"The Barrier" Scene 1 Progress 2014 September 28

The new scene really started to come together this week. I posted a test video that I think gives a good indication what the final version will look like.

 

I think I've got all the vehicle movements done now. Although I might need to do some tweaks later.

I spent most of my time on the set up of the cameras. Most of the cameras were fairly easy, but a couple were more difficult. One of these is a point of view shot from the driver, while the other is a close up of the driver. I plan I need to have them to stay in the exact same position relative to the car and that turns out to be very finicky work.

The point of view camera is a bit easier because I can eyeball the position reasonably well. The close up camera is a real pain. I plan to composite in the driver and to make that easier, I need the camera settings to be very precise.

It is OK when the car moves in a straight line, but when it changes direction it becomes a night mare. I developed a formula to convert the relative coordinates of the camera to the coordinates after the car changes direction. The one I came up with was a bit too simplistic and I'll need to work on it some more.

I was quite happy how the sequence looks when I cut it all together. I can improve on the continuity though. I also wonder if I need to add more trees and maybe some ground cover to the set.

"The Barrier" is a movie about a transportation planner. You learn a bit more about it here: http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/the-barrier/

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

More Fiddling with "The Barrier" Animation - 2014 September 21

I made a little more progress on the new version of scene 1 for "The Barrier" this week. I have both a truck and a car for the scene now. I added a lot of trees and played around with the terrain a bit. I posted a test animation:

My first task Monday was to design and create the truck. In the current version of the movie, Arthur calls the truck a semi, but I decided it would be easier to do a cube van.  It was easier to do than the car and went fairly quickly.  When I imported it into the Gladstone set, it came out huge and I needed to scale it down. Later in the week, when I did some modifications later in the week, I did the rescale before the import. I did the same for the car. I did a test animation with both the car and truck.  I messed up the animation of the truck and it jumped around a bit, so it was hard to get at a good idea how it would look.

I made some changes to the truck Tuesday, including some headlights. I modified the car as well. I added a steering wheel and head lights  to the car.  I modified the car's front bumper as well. I pulled the revised vehicle both into the Gladstone set.  I had to fiddle with scale, but it wasn't as difficult.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I modified the set extensively. I trim out sections of the terrain that I didn't think I needed. I added hundreds of trees, I wanted to give some of them different colors, but I ran into trouble with that, so I just let them be. The terrain still has some open spaces, but the forest does look more realistic.  I added some rocks along the river and gravel along the side of the road. They didn't look very good. I will have to try something else. I modified the water so it would be move so it would looks like flowing water. All these additions to the set slows down the animation render quite a bit.

Thursday I revised the animation plan. I calculated the positions of the car and truck at key points on the time line. That proved to be slow tedious work, but I think I have it right now. It will come in handy when I start to work on the animation.

Friday I discovered that the car, the truck and the elements of the set were of different scales. The truck was easy to fix. The car wasn't so easy. After I rescaled it, the car looked too squashed down. I didn't want to rescale the height, because then the tires would look oval. Instead, I moved the top of the car up relative to the rest of the car. I think I might raise it up a little more. I was worried that the trees were out of scale, but when I did a test animation, they looked OK to me.

One thing I still don't really understand about Blender is how the co-ordinate system works. I had to work out how to convert the co-ordinate system for the roadway to the co-ordinate system for the whole set. I need to do that so I can use the time and positions of the car and truck for the animation. After some fiddling about, I came up with a couple of formulas to do the conversion.

Saturday I put more detail into the animation plan for what happens to the car after it avoids the truck.  I suspect that once I have everything set up, that I will need to make some further adjustments.

I am still not very sure how I will handle camera movement. Three of the five cameras I plan to use for the scene have track the car and will need to move during their shots. One idea I had was to link the camera to the car but I am not sure that will work. I'll have to experiment with that. My other idea is to set the first position of the camera relative to the car and then do the same for the end point. That should give it the same speed as the car and have it not move relative to the car.

One camera is a close up of the driver's seat and I expect that will be the most difficult. I plan to composite in the image of the driver, and if there is any relative movement, the shot won't work. On the other hand, the drivers point of view shouldn't be very hard.

Finally, I created a short test animation to see how it all looks. It isn't a shot I plan to use in the final scene. Please have a look at the test animation and let me know what you think of it.

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

More Blender Animation for "The Barrier" - 2014 September 14

I continued to work on the revised opening scene for "The Barrier" this week. Progress has been slower than I hoped, but I enjoy most of the work, and I've learned quite a lot from what I've done so far.

In the opening scene, my hero, a young transportation planner drives down a road and is almost hit by a truck. In the scene in the current version of "The Barrier" this isn't very clear. I hope to get a much more impressive opening scene with Blender.

It took me most of the week to create the car for the scene. I wasn't happy with the first version I did, so I scraped it. I did learn a few tricks when I did it though that helped me when I did the new version. When I did the second version, I based it on a specific car. It didn't look much like it when I was done, but it did look more realistic. I don't want it to look too realistic though. After I got the initial version done, I added some seats. At first I made them a dark brown, but then decided a light tan would look better.

I gave the windows for the car a slight blue colour, a little reflectivity and a slight opaqueness. I thought that looked good, but then ran into a problem where the inside of the car was too dark to see anything. I made the windows more transparent and even deleted some of them. I lightened the colour of the seats, and moved the Sun so that it would better illuminate the interior. Finally I put a light inside the car. I was reluctant to do that because I was concerned that it would look wrong. However, it didn't look too bad.

I did some more animation tests, mostly to see how the car looked when I travelled down the road. One of the issues I have to solve is that car can fly up above or drop below the road unless I get the key frames right. That is finicky work. The river beside the road is static, so I did a test to see if I could animate it as well.

At the end of the week I started to work out the animation plan in more detail. I need to know where to put the car, the truck and the cameras for each key frame. I have the car worked out, but ran into trouble with the truck. I'll try again next week. I haven't done anything about the cameras yet. The ones that move need to stay in the same relative position to the car throughout the scene. I hope that I can find a way to link the cameras to the car, so they move when the car moves. I find it difficult to work with the co-ordinate system in Blender. It seems like each object has its own system.

I wanted to add new objects to the animation, so I searched for a video demonstration on-line. I've found that videos about most everything I need to learn about Blender are available on-line.

I still have a lot of work to do before I'm done with this video. I need to finish the car: I want to add head lights and a steering wheel. A rear view mirror would be nice, but I think I can skip that. I also would like to add some detail to the interior of the car.

The one major piece of work I have to do is create the truck. In the script I have it as a semi, but I think that would be too difficult to animate, so I think I will do some sort of van. That will be a bit trickier than the car. I don't think I will need the interior detail, which will help.

I'm not sure how much longer this scene will take me to complete. Every week I start with the thought that I'll get it done this week. It turns out to be wishful thinking.

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

"The Barrier" Test Animation 2014 September 6

My goal is to create a new version of the opening scene for my movie, "The Barrier". In the current version of the opening scene it isn't clear what happens. I completed a short test animation this week.

So far I've concentrated on building the set, but also did a test animation. I used Blender to build the set and do the animation. At one point I got very frustrated with Blender. It seems like I get something the way I want it, and then it stops working after I made some more changes. Late in the week I seemed to find a way around that and got a test animation done. You can watch it here:

I'm a long way from completion. I plan to add more trees and some vehicles. I may also add a yellow stripe down the center of the road or more detailed trees. I don't want the set to look too realistic because it would look odd when I combine it with the Xtranormal animation I used in the rest of the movie. I plan to shoot the scene from several different cameras and then cut them together in Premiere Pro.

"The Barrier" is the story about the struggles of a transportation planner when he tries to do what he thinks is right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-LOUNSEKac

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