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!

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.

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!

Scene one test, now with sound!

I've been playing around with some ideas for the first scene soundtrack and the first set of credits. Here's what I've got right now. Let me know what you think!

The taming of the Frankenstein.

Well, I think I fixed it. It's rendered 300 frames or so (about half) without crashing, so I may have solved the problem. I restarted my computer, and this time resisted the urge to open my web browser. I opened Blender, and disabled Save Buffer, Instances, Free Unused, and Local Coordinates. (I think, if I remembered right). It also seems to be rendering somewhat faster too. I'm seeing render times of about one minute on my main computer.
 The main problem I see when I look at it is that my animation skills are abysmal.
Josh, would you be willing to try animating it, and then sending the .blend file back for me to render?

Update: It's around frame 550 now! I may be able to get a video out tonight!

I made a Frankenstein!

AARGH!

Well, I'll post a short test of the first scene soon if I can get it to render. It's not working right now, to the point of totally crashing my main workstation, and when I say totally, I mean the mouse stops working, then the keyboard lights start blinking, then the whole computer reboots by itself. I was going to farm this out so we could cut down on rendertime, but I'm not going to inflict anyone with a blend file that crashes every five frames!

Other than that, things are going pretty well. The satellite looks pretty decent, as do the world and asteroid, so if I can get them to render we should have some pretty good looking results. Here's a still render, I don't seem to have as much trouble with those:

-Going into troubleshooting mode... Will update if I get any large uninterrupted render segments.

...And here it is!

Here is the .blend file for scene one: 

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/scenes/asteroid-satellite-and-world/

Don't forget to unpack the textures!

Within a few hours of me posting it, it was on the front page of blendswap! Here's proof:

(O.K., so it was in the recently downloaded, but still... :D)

I will upload it to Google Docs if anyone wants, otherwise I'll just host it at blendswap. Reading through blendswap's terms, I realized that they will have limited usefulness for us, as they will not accept WIP (work in progress) blends, and I expect we'll have quite a few of those! Also, I need to learn how to make my own textures, because it's just so much easier not having to keep track of every single texture used and the license. I can only make so many though, the earth ones obviously have to come from NASA ;) Anyway, enjoy, and please post if you do anything interesting!

Title

This could come in quite handy:
http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/how-to-create-a-professional-logo-animation/

Very professional looking. I've got some fun ideas for our logo, (VA FX), but they'll have to wait, because I'm about to release the long-awaited asteroid, earth and satellite .blend file! Here's a render:

Notice any problems? It's rendered in 4K, and I tried something different with the link, so you should be able to download it and view it in full resolution. (Hint, the problem has to do with the compositing, and it's not the lack of it), I still have to put the rest of the nodes in before I release it though.

Satellite, asteroid, and earth

I now have the satellite, earth, and asteroid all rendering together! There are still a few glitches though, see the image below.

There are still several issues with this render. The .blend file is getting so complicated I'm going to start .blend file version 3 soon to try to simplify it. Here are the current problems I see with this render.
1. There is a outline around the asteroid.
2. The glow effect that looks good on the satellite up close doesn't scale down well. It looked O.K. when the satellite took up most of the screen, but now it just makes it look blurry.
3. I would like to have some sort of depth of field.

Anyway, I'm going to start working on blend file version 3, and see how that goes. It's really coming together nicely so far.

First scene update!

I've been working on the first scene some. I've learned quite a bit, and made some good progress. I have previously posted renders of the satellite and the earth, but never combined, as one was in Blender Internal render engine, and the other was rendered in Cycles. It turns out that compositing them is actually pretty easy. Here are some early renders, I'm pretty excited about this:

And, just for fun, here it is again with the alpha channel:

(I don't know how the blog will display the alpha channel. I uploaded it as a .png, which supports alpha channel as well as the standard RGB. In the Linux image viewer it has a nice alpha checkered background)

I'll try to post a link to the blend file soon, which brings up a question; are we willing to use Blendswap for this movie, or should we stick to posting or e-mailing links to Google Docs? Please reply in the comments below.

Here's a screenshot of the node setup, as you can see, nothing too complicated, right?

Wrong! (and only one of the node groups is expanded!)

I just figured out how to use node groups, and it can drastically cut down on clutter in the node chain.

Asteroid to be added soon!

Embedded realtime blend file visualization

I just found a really cool website. It's sketchfab.com, and one of the things they let you do is .blend file visualization in real time with embedded code! It's not especially fancy, but it gets the basic idea across, and could come in handy. Here's an example:

Tracking test

Here is a tracking test that Josh and I made. It's not perfect, but we both learned a lot, and I think tracking will be important for the movie, so it's good to get some practice in.

Improved masking and keying

The mask isn't perfect, but here's a much better version: (keying too)

I'm still not spending much time on this to perfect the result but it's coming along nicely. Somewhere in the video you can see I nicked the person with the mask. It's really easy to use, but it does take a while.

Keying in Blender -now working!

I finally figured out how to get the keying to work in blender! Here's the screenshot:

It's the same footage as before, just so I have something consistent to work with.
As you can see, I just plugged the mask into the keying node using an invert node and it worked. I had tried plugging the mask into the keying node, but hadn't gotten anything before, so I don't know why it didn't work before, but I have it working now!

I'll see if I can fix the mask in the next post. I'm not going to try to track the background.

Blender 2.64 Testbuild!

I'm really excited about Blender 2.64. I've been trying to do chroma keying in Blender with no success because I can't figure out how to blur (feather) the mask. The new keying node should be a huge improvement. The despill node was great, but this should take the keying to professional levels.

Not only did they drastically improve the keying, planar tracking was introduced! 

This will also be a great help, and I'm really looking forward to trying it out, it's downloading as I post.