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

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 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.

First scene test #1

... And the long awaited first scene test!

Again, I don't claim in any way that animation is my strong point!

And, here's the blend file!
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B3AzOhkYNoUUOHFzV3pVek05MDQ

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.

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.

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.

Cycles Satellite

Here's a quick test video render of the Cycles satellite:



Drastic overuse of the glare node. I need to fix that, but it's still a work in progress.

Less menacing asteroid

If we wanted something a little more bright:

Scene one early test

This was an earlier scene test video that I don't think got posted, so here it is:

I like version 3 is better, but this is one of the early tests we did. This one is also about 1/3 the length I think it should be.

stepper motor position control

The stepper motor now has a position control! It wasn't easy either, and it has a ways to go yet, but here's an update:

As you can see, it needs some more work yet, but it is really coming together nicely now. A few of the problems that I will try to fix are:

Jitter. It's not too bad anymore, but it's too much. I may have to use a digital potentiometer.

• Current draw. The motor is rated for 6 Amps @ 3 volts. I'm not sure that rating is right, but that was what it was specified as. The problem with that is that the transistors can't handle more than about an amp, so they are getting really hot. The other problem with the current draw is that the whole thing is running off of USB, so while this is great for testing, because it's current limited, to get the full torque out of this motor I'll need a good 3V supply and some higher current transistors. (I'm also not sure if the transistors are saturating all the way, so it might be that I just need lower voltage transistors)

• What to use for a proper enclosure.

• How to mount it to the rail system ( this is the easy one!)

Anyway, that's where I am currently. Here's the code I'm using:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/*
 * MotorKnob
 *
 * A stepper motor follows the turns of a potentiometer
 * (or other sensor) on analog input 0.
 *
 * http://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/Stepper
 * This example code is in the public domain.
 */

#include

// change this to the number of steps on your motor
#define STEPS 200

// create an instance of the stepper class, specifying
// the number of steps of the motor and the pins it's
// attached to
Stepper stepper(STEPS, 8, 9, 10, 11);

// the previous reading from the analog input
int previous = 0;

void setup()
{
  // set the speed of the motor to 15 RPMs
  stepper.setSpeed(15);
}

void loop()
{
  delay(100);
  // get the sensor value
  int val = analogRead(0);

  // move a number of steps equal to the change in the
  // sensor reading
  stepper.step(val - previous);

  // remember the previous value of the sensor
  previous = val;
}

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(I know that's probably not relevant to anyone else here, but I want a backup of the code online, and this is a good place to put it)

Improved camera

Now with aperture!

In case anyone's curious, it takes about 40 sec- 1 minute per frame to render with a node chain. (That's with my CPU overclocked) 

Concept Artwork

Click for full 2K! This is the current result of some of my work for this movie. This is supposed to be a lens for the satellite's camera. (the gray box at the bottom will be the camera / satellite) The boxes around the lens are supposed to be the controls for focus and zoom.

What do you think? I know it still needs a lot of work, especially texturing. What could be improved? I'm thinking of adding an iris behind the lens, but haven't yet.

Bigger Better Camera Crane

The camera crane is now 20 feet long, (15 effective) 60lbs counterweight, and still working nicely. If I can figure out how to mount this thing it will be great. Here's another video, and this time it's longer too (still no HD, sorry)

It's looking good, but finding a good mount for it is going to be tough, not to mention trying to transport it! (If we decide to use it for the movie that is) Here are some photos to show the size of this thing.

Above: It's not small!

The counterbalance system above.

Above: The temporary camera mount (This is part of why I'm not putting a 5D up there!)

My impromptu method of joining. (It's actually much better than it looks)

And along the side.

Try not to cringe too much, watch the video first, it really works very well so far.

Camera Crane Test

I've wanted to make / use a camera crane for a while, but they're expensive, and I would also need a pan/tilt head. A pan/tilt head shouldn't be too hard to build, now that I've figured out how to get my Arduino to read a potentiometer and control a stepper motor. I was thinking about using a servo motor for a while, and then I discovered stepper motors :) Anyway, I may or may not go that direction yet, but I was testing out a section of antenna tower I have as a camera crane with the camera mounted directly on it. Here's the test video below:

Start at 0:15. The jerk at 30 seconds in is from the counterweight (30lbs) on the back sliding around.

Yes, I know, it's not HD, and I find that annoying too, but I'm not putting one of our HD cameras up there until I have some sort of fail-safe. Below are photos of it:

And close up of the ends:

All for now! Please comment, and next up, production workstation photos!

Muzzle Flash Test

Like I said earlier, I'll post tests here, so people can get an idea of how things are happening. Here's a short muzzle flash test I did a while back. I plan on doing a (much) better version soon.

Script overview

The general script overview is finished! This is a big step forward. I still have to work in one more actor, but it doesn't affect the plot very much, so it shouldn't take too long. It should add some humor too, which is always good. I'm unsure how much of the plot we want to reveal before the movie is released, so for now I'm keeping it to a minimum, but keep watching, we may release some of the script later! (Not to mention test scenes, trailers and such ;) I've started some test videos, so I'll post some periodically, so people can see what some of the issues we might run into would be. Here's one below:


Some of the problems you can see if you watch closely. The main one is rolling shutter. We can't do a whole lot about that. It's going to be tricky to minimize it, and it becomes more pronounced at higher shutter speeds. Since we will be filming at 60fps, the shutter speed can't be below 1/60 of a second. That's not too bad, but the other problem is blurring. This clip looks pretty blurred, and is somewhat painful to watch. That being said, the white balance looks pretty nice, not perfect though, and the rolling shutter isn't very pronounced here. In the car chase scenes (oops, I gave another scene away ;) we're going to try to film from around 45 degrees, not 90 to minimize rolling shutter. We might have some shots that are straight on, but that probably wouldn't be as interesting, so probably not too many.