Everyone has put in such a mammoth effort to get this out and it’s paid off to come runners up in the promo category. Well done guys and enjoy the break.

Vimeo link.

Youtube link.

Contrivance release date closing in!

This is my first post, we’ve been so busy we’ve barely had the time to keep this blog as up to date as possible.. I’ve been busy rendering, lighting and comping. Hopefully I can get a breakdown video of my parts soon. We are coming close to our public release date so here’s a quick teaser for what we have installed.

24 hours to go…

Geeze.. Only 24 hours to go? What is left to do???

All the shots have now been rendered out (of nuke) bar shot02, though that is rendering out over night. The sound has been recorded though has not been put to the visuals as none of the editing has been done…

This, is going to be a long 24 hours.

Contrivance Rig Demo

Thought I’d share some of the rigging that I have accomplished in this project.

Components that are rigged are the Characters Head, Hanging Bracket, Gattling Gun, Bottom and Top Repair arms.

The rig on the character’s head is managed by one main controller but when it came to animating it had to be taken out for more control in the animation. Thoroughly enjoyed set driven keys here, haha.

Sparks update.

Rendered out the sparks for shot04 over night. Had a look this morning.. yeah it was a bit lacking so I redid it. Rendered it out again and hmm yeah still looking a bit average, but then I thought, what if I put 2 and 2 together and see what I get.. hahah beautiful things can happen 😛

Sparks and Dynamics

If I may say, messing around with dynamics is both fun & tedious!

I was actually struggling quite a bit yesterday with sparks but today I’m finally getting out some test render and I think they are somewhat getting there. With a little more tweaking I think they will fit in quite well with the shots. But only time will tell if we can get them out quick enough.

The other issue with sparks is that they weren’t actually looking like sparks. And trying to do this without reference was quite hard so this video helped quite a bit with the timing and colour.

On the home stretch…

Wow, what a sleepless few weeks it has been. With only a few days to go until submission we have still quite a few things to cover and are still feeling under the pump.

After re-rendering shot04 (calf) I noticed that my animation still needed fixing.. what?!? I thought I totally fixed this but I was wrong. The re-re fix however is quite quick and easy to do, however the actual rendering part.. wow, it’s taking its toll on us. The servers have crashed on us twice during the re-render stage and have lost many hours due to it. Time is definitely of the essence but hopefully we’ll still manage to get the renders out.

Sound.. where has this been? The plan for sound and music was to be achieved by one of Brads friends who has also been feeling the pressure as we kept changing the shots to make the timing fit better. We have currently set a deadline by Thursday to get this done and hopefully we will still have enough time to edit if necessary.

What has Damien been unto? Don’t ask, I can feel the stress coming off his face hahah. Though in hind site he is still a cool customer and one of the hardest workers I know. He’s currently adding activation lights for when the robot turns on and I must say you guys are in for a treat.

Brads been organising all of the other render passes so we can gain more control in comp. The passes we are worrying about are an Ambient Occlusion, Motion Vector, Volumetric lighting and shadow pass.

As for myself, apart from trying to keep this blog unto date I have taken over Dynamic duties to attempt the sparks in our scene. Reason being is that shot 04 has been reanimated and so the sparks won’t match up exactly how we planed.. I will try get out some renders of sparks for shot 04 and 02 and hopefully it can been done quickly enough. Otherwise it will just have to be cut unfortunately.

Presentation Day

Ok sorry to jump a little bit, but on the 3rd of December we had our group presentations in front of the class including guest attendees Daniel Bryce. It was showing briefly what we had accomplished at that point in time.

So it was missing a few things like sound and music. We ended up cutting a few scenes as we were getting some spiking issues with fireflies. It is definitely a beta version of our final product but here are some screenies from the presentation.

AiE: Industry Night

At the Academy of Interactive Entertainment Sydney, we were lucky enough to be invited to showcase our project alongside the 2nd year students. Industry night is where the 2nd year students usually showcase their own work in front of current industry professionals from such companies as Animal Logic and Plastic Wax. We were only told a few hours prior to the start time so we were definitely feeling the pump to get something up to show.

It was a great learning experience for the three of us who were able to attend as it was our first time just merely talking to industry professionals.

We did not have any business cards ready, so I put together a large group card that was displayed on a monitor next to our showcase.

Reanimated.

We are now at the stage of being able to redo some areas that needed fixing. I was very unhappy with some of the animation of the calf shot as the repair arms didn’t look mechanical enough so if was good being able to reanimate that shot.

This is the re-animated version.