We are talking about rotoscoping, and to do that you must have patience. If you dont have patience, dont even bother read about rotoscoping my advice and from my personal experience!  Back in early 50's they used this technology to create short animation films. I think it was faster to rotoscope than drawing out a whole film. It was a technique to trace over live action film movement frame by frame. The first rotoscope film "Out of the Inkwell" was produced by Max Fleischer  in 1915.

This might be interesting to share with you. The first chinese rotoscoped film was produced in 1941 "Princess Iron Fan" It was used up to 200,000 papers, 20,000 render frames. Gather them all would make the final piece 2,300 meters. Creation of this film took 3 years with 237 artist and cost 350,000 Yuan to produce this.
Rotoscoping was also used in many of Disney's animated films with human characters. The rotoscope was used mainly for studying human and animal motion.

Our purpose using of the rotoscope technique is to mask away unwanted object in scene. It's actually vice versa what they purpose of rotoscope technique is made for. For instance in the "The Jungle Book" the background environment is so well painted with shading and shadows. But the character in motion is flat with no shading and shadows in them. It's a smart workflow when you only need to draw the background plate and rotoscope the character ino the scene.

While in our movie we are using rotoscope help as a mask to remove unwanted object in scene that we don't want to show. Or make it simple you want to hid a specific geometry behind a person you have to rotoscope it out.

Another day passed and 3 days left until our deadline. Today I worked on the most precious and hardly scene shot we had. No doubt and no comment, until you've watched it! It was pretty hard and the whole sequence had around 350 frames. The goal was to mask the CG cabinet behind the electrician. I have to admit it it was quite challenging, patience and time consuming. I nearly worked at-least 12 hours on a 10sec clip.

But the good thing is actually I completed it, and it's ready to render even. The result was pretty good, I mean it was better than I hoped. The whole composite was all about rotoscoping, the main part. And the tricky part was to stabilize it, because it was a handheld shot. And we had 2 different renders from Max. I was thinking of using only 1 single frame were you actually only see the cabinet then using the tracker to match up with the camera movement. 

And the final part was to mask the cabinet out and robot. So that will be double time taken. Why I did this is because we have to put different settings on each CG render. Because only having 1 CG render will affect both of the props when for instance you turning up the exposure it will be heavy burn out on both. While having 2 CG render separated would gives you more control. 

Time to countdown on deadline AND my journal post. I will try to update my post everyday from now on. Today we reorganized our folder structure because Adrian and I have different files and folder names. So to make this easy for these next days and easy compositing, we renamed all folders and files to make it simple as possible and organized. We still got some scenes left for rendering and the deadline is next monday. I hope we will finish this because I can't wait any longer to watch our clips in one movie.

If you ever wonder why I haven't got any pictures or post it is because I just lost my membership to Weebly, so I'm thinking of merging this site to another. And the basic tool here is not good, I just want the quality stuff. That's me. But I will upload some preview hopefully tomorrow. Stay tuned!

A little project update going on. We are currently doing major rendering and compositing now. Today our animator William just did the last scene we need. A really good animator you might find something about his production workflow. After that it's basically just compositing and adding music on then we're set.
I have to agree that there is some scenes I found myself quite challenging.

If we look at this shot here, the bicycle buddy pop outs from nowhere and stole our attention. We didn't want that, so we tried to remove it. And that wasn't easy as I thought. Took me 2 days to figure it out and still we had to drop that idea. 

We tried several of methods to remove the guy, but found out masking was the best part of it and use it as a alpha.
And to use this method we had to make a copy or set a hold image sequence of the clip itself to "rotoscope" the part we want to be removed. Rotopainting took me approximately 4hours of a 10 seconds or less of the clip. 
The result was pretty good actually, I mean it couldn't look better. But the major problem was when you set a hold image sequence the original shot is still playing and the masked guy crossing by all that mess in background where people already walked by in the original shot they pop out from nowhere, so you see them twice.

It was pretty annoying sequence though, as we filmed the raw footage how couldn't we paid attention to him?
I was thinking of removing the whole background and that would be like raw 3d with no movements. And the original shot was a stabilized shot. If we removed the background too the would have no life in it.

I played the scene several times, and occasionally the robot tilt his head right to the camera as the bicycle dude passing by and gave me a idea, to make something out of it. Because this scene were supposed to be curiosity and emotionally so occasionally he glared at the dude passing by the street and starts to follow him. We composited some frames back and tried to match when the cycle dude passing by, some color correcting to looks like he's melted into the scene because of the sun, and animated the contrast to look more realistic when he went into the shadow. The result was pretty good, and yeah got lucky this time!

First of all I'm going to show you guys our workflow and how we decide to nail this and why.
We're going to shoot the whole film with HD camera around Oslo. This way will save us a lot of time during production of the film. The unique thing is that we are going to add 3d objects around in the scene and composite it into the live footage. That way it will look more professional and complex.


We will be using Autodesk 3Ds Max as main tool. Objects will be created with 3ds Max. Our modeling team will be using Zbrush to speed model. Our final render will be rendered with Vray. Why did we choose Vray? Simple, Vray is a very powerful rendering engine that uses advanced techniques. The way vray rendering looks so realistic and credible. Since we are using Vray, the materials will also be Vray materials. We will mostly create materials and textures including bump + normal maps using different tools, photoshop is one of them.


Our final render will be saved as Open.EXR that saves beauty pass in one file. Open.EXR is a "High Dynamic Range Image" also known as HDR or HDRI. That way we will have total control over the uncomposed final render, which we will tweak in later compositing program. What makes HDRI image so special is the advantage that allows greater values or dynamic range of luminaces between the lightest and darkest areas image than standard images.


The main tool of compositing program we use will be Nuke from TheFoundry. Nuke is a node graph based compositing program. It can be very fast and efficient if you know what you are doing. How the node works is they are connected to each other one by one. All pointers going only one direction depending on the arrow, and into the last node which is the viewer node then we can see the result through Nuke's scanline render engine. Nuke uses limited of RAM which is greatful to work with.


We are also going to use Boujou to track motion points. But we had some problems so far with tracking process. It can be very limited due to sensitiveness and blurriness. So far I know we need to handle the camera EXTREMELY steady to get a great result. Why we use Boujou is because we need the camera path to create some of the scene that requires full 3D environment and objects. So far we haven't got a successful scene yet. We may have found a solution on it, maybe using another tool. I will inform until further direction.


We will composite movie sounds using either Fooley or AdobeSoundbooth. I personally don't have that much experience within sound compositing, thankful we got experienced Sebastian also our Team Leader that covers it. What I know of there isn't any way of composite sound through Nuke. Due to that we have to do the final post production via Adobe PremierPro.

I got some examples so you can see this more detailed and easier to explain how it works. We render all passes out from 3Ds Max and save it as EXR. As I said above EXR could contain unlimited passes in one file. We are doing this way because it's more efficient way of controlling how the result would look like. 
After that we will bring EXR into nuke and shuffling out the passes that we will tweak later on.

I've been working a lot with 3ds max vray and Thefoundry Nuke which is a powerful compositing program.
Since we're going to composite CG elements in real life footage. I've been testing out especially the vray materials, because they are so realistic. Our modelling team are using normal maps, I don't know how to use them but know what they do. Guess I'll look at it later..

My main assignment in this group is to work with materials and post production. I'm currently working with 32bit float HDR and Open.EXR. We set everything into Gamma 2,2.  After that we composite it in Nuke basically. Why we choose Nuke is because it has a node based graph, no layers. Quickness and mobility.

Here I show some images of nuke compositing node graph and HDR image.

So this week we are going to produce a logo and name that represents you're own group. I spent some time and tried out Vray rendering engine. The result wasn't bad at all! You can sneak peak a preview of my result below.
The idea behind "SAX" was front letters of our first members name. Couldn't come up with a better idea.. And the wheel explain itself, because our film is involving within steam-punk ish style. 
Our crew members is:
Adrian
Einar
Sebastian
Remi

3Ds Max 2009 Vray 1.5sp2

Lonely astronaut Jim is an employee contracted by the company Koyo Industries to extract resources for much needed back on Earth. While leaving his family, he is stationed for three years at the lunar base with only a robotic assistant called “R”.

Jim only receives recorded transmissions to and from Earth. A satellite failure limits the live conversation. He’s most valuable thing is the picture with wife and kid. During a routine with rover he discovered series of antenna’s jamming live communication with Earth far away from lunar base. While exploring he found something suspicious photograph lying on ground.

It seems to be an old image from the past. He picked it up and saw it is the same picture that he has! The scariest thing is back on the photo also have the same date where the picture was taken. He went back to the lunar base and discovers later logs of previous Jim clones.

 Now with a clearly understanding of the nature of his existence, he explores the secret chamber with a large room beneath it. There is extensive cache of clones. He finally understood the “Three Years” contract is actually the clone’s life span. A dramatically ending Jim closes his eyes and fell into sleep.  

Hey folks! It's been a while since last post! I have to admit I've been slacking alot. Been gone longer than I thought I was gona be. But our assignment for this year is to produce a last film project. So here is a little preview of my assesment:


Jim is an employee contracted by the company Koyo Industries to extract helium-3 lunar soil for much needed energy back on Earth. Leaving behind his family, he is stationed for three years at the lunar base with only a robotic assistant called “R”. A satellite failure limits him to only recorded transmissions to and from Earth. During a routine rover he crashes the rover into the harvester and blacked out. Jim awakens in the infirmary and R tells him that he is recovering from injuries in an accident. A message from Koyo Industries informs that a rescue crew is on the way to repair the damaged harvester, and learns that R will not allow him outside the lunar base. Jim suspicion is aroused. Later he sabotages a gas pipe to convince R to allow him outside. Outside the base Jim found a series of antenna’s jamming live communication with earth. He discovers later logs of previous Jim clones working. Now with a clearly understanding of the nature of his existence, he explores the secret chamber with a large room beneath it. There is extensive cache of clones. He finally understood the “Three years” contract is actually the clone’s life-span.. With a dramatically ending Jim closes his eyes and fell into sleep.

 
A bored astronaut wakes up suddenly and received a happy New Year message in front of the computer screen. He is trying to find the rum onboard, suddenly the power took off and the gravity turns on. Seeing everything floating around and he got annoyed. He picks a tool floating around him and starts to hit the computer and power is on again, but he lost his rum. He pushed a button with a rum icon on it, sitting back and relaxing while turning the TV on. The gateway door behind him starts slowly to open. Some kind of alien thing turns up and starts walking towards the astronaut. The astronaut facing the alien with no expression, the alien opens the mouth and a bottle came out! Now with a better understanding the alien-machine thing came to deliver the rum he was asked for! A comedy from an alien turns into a rum-machine with a screen message on time estimate until arrival as ending.

Here is some examples how the R-robot will be, mostly the concepts. And the Lunar base environment from inside.

Here is the example of my second story:

A little update to my first story draft. Today we sat down with classmates and discussed a little bit about each others stories. We gave each other ideas what to do what not. And seems that it helped a lot! At least, for me. I got some feedback's from Eivind. I found out that removing the dialogue in the scene improved quite a lot both for the plot AND sequences. Because I feel it's way too much to contain in a short film, I was thinking about cutting out the scene where he crashes into harvester and blacked out. Why I did this is basically lip syncing is much time consuming, and I want to create this movie so public can understand the meaning of this without having a dialogue . Now that is success.

Some new ideas to recover the cutting scene:

• Jim is doing a routine where he finds suspicious items like photo of his daughter or wife.
• Same picture of what he has
• Writing date behind of the photo is the same OR it can be from the past
• Merging the scene with exploring radar jammer and discovering of suspicious items in one sequence.
• Discovered previous video logs of past Jim'
  

Today fortunately we all are gathered at school. And we had to spend some time to get an ending to our story. So we sat down and shared our thoughts. After some discussion we separated our work. Because our main goal now is to draw our storyboard into animatic. So at the moment Im drawing my scene parts. And updating my journal post, kind of multitasking. Here we go.. I am a bit late but still have to do my journal post. I was divided into a group with Ana, Kay and Due. We sat down and discussed how we should divide the group work. Due had main goal to finish our group treatment, unfortunately lack of one member of our team we had more jobs to do.


I decided to draw on computer because I felt it will go faster and more accurate. I didn't had lot of experience within digital drawing so it was a lot of fun while doing this under pressure. I basically used Photoshop. Started out with Corel Painter which was a failure. Not the best teamwork unfortunately, but we tried our best.
We had only 2 days to finish our storyboard and animatic. So there wasn't the best video compositing.