Still here...

Despite the long absence of any activity here, we are all still alive and doing well. The project, well, not so much. The script is done to the point that we can start filming if we could just work out schedules. Unfortunately, that doesn't look likely any time in the near future.
I'll be posting some tech updates though if I remember.

Anyway, here's an image, because blog posts are more interesting if they have pictures:

I had some fun with an old render in Gimp (Gimp is awesome :D) I don't like the blue flare, but I like most of the other effects. I probably won't use them in the movie, but you never know, some of them could show up.

Satellite POV

A little more grunge, and this will probably be seen in the first scene. ;)

Just before collision, the asteroid is shooting towards the satellite...

I like this effect for the satellite POV

Edit:

Looking back, I really need to turn on dithering next time I render that!

Working follow focus test setup!

Yes! It works!

It works a little better than the video shows, but it's a little too noisy right now, and still has some kinks to be ironed out.

Video with the Canon M500

LEDs

The LEDs came, and they work great! The cold white one is exactly that, it would work well for bluish mood lighting, and the warm one is a nice warm white.

--Working on the new stepper motor interface. This should make for a much tidier layout.

-- Update! --

This is just for the cold white one, the other one is a little harder to mount.

The new stepper motor came!

I have the new stepper motor, and now I have to go to swim practice... Ho hum. Update coming later.

More LED lights

Turns out that Mouser has many more LED lights, and cheaper.
http://www.mouser.com/Optoelectronics/LED-Lighting/LED-Emitters/High-Power-LEDs-White/_/N-8usfj?P=1yzvd86Z1yzxcydZ1yzvr9p&Ns=Pricing|0

I hadn't looked there for a while, prices have dropped.
Also, note to self, this looks promising: http://www.mouser.com/ds/2/256/MAX16834-97839.pdf

With LED's about 30 cents apiece, you could get 

100 36 lumen LED's for $30 ... 100 X 36 = 3600 lumens = bright!

LED lights

While I was at it I ordered two LED lights from MPJA as well (saves on shipping)
Warm white: http://www.mpja.com/90lm-Warm-White-SMD-LED/productinfo/19567%20OP/
(3600K)

And cold white: http://www.mpja.com/90-lm-1-Watt-White-Star-LED/productinfo/19585%20OP/
(6000K-6500K)

These are both 90 lumen SMT LED's, and my thinking here is that you could build a 900 lumen light for $20 + about $10 for case and circuit board. You could have 10 of each, and switches to set it to various color temperatures from 3600K to 6500K! (though luminence across the spectrum would be uneven)
I'll be trying out these soon, and seeing if they are feasible for set lighting. Also, while I can build one of these rather cheaply, I'm planning to run it on 12 VDC or so. Not everyone has 12 V power on set. I have more power supplies than I know what to do with (Just kidding), at least 12V ones. Also, most of mine are set for the standard 13.8 VDC, so I may need to put some sort of regulation in there... things get complicated... This might also be worth looking at too, but is a lot more expensive and not as bright: http://www.mpja.com/LED-High-Lumen-12V-Module-White/productinfo/18875%20OP/

That's all for now!

Stepper motor coming soon...

O.K. so the first stepper motor I got from MPJA worked, but didn't have enough torque for what I needed. I measured the coil resistance, and found it to be about (I forget now, I think it was about 70 Ohms). I ordered a new motor, and it should get here in two days (Wednesday).

There are no particular torque specs I found on it, but comparing it to similar motors, it looks like it has about 4 times the power that the old motor had. This is the new motor:

http://www.mpja.com/Stepper-Motor-NEMA-17-12V/productinfo/18734%20MS/

It has a specified holding torque of 3.2 kg/cm, which I think is still rather on the low side, but we'll see.

Also, that's holding torque, which is usually somewhat more than rotational torque.

I also ordered a driver IC (actually a few, I'll probably burn out at least one...) so I'll have a nice neat driver circuit instead of the big mess of transistors I had on the breadboard before.

http://www.mpja.com/ULN2003A-Darlington-Driver-IC/productinfo/19604%20IC/

This does have a nice data sheet, very helpful!

New post about LED lights coming soon.

Scene Music

It's still up in the air whether we will make our own music or use royalty free music (for the most part anyway). I'm thinking that we will use available music for the most part, so I've been going through music libraries to fit music to scenes. I started looking for music for the car chase, and came up with some for the other scenes too. Here's what I've got right now (this is just the first pass, anything that could potentially work, and it's late, so I'm not as picky)

First scene (outer space):

http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100856

Burglary:

http://audionautix.com/Music/SneakingUp.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/StalkingPrey.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/SuspenseAction.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/Touchpoint.mp3

Car chase:

http://audionautix.com/Music/ModernRockBoy.mp3 One of the most promising.
http://audionautix.com/Music/LineOfFire.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/Delusion32.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/LongLiveDeath.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/HighTension.mp3
http://audionautix.com/Music/Pentagram.mp3 Cutouts around :40 could be good for slo-mo
http://audionautix.com/Music/RP-FightScene.mp3 Promising, pauses here could be good for slo-mo]
http://audionautix.com/Music/RockYourWorld.mp3 nothing special
http://audionautix.com/Music/RockerChicks.mp3 big sound]
http://audionautix.com/Music/TheHunter.mp3 too short, maybe for the second chase?
http://audionautix.com/Music/WhatsItToYaPunk.mp3 Mood change at 1:20 then back

End credits:

http://audionautix.com/Music/RememberTheHeroes.mp3

And here's a piece I liked for no apparent reason, http://audionautix.com/Music/SlimAndNone.mp3

I didn't like a lot of the car chase ones. It's going to be hard to find a piece to fit well and sound good too. I need to go back and listen to them with real speakers too, I was using Bose headphones, and a lot of them sounded like they really had too much bass, so I need to determine whether it was the headphones or the music.

What do you think? These are just rough ideas for now.

Response curves in Blender

This isn't exactly new, but it's something I don't think that many people realize, and I may want to reference it again, so I'll put it here.

In the scene properties side panel, (this section is between render and world) under 'color management' there's a set of render buttons labelled

Default     RRT     Film     Raw     Log

Try the film option. It really does a pretty good job, and the other options can be good for quick and easy color response adjustment.

Storyboards

I've been working on some storyboards for the first scene. I think that if these work out we may use these instead of the (rather tedious) written camera movements. There will still need to be some written descriptions, but not nearly as many.

I have slightly simplified and re-written the first scene to make it quicker and easier to film, as well as being easier to follow. (always very important!)
 Remember, the script is not locked yet, so feel free to put in any changes you think would help (always commenting, so we know what you changed)

Here are some of my first attempts:

O.K., so it's not great, but you try drawing in a moving 15 passenger van!

Feedback wanted!

Smoke reference

I know I'm going to need this later on, so here is a really helpful article about smoke and explosions.

http://www.blendernation.com/2013/03/12/how-to-render-large-scale-smoke/

Blender 2.66

Don't forget to download the latest version of Blender everyone!

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-266/

Lots of good features in this release.

light explosion

Explosions can behave very differently depending on the color of background and lighting. Here is almost the exact same settings for the smoke (with an improved domain) but a different color background. The smoke has apparently gone from light grey to dark grey. It hasn't really changed color, but in contrast to the background it looks different. It's the little things like this that matter in CG!

Rendered in 1080 x 1920 (not 1920 x 1080)

Resolution:     120

Smoke high resolution:     4

Dissolve:  1/40

And this time the domain is almost big enough...

Explosion test video

Here's the render!



As you can see, I made the domain too small. I'd redo it and just post the better version, but it takes a really long time to recalculate the smoke. I had about 72 GB of smoke cache files from this video!

Explosion render

It's late, so this is all I'm going to post for now, just a teaser: 

Settings were as follows:

Smoke resolution:     100

Smoke high resolution:     4

Render: 4K png 50% compression

Blender version:     2.59 (r39307)

Those smoke resolutions take up a lot of resources though. It was using almost 2 GB of memory each time it computed a frame. It goes without saying that it used all the CPU! For about 60 frames, it took almost 8 GB smoke cache.

Explosions!

I finally found a really good looking explosion made in blender. Here's a link: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?230329-How-to-make-a-very-realistic-fire-explosion-in-Blender-2-5!
The only downside is that I can only get it to work on older versions of blender. Right now I'm using 2.62. I tried it in 2.65, but couldn't find the options I needed.

I have it baking now, if it looks good I'll post a result soon!

New background

I put a render from the first scene as the blog background. Let me know what you think.

Also, just a quick update: I managed to modify the asteroid to work in cycles, and the first scene has been sent over to the animation department, and is under work now.

(Sorry this is all old news, I wrote this, and then just forget to post it)