New video card for cycles!

Project 2.6 will now be able to render using the Cycles render!  We just got a Nvidia 560 with 2gb of DDR5 memory.  This will allow us to successfully render using cycles without crashing the program.

When idle, the 560 runs about 30 degrees Celsius, but after 1000 passes in cycles in jumps up to 75 degrees, and can render 6000 passes in just over 8 minutes.  Which is more than 10 times faster than the CPU!

We will hopefully have some more statistics and test shots later to show just what can be done with the Cycles render engine.  

Cycles!

Cycles may be a possibility for this project after all! We're having some posting / authorization issues right now, but hopefully by Saturday we should have that straightened out. Once we get that fixed we'll try to post more about Cycles and our current setup... :)

More fire

More fire!



Just playing around with a blend file... It looks pretty weird though, I may change the seed and tweak some settings to see what else I can do.

Celtx vs. Google Docs

I've tried Celtx and I've tried Google Docs. Celtx doesn't work nearly as well when multiple people are working on the same thing.  So, we'll probably leave the script in Google Docs. Celtix can be useful for making lists, and possibly some other more in depth scene breakdown, but for now, nothing major is going to change.

First Scene Location Scouting

Location scouting; Right now, I'm looking for a place to shoot the first scene. We have three houses right now that we can pick from (ours), but there's a catch. What I want to do is to have a room with some chairs / sofa and a window to the backyard. One of our houses doesn't have a backyard that I know of. Our house has a room that might work, except that the view from the room is of our deck, not the ground. It might work, but would be less than ideal. The other house I haven't seen the backyard. 

So...

Daniel, does your house have any rooms with windows not very far off the ground in the back, and if so, could you send or post some photos?

We also have two other options. One is to greenscreen the window, for the video of the impact. I don't want to do this, as that means we will have to shoot locked down, which won't look as good, or use motion tracking, which I think we're going to be doing enough of already. The other is to have the satellite fall into the front yard. This is worth considering, especially for the last scene, when Zeke has a bunch of his friends around it, telling them what happened.

So, what do you think? What should we try? We have to decide soon, because we want to shoot the trailer soon.

I think we should shoot it so that the satellite falls in the front yard. If people agree, I'll change the script.

If we did this, we would preferably shoot it at your house, Daniel. Are there any rooms that would work for this?

Camera Ladder

Camera cranes are great, but commercial ones are really expensive. I want to use one on this project, so I have to figure out how to make one. I've posted about my first ones, but I'm also looking at trying to using a ladder like this one as the arm. It has the advantage of being (slightly) collapsible, and probably lighter weight, but it's also more flexible than the triangle design of the tower that I was using, so there might be bounce on faster moving shots. Only a test run will show, so that's on the list of things to try. It's not very high on the list though, because I already have something that I think will work.