April 17 2005
The pre-production work on the project I had to squash in between Sleeping Dragon is coming along nicely. This short film is tentatively named “Tea Time”, but that’s bound to change before the film is completed.
So far, the story is finished, the storyboards are almost there and even the characters are mostly done.
And here they are:
Beautiful, the two of ‘em. Rupert and Edward, old blokes as English as they get. I tried to get as much character into them as possible without getting too cartoony, and it’ll be more clear when they’re animated.
It’s nice that I can benefit from all the research and development done on Sleeping Dragon. Although the look will differ slightly from Sleeping Dragon, many elements and especially shaders can will be re-used in this projects. I also intend to once again use 3delight for rendering the characters. The backgrounds will be a mixture of 3D renders and 2D paintings, with the focus clearly on the painting.
Next I’ll be working on the scenery, an old railroad station were the two of them will have their little quarrel. I’ve already tried several different settings, but alas none of them suited the story all that well.
The solution: A surrounding park with lots and lots of CG trees! So I’ll be looking for ways to render a ridiculous amount of trees… as quickly as I can! After all, there’s only a few weeks left ’til the deadline.
January 14 2005
Honestly, I should be working on my demo reel at this moment… I’m preparing to send out my reel and job applications in about a months time, but since I feel that there should be at least a glimpse of Sleeping Dragon in my demo, I’m now tweaking the most complete scene to get it into a presentable state.
So, here it is: The “Hello world” from Tatsu (the little guy) and Ryu (the big guy)!
Hopefully it’s obvious that I aim to mimic the earlier Disney look you might remember from classics such as Bambi, Robin Hood, or my favorite, The Jungle Book. In order to achieve this I’ve devised a combination of post-filters to emulate the way the Technicolor process affects film stock. As it stands, I’m not 100% happy with the current look, but there’s still time to improve.
January 11 2005
Perhaps you’ve noticed a lack of updates lately. This was due to me spending the holidays with my girlfriend, during which we had three wonderful weeks together. There I found the time to settle down, relax and not worry too much about any projects or my short film…
Now that I’m back home, I intend to get back to work as soon as possible. I’ll be working on another project for uni this month, but I hope to squeeze in some time to work on Sleeping Dragon. If all goes well, I should have the first backgrounds and animations done by the end of this month!
December 26 2004
My continued research on painterly rendering techniques is beginning to bear fruits: PainterMan, a NPR RenderMan shader, has been rewritten from scratch and now works properly on any surface using a new and thoroughly optimized algorithm that provides much more control over the look.
Sublte displacement creates the illusion of paint strokes. Support for shadows and multiple light sources of any type has also been added. To my amazement it works best at high shading rates in ranges of 100‑1000, whereby the time to render a frame has gone down a lot more than I could have achieved through code optimization alone.
As a matter of fact, this algorithm produces a look so different from the last version that I decided to keep the old shader alongside the updated one, simply renaming the new version to PainterMan II. Surely both can prove useful for different objects in my film.
Here’s a sample of what it looks like in a rough test scene:
That’s not all I’ve been up to lately… I have another NPR project cooking for use in Sleeping Dragon: Disney’s Deep Canvas technology looks mighty impressive, but there’s very little technical information or even documentation available on the net. A SIGGRAPH paper from 2003 proved somewhat insightful, but lacks detail here and there — not much of a surprise, of course Disney doesn’t want to give away its trade secrets just like that.
From what I gather, it should be possible to create a system similar in look to Deep Canvas using only standard programs and a little scripting. Alas, I don’t have the time nor desire to create a fully working implementation just for my short movie, so I’ll have to make do with a little hack, if at all.
As it stands, only few scenes in Sleeping Dragon would gain from a system like this, so it’s not my main focus to get this running at the moment. I’ll keep working on it alongside the film and post updates if anything noteworthy comes about.
December 12 2004
Over the past week I was ill and spent a lot more time in bed than out, hence I didn’t have the time (much less the power) to continue working on Sleeping Dragon. Today I feel much better, so I hope to be able to make some progress in the following days.
I did, however, go out to see Pixar’s “The Incredibles” in a cinema at the Potsdamer Platz on friday night, where it was shown in English, fortunately.
Congratulations to Brad Bird and the team and Pixar, the film was wonderful — very, very inspiring!
The plot and storytelling was brilliant as expected, and once again they’ve outdone themselves when it comes to raising the bar for animated film. The animation, the movement of the characters, their emotions were truely stunning and I’ll try to “borrow” a few tricks here and there for use in my own short film!
It’s great to see someone actually caring about story and not just about throwing special effects at the audience. Also, though it may sound strange, I feel that the Incredibles actually have something that their real-life counterparts are severely lacking these days: Life…
