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!

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.