CRS-4 General Purpose Droid

As part of my efforts to re-design the world of Pale Black, one of the first major asset I dumped and rebuilt from scratch is the security droid. After some painful contemplation, I have decided that the previous version looked too...what's that word..."anime"-like. Sure it looked aggresive, but considering that it's purpose on the station was to protect the onboard population, I couldn't have it look as if it was going to rip out your spine whenever it was coming at you.

So, taking some pointers from real world robot designs, I came up with something more subdued and neutral. Something that wouldn't normally make babies cry but if looked at under the right light, could (hopefully) make your skin crawl.

I present to you, the CRS-4 General Purpose Droid.

As you can see, the station employs three variants that serves different roles. As with many major assets, I did a short writeup about the droid's characteristics to ensure continuity with the design and it's behaviour. I'll close this post with an excerpt from the writeup:

".....What the CRS-4 lacks in intelligence and durability, it makes it up with a relatively low startup cost and an even lower operating cost. The droid’s parts are designed as modules and can easily removed or re-attached in the field, even by untrained personnel. This reduces the need for dedicated technicians just for droid maintenance, as long as the operator maintain a healthy inventory of spare parts......"

Download - Chipped paint Lightwave3D preset

Yes, yes I know it's been a rather long time since my last update. While I have been hard at work revamping a lot of the assets, I have also been kept busy with paid jobs. In fact, this project is the only thing that keeps me from burning out from all those mundane, un-creative jobs that pays for my meals.

Anyway, I am working on a short teaser at the moment. The teaser will not only serve as a demo of the visual style and quality I'm aiming for, but also a means to experiment with my production pipeline. I've made some progress, albeit slowly, but I'm hopeful I'll get it done very soon. Oh, and having one of my workstations die on me the last weekend didn't help.

One of the things that I had started to develop early on was a metallic chipped surface shader that I could reuse (and easily modify as needed), since the story takes place on a space station where there will be many, what else, old, scratched metallic surfaces.

I have completed a version using only the layers system in Lightwave3D with procedural textures and gradients, the result of which you can see below:

A version of the shader was applied to my early prop models, such as the barrel:

You can download the preset here (Newtek Lightwave 3D v9.0 or higher required).

I am currently working on a node-only  version of the shader which will allow me to control the amount of chipped areas via a weight map, such as on the edges of an object.

Using a procedural shader saves me the trouble of painting chipped paint textures for every single object, and I don't have to worry about texture sizes since procedural textures are resolution independent. The downside of this approach is the increased CPU overhead when rendering since the textures have to be generated during rendertime. But considering the alternative of using high resolution image maps, which will incur memory overhead and possibly a larger impact on rendering time, I think it is a fair compromise, if not a solution.

Alright then, back to work!

Aaron Sim's Archetype

Aaron Sims, renowned concept designer (The Incredible Hulk, I am Legend) has released a teaser trailer for his film project named Archetype. Watch the trailer below

"Your Memories are just a glitch

RL7 is an eight foot tall combat robot. Only problem is he's starting to remember once being human. Now on the run from an all powerful corporation that will stop at nothing to destroy him RL7 desperately searches for the truth behind his mysterious memories before it's too late.

Directed by Aaron Sims, starring Robert Joy (Land of the Dead, CSI: NY) and David Anders (Heroes, 24).

For more information on Aaron and his latest projects, go to aaron-sims.com, and archetype-movie.com."

This is particularly interesting for me because there are certain aspects of this project that is similiar to what I have in mind for Pale Black. Nonetheless, I'm sure there are many key differences that differentiates both projects, lest people start saying that I'm ripping off Sims (or he is ripping off Pale Black! Har Har!).

It is great to see another robot film, nonetheless.

On another note, again, I know there have been little updates lately. I am reviewing some of the work I've done and is pondering whether to implement some changes to my work, which could mean redoing some completed assets. I'll keep posting.

The power of spreadsheets

Pale Black is not a major production by any means, but it's a pretty daunting undertaking for one person. That is why it is important for me to document and track the progress of everything in this project.

I don't use any fancy tracking applications that shows me flowcharts, progress bars and completion percentage, nor do I need them. I do want a lightweight, simple and easy to use solution. In fact, as it turns out, I only needed spreadsheets. I also needed portability, since I'm not always in front of my workstation and I didn't want to carry a laptop or thumbdrive with me all the time. That is why Cloud applications, specifically Google Docs, is a godsend to people like me. I can update my documents anywhere and anytime as long as I have an Internet connection. Currently, I keep all my documents pertaining to Pale Black, including scripts and treatments, with Google Docs.

But enough of that. You can see below a screen shot of my 3D assets list:

It is as simple as it gets. The name of the asset, the type of the asset, reference concept art, status of the 3D model (whether it is modeled, textured, rigged etc.) and the level-of-detail (LOD) of the 3D model. Everything is updated manually which is not that much work since there aren't that many assets.

A shotlist is created for each episode, and as you might've guess from the name, it lists the shots that needs to be done to be assembled into a coherent episode.

Excuse the mosaic, possible spoilers!

Again, it is extremely simply. The information included are the shot number, description of the shot, audio (sound effects, music and dialogue), remarks (usually highlighting unique techniques for the particular shot) and the current status of the shot. The shotlist allows me to estimate the number of shots for each episode and track the status of each shot as well as what I have to look out for when I revisit any particular shot.

Strangely, these two documents not only helps me keep track of the production, they also have weird way of motivating me. The feeling of checking off tasks in these spreadsheet are very gratifying to say the least, and gives me, however minute, a sense of achievement every time I mark something as "Done".

I would like to add that Google Docs is by no means a replacement for MS Office or even OpenOffice (Which I use for my other works) when it comes to functionality, but if you are only in the market for a free, simple and portable alternative, it proves to be an immensely useful tool. That, and it saves the document that your are working on into the cloud every few seconds, saving you the heartache of lost work because of a computer crash....that has gotta worth something!

Generic corridor

A typical sci-fi corridor, complete with fog and alarm lights. The big white square on the upper left corner is suppose to be a display screen. Still a WIP at the moment, though.

Storage room

New environment, a large, empty storage area. Nothing terribly interesting.

I blame the sweltering heat

My part of the world is undergoing some sort of freak weather phenomenon. Two weeks ago not a day would go by without an obligatory heavy downpour. Then since a week ago there was not a drop of rain to be seen,  the clouds have all but disappeared, giving the scorching sun an un-occluded access to the tarmac, which duly reflected the heat. This wouldn't be so bad if my car's air conditioning didn't pick that time to break down.

But anyway,  I have been working hard on creating assets for the project, one of them being the main protagonist. I am taking it very slowly, redoing major parts of the character even, because I don't want to rush it just for the sake of getting it done quickly. This is why I haven't had anything interesting to post for the past week.

I have made some headway in finalizing the script for the first episode, and am contemplating a possible teaser trailer. I'll be sure to post any interesting updates.

FX test - Muzzle flash

You know what they say about variety being the spice of life, so I've decided to take a break from modeling today to do some effects R&D.

If you've already seen the first test animation I posted, you'll notice that I have already implemented some form of muzzle flash on the blaster. What I wanted to achieve was a gaseous look, where the dense, superheated gas ejected from the muzzle (the flash) would expand and evaporate immediately. Lacking a easy fluid solution since Lightwave3D doesn't have one ( yet! ), I used a 3D muzzle flash mesh and Hypervoxels.

You can see the development of the effect in the video below.

Warning! Sound effects have been added near the end of the video.

There are still room from improvements such as fixing the geometric spiky look of the flash object, and improve the blending between the flash and the particles.The sound effects also sound kinda cheesy so I'm not sure at the moment.

Other than that, for a few hours of work, I'm pretty happy with it.

Lightwave 3D - How motion blur killed the render time

Like many other Lightwave 3D users, one of the things I love most about the software is the relative simplicity of it's rendering engine. This is a great advantage for an independent 3D generalist like me - the ability to churn out frames with minimum tinkering is invaluable and an immense time saver. Nevertheless, being simple doesn't save one from aggravating hair-tearing moments, such as the one I experienced when rendering the test animation in the previous post.

The camera and rendering settings are similiar to what I typically use:

The test renders were also normal, clocking at about 6 minutes per frame on my old Core2Duo machine. If you are familiar with LW, you'll see that these are hardly the best settings if you're looking for a high quality output, but for a test animation I decided it'll do.

Satisfied that everything is in order, I sent the job to my i5 quadcore machine for final rendering and moved on to other tasks.

3 hours later I came back to check on the progress. To my utter dismay, it was still working on the third frame, with the second frame taking over 2 hours to render. Needless to say, it was a pretty huge jump from 6 minutes a frame on a lesser computer. Suspecting a freak memory leak at first, I restarted the rendering from the last frame to let it work backwards to the first frame. The first few frames took about 7-8 minutes per frame, which was still considerably slower considering 2 more cores were working on it, but I was too tired to troubleshoot, so I let it be and went to sleep.

In the morning, I checked again and found that the render was stuck at the 37th frame, with the previous frame taking 1.5 hours. By then it was already 10 hours into the render. For a simple 4 second animation, it was getting ridiculous.

By studying the render progress, I quickly realize that the render slowed to a crawl when ever it reach the portions with heavy motion blur. Lowering the blur amount and passes helped very little, and I was not about to reduce the AA and adaptive sampling settings, because it was bordering on being unacceptably grainy.

Initial forum searches yielded no results, until I found a thread on, where else, the Newtek forums. In a nutshell, the problem lied in the fact that I was using Photoreal motion blur and a deforming object, which did not play well with each other.

 Faced with the grim prospect of spending a week rendering a test animation, I bit the bullet and switched to dithered motion blur and viola, the render time dropped to 6 minutes a frame, which remained more or less consistent throughout the 130 frames.

The result of using dithered MB, in my opinion, was not all that inferior to photoreal. The MB amount was low enough that the checkered dither pattern was not all that noticable. I suppose that given enough passes, it would look just as good as photoreal MB (photoreal uses stochastic dithering), though I'm not sure the resulting increase in rendering time would be worth it.

In any case, I guess I'll have to start looking into implementing MB in post.

Happy Labour day and first video of the blog

Please forgive the wonky animation, didn't wanna spend too much time animating at this early stage of production.

One of the animations I made to put the rig through it's paces. I've spent the past week de-bugging the rig and getting the damn thing to render. I ran into some rendering problems that caused some hair-pulling, head-banging and face-palm moments. That alone caused some re-renders and wasted a few days of rendering. I'll elaborate in the next post.

Nonetheless, in hindsight it is a good thing that I thoroughly tested these two things before going full swing into animation, otherwise this could cause some serious damage on my sanity.

Security droid

One of the opposing robots the protagonist will encounter in the space station. Like most of the machines serving the (former) inhabitants of the station, the bi-pedal security droids have semi-independent AI that allows creative thinking, which makes them efficient enforcers and sometimes unpredictable.

Droid workshop and what the hell was I thinking

The droid workshop was the first environment I worked on. I finished the first version in one and a half day so I was pretty pleased with myself, confident that at this speed I could finish the first episode in no time. You can see the first version below:

Thankfully, I came to my senses quickly and realize that it looked like a POS. So I scrapped the whole thing and re-did it. The new workshop as it stands now looks like this:

I don't always have the luxury of sketching things out properly first, so sometimes my workflow involves haphazardly putting shapes together in my 3D modeler and hopes that it sticks. Fortunately, most of the time it works and the results look good enough. On the flipside, if it doesn't work out I would have wasted a lot of time.

So the lesson learnt here is: In the future, I will try to do more planning before before sinking my time in actual production of any assets, especially key objects and characters.

Here's to the one and a half days of my like I'm never getting back.

Guns and Grenades

The M161P Plasma Repeater Blaster and frag grenade. Putting holes and blowing up bad robots with the right amount of badass-ery and prejudice.

The great crates

What better to kickstart the production than making the ubiquitous crates and barrel that have became the hallmark of the sci-fi genre.

Yes, admittedly, progress is slow, but at least it is moving along.

To cap this post off, here's a humorous read about crates in video games.

Sashimi and flu

As luck would have it, I came down with a nasty case of stomach flu the day after publishing the first post. I'll spare you the details but I suspect it has something to do with the copious amount of Sashimi I consumed the day before. Note to self : practice restraint at a Japanese buffet next time.

So long story short, I haven't been able to get anything done while I was busy managing my bowel movements. Now that I'm better, I'm hoping to catch up with some work and hopefully I'll have something to post soon.