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Showing posts from October, 2009

MUST...Urgghhhh...meet QuotA...

Some times its a grind... it is animation which YES is fun and exciting but after a couple hundred shots you start to get fatigued and lose inspiration and its a struggle just to sit still in front of the computer... this is where all the planning and workflow projections come in handy... if you did your homework you know exactly how many shots you need to do a day to stay on schedule... my minimum is 7 shots a day... BUT I try to double that or do at least 10... but on those GRINDY days I barely make it to 7... and thats good enough....everyday you can't be a super speed world beater... some days you just gotta do what you gotta do to get the job done... The important thing is to NOT stop EVER do your quota even if your crying and bleeding from your FACE.... because all it takes is to give in to procrastination ONCE then it festers and takes over and before you know it..FAIL. Some times I don't want to have to do everything but I just moan and do everything anyway ^ ^ Its weir

Mistakes make things great

The above photo I took while on a morning bike ride is full of photographic errors..mistakes... chromatic aberration, lens flares, lens glare, grain, circles of confusion...all kinds of crap ^ ^ but I love that stuff... The thing that SUX about 3d is that the "camera" takes perfect photos every time... so unless you work to add in them errors your going to get perfect plastic pictures...which I don't like... NOW taking the "mistake" thing a ways past photography and into animation itself...Stop motion gives you TONS of mistakes for free haha... things are shaking, grimy, gritty...they can go out of focus easily...the light may flicker... you get all that with no work.... you have to work to make it clean... Seeing that HSM is all 3d... I guess many would assume that my work will lose its creepy jittery edge or somethin... well it is a lot more refined but I did a TON of work so that it looks handmade...and not just in the construction but in how its animated...

This shit is easy ^ ^ it's all in the pre-pro

I don't mean to be too cocky about my speed of production on this new film so far... but it looks like in the first month I'll be able to do 20 minutes of finished animation... thats full 3d animation with many characters, crazy huge complex sets and it looks amazing like nothing seen before....if people thought WATS looked like a 30 million dollar film this one looks like a 200 million dollar film ^ ^ NOW seeing how fast one d00d can work I'm wondering WHY small no-budget teams all over the world are not kicking out high quality 3d animated features? Cause seriously this shit is easy! The tools are so powerful and flexible and allow you to work really fast and a few decent quad core boxes give you lots of rendering power... Well the reason I am able to work so fast is because I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I WANT... from each shot, each character....from everything...there is no hesitation because everything was worked out in the LONG pre-production I did... most people dont do en

Production notes 10-21-09

Notes on workflow etc.. Copy exr renders from render server folder onto workstation media drive... copy project file from render into archive on render server... import exr sequences from renders into After Effects... organize and rename each shot... save AE project file as Sequence name... render out temp quicktime movies to do offline edit and to give composer/sound designer something to work off of... as I go through the files in After Effects I made notes of problems with shots... I have a folder in the AE project that holds the notes... just folders using the description text to keep notes.... So when the whole film is animated and I reopen these AE projects to do the final comps I will fix/re-render the shots that have notes... I'm not doing that now because I want to move forward... seems like a better way to work for me... Just finished editing the first sequence...which is a little over 6 minutes... looks good... on one shot the alpha channel was missing for one frame?! an

3 weeks/ 10 minutes

So I've finished animating the first 10 minutes of the film... I've broken the film into 45 sequences based on location for workflow purposes... So I did Sequence 1 & 2... As you can see in the pic two more shots need to render...then I can load all the img sequences into After Effects to make the temp .mov's to drop into the edit... I think its more than 10 minutes though cause I added a lot of shots that weren't in the animatic... but yeh... Then all the shots from sequence 2 that are done will go on to render... THoughts so far... Running out of drive space... My render server drive is a 1tb drive and it only has 335gb free right now... I'm rendering 1920x802 exr sequences... an Rgba pass and a depth pass... on average a 10 second shot is 1gb total for both passes... Deleting the project folders off the render server for the finished shots will reclaim a lot of space but its apparent that I will need to buy more drives (Thanks to THorgin for donating to the h

Do you really want to be pwned by these guys?

Ya know I get a lot of " you should make movies for Hollywood" comments from well meaning but unknowing peoples... Well once you sign a contract ANY of the cogs in the system your pretty much owned by one of these old men... Pictured are Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch... two "media moguls"... Americans responsible for turning popular media into the TRASH it is today and subsequently eroding American values and the minds of all of its citizens...just to make a buck..yeah/// So the people in the Hollywood system can PRETEND to be all edgy or whatever but in the end they are OWNED by these old men... They cannot do anything without the approval of old men like these... yeh sounds great 0_0 They push they warped values and distorted ideas on the world...and everyone bows down to them as they slaves just to make a buck... maybe your a slave to them? How does it feel? Is it great? I mean your "successful" you probably own a nice haus and car and wife and hav

Voices of HSM: Meet JP teh mophuCiN Genius ^ ^

One of the things I'm really excited about is the voice actors that are going to be in HSM... So the first person you should meet is JP Anderson... known to peoples around the world through his amazinG band RABBIT JUNK ... and also as the digital hardcore pioneer with his project... again, its amazing THE SHIZIT ...he just released a new SHIZIT album and its is SO WIN go download it! Here's the first SHIZIT video I saw..its an old one but I've been a fan ever since I saw this.. I've never met JP in person... I've just been a fan of his music in which he pretty much does everything himself and he like owns all other bands... and he's just one d00d ^ ^ Inspiring stuff... So yeh then I made that video for one of his RJ tracks Yeh then I was listening to a new EP he put out in which he does a little voice acting and I was like I HAVE TO ASK HIM IF HE'll do a voice! I emailed him and much to my excitement he was into it ^ ^ So JP will be the voice of THE main cha

ChallengeS+

The biggest challenge so far has been working on shots with multiple characters in... right now I'm working on a shot with 7 animated characters... I use the c4d layer system to solo the chaR I'm working on then switch the others back on for previews... with 2 characters I can play the scene back around 24fps... but with 7 it slows to 3fps...which isn't really useful.. So I have to animate the scene is passes...2 chaR at a time... which works but slows the workflow down a lot... thankfully there aren't that many shots with gangs of characters....OR maybe there IS?! looks over storyboards ^ ^ Something I've been fighting is being TOO resourceful... I know tons of animation shortcuts...meaning I know lots of ways to complete shots as fast as possible with as little animation as possible... I learned this rushing through wats trying to make a deadline... BUT in HSM I'm not doing this... I'm fully animating everything...it takes longer but since I don't have

To whomever created the HSM imdb entry

Thanks for adding the film ^ ^ but there are a few errors in it... In the details it lists "St8nime" which is spelled wrong as its missing the r.. its "str8nime" see related link And "Heart String Marionette" will not be in Str8nime... I have developed a new style for this film.. the name and details will be released as the film is closer to being completed...its way more pretentious and complicated ^ ^ My name is also spelled wrong as it has a period that shouldnt be there its " M dot Strange" not "M. dot Strange" Its wrong on the "we are the strange" imdb but I don't know how to change it... Also the country of production is not "USA" it is the "Internets".... this is something I'm doing on this film... I do not consider myself an "American Filmmaker" anymore as I don't have much in common with American people and if you want to get into details I'm more Draconian in nature...

Starting to move...

So I've animated 106 shots in the first two weeks of production... I haven't gotten to the crazy swordfights just yet but I'm pretty confident about everything ^ ^ The last shot I animated was an 800 frame one... It's a bit too soon to make any projections but I'd like to do 250 shots a month so thats what I'll be shooting for this month... I haven't looked at any of the finished 3d renders yet as my emphasis is on moving forward instead of wasting time and ruining momentum by tweaking off minor issues on shots... all the shots are organized and saved so if there is a prob I just open the scene file...fix and re-render... So on my workstation I have a "SHOTS" folder..this is what the hierarchy looks like... SHOTS/Sequence/Sequence01/Shot_0001/C4d project file+audio files for lip sync+text file for notes So I have a folder for every shot on the workstation.... then on the render server I have a folder with folders for each sequence and inside of tha

Boundaries?

I was listening to this podcast in which this d00d was talking about the Australian film industry in the 1970's or the lack thereof ^ ^ So all these crazy hardcore filmmakers just went out and made crazy fucking films full of sex, violence, and car crashes... as that kind of subject matter was still "taboo" back then... Now if your an internet filmmaker like me who bows to, and answers to no one when it comes to subject matter why would you not go beyond the boundaries where most filmmakers stop? I mean seriously you can do anything you want and no one can stop you.. you can put in online where people will be able to watch it...so what is with the boundaries? Today sex, violence and car crashes are pretty normal in film ACTUALLY if you've seen Cronenberg's "Crash" he mixed all three ^ ^ And now that Hollywood has a bankable genre like torture porn you can't really "shock" people anymore... I still think its funny that those films are marke

Twas the AO that was killing meh

After tweaking the shots that were taking forever it seems it was the Scene Ambient Occlusion that was causing the taking of forever to render to go along with the single threaded plugin... I had NEVER used AO for whole scenes before as it was too computationally expensive to render in a non-ridiculous amount of time... but I was like I got a quad core 3.4ghz lil farm with 8gb of ram each shUD be ok... well it wasn't... was too slow to I switched it off on all the scenes and now they are rendering at a good speed... So when that plugin goes multithreaded my renders will FLY ^ ^ Seems the gfx card fix hasn't stopped the random freezes on my main system... it froze earlier today while I was animating... after restarting I tried to open the project file I was working on and it was corrupt and wouldn't open : ( BUT then I remembered Cinema 4d has like a crash log folder where it tries to salvage project files that were open when there's a crash I went in there and found th

Single threadING kills MEH

So now my render computers are about 60 shots behind me... the thang thats makin em lag mostly is the plugin I use to generate the depth passes for compositing... when it calculates and processes the depth map its a single threaded operation... so it only uses one CPU... In 11.5 Cinema is pretty much multithreaded all around so it's really fast... and there are workarounds for things that are single threaded like hair.... I emailed the plugin developer about a multithreaded version and he said he was testing one... I hope he comes out with it soon 0_0 Because at this rate I'll finish animating the film in like 6 months... then it'll take another year to render 0_0 If sHET gets really bad I'll have to go into each shot and crank the detail down and remove thangs... the crazy detail thats in there now will probably never be noticed by anyone anyway haha... its just my tweaker perfectionist self thats all NO YOU NEED THAT.... yeh I have to remember that I'm just a d00

Lunch break thoughts

I'm on my lunchbreak from todays work... here's some thoughts and thangs on production... Was getting random crashes with my gigabyte 4870 card... found the fix here applied fix now tis fine... Had my first challenging shot yesterday... 10 second shot took me 4.5 hours to do... mostly because I was trying to use pivot objects in place of nulls to move a walk cycled character AND later I found out thats not what the pivot object is for ^ ^ but yeh... Renders are still really far behind... I've probably animated about 50 shots now but only 3 shots have finished rendering so far... I'm going out of the country for Christmas/New Years for 3 weeks so I'll leave the renders on then and hopefully they will catch up cause I keep stacking them shots! Oh yeh Ricky about FK on the arms... I chose FK because when using IK its really hard to control the position of the elbow... you have to also animate the arms solver to get things right and it just makes a mess and still never

So it seems I need like ILM's render farm

Your pal M dot animates shots faster than his computers can render them... Its only day 3 of production but I decided to like get macho and work like crazy for 9 hours... I'll eventually get up to 12.... but in 9 hours I animated 20 shots... and DONT WORRY THEY ARE AMAZING ^ ^ So now there's like 41 shots waiting to render with shot 0001 at %95 haha... Whatever..its a good problem to have... Thoughts on doing full 3d character animation in C4D so far... I don't have any complaints... I'm able to work really fast... I created an "animating" layout and a "render prep" layout... that I switch back and forth from when working... Cinema 4d's timeline has some quirks... but I only said "GAWD DAMNIT FUCK YOU" like twice in 9 hours...thats a good ratio... I find myself animating straight ahead instead of pose to pose... guess its the ghetto stopmo animator in me.. ALSO I HATE IK on arms... So I'm using FK for all the shots... Since all the

Mdot: 22 Computers: 0

So it seems as of right now I can only do 8 hours of straight animation work before I go braindead and start to lose focus and makes mistakes... that's when you know when to call it a day or night... So I've done 2 days work so far... animated 22 shots... but none of them are finished rendering yet 0_0 This set is kinda crazy though... I'm making the film in order so this first seem has to impress you all ^ ^ Mistake I made... I forgot that when doing multipass renders with NET you have to manually set the multipass save path after doing the "save project" command to the render server... had to fix that... also forgot to add a compositing tag on all the characters so they are not affected by Ambient Occlusion... AND I forgot to add IK/FK switches on some of the characters so I had to fix that too... TO finish the film in one year I have to do 6 shots a day... every day... I'll have an idea how feasible this is by Dec 1st... First month of production is going t