Sunday, August 11, 2013

Building a Set for “The Barrier”

This week I experimented with a 3D model program to create a background set for some of my scenes in “The Barrier”. I made good progress, but have much to learn yet.

I need to create a background for a few of my scenes, because the ones available didn’t fit. I output them with green scenes, so I could drop in background images.

This week I started to work on how to create the background images. My original idea was to create flat images and then distort them to look right. That would have been a lot of finicky work, and likely would still not look any good.

I looked into 3D modelling programs. One, called Blender, looked like a good choice. http://www.blender.org/ They said it was easy to use, and it was also free. Some of the free ones let you have the program for free, but then you can’t use the images you create in a commercial product. Blender does.

It wasn’t as easy to use as they said it was. After a couple of days I was about the give up. Then I got one thing to work the way I wanted to, and started to build on that. Over the course of the week I learned a fair bit, although I’m sure I only scraped the surface of what can be done.

I created walls and a floor for my set. The initial versions weren’t very good, so I did new versions. Version three looks OK to me. I still need to build the whole set. Besides the walls and floors, I want to put some posters on the walls and add some doors to the room. Beyond that I would like to add some other set dressings, but at this point I think I should hold off on that. It could be a lot of work.

Once I have the set, I need to set up the cameras. I’ve done some work on translating the camera settings in Xtranormal into the camera settings in Blender. I think I know how to do it, but I haven’t actually done it yet. Surprises may await me.

I did a test to see how the composited image compares to the same shot on an Xtranormal set. The XN logo ends up green, which looks funny. At this stage I don’t think that is important.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

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