The Plate:

I convinced a few friends to all wake up at 5AM and come with me to Adler hall to shoot. Alex Moed helped shoot an HDR (and tried to do a bit of acting), Ibtisam Ahmed helped with timing and orchestration, and Nathan Kudla blessed us with his performance as the main character.

We decided to dress up the main running character in something to add a bit of substance to the shot. After a trip to the costume shop, it was clear that we could easily become carried away, and that simplicity was the best way to go. Thus, we rented a santa belly for the day, and dressed Nate as best we could as a slob. A mysterious, running, slob.

Somewhere along the way we decided that the building should be an abandoned motel, and added a suitcase to fit.

The Match Move:

The shot was surprisingly hard to track; I enjoy dealing with problems, so I refrained from setting up markers on set… and shot at a low shutter speed. I also shook the camera, violently, to ensure I had a challenge. Because the beginning of the plate and Nate running through it are the only life action elements, I could have added the shake in post, but I wanted it to be as realistic motion as possible.

The Textures:

Mikey Rogers and I went out to shoot some nice textures for the decrepit walls and trash. We ventured over near the Savannah Paper Mill in Garden City, where Mike promptly cut his toe on a broken light bulb (I am reporting everything on this project, I wish I’d taken a picture, blood everywhere). And I went on a separate trip to Tybee Island to an old beach motel for more textures and reference.

The Layout:

Alex and I altered a lot of the model to fit into the new motel idea, and added a pool and fence. I plan to continuously build on the scene as we go, the only issue being that the UVs need to be layed out before the simulation is run (nDynamics freaks out when you edit UVs mid-sim). This adds another step and could be a problem with multiple people working on different files.

The Lighting:

I managed to render out a quick lighting test:

The Simulation:

I’ve had some problems breaking the geometry apart. My original plan was to use the Volumebreaker plug in with 3ds Max, but because we aren’t allowed to install plug ins onto the computers at SCAD, I was going to do it on my laptop. Unfortunately, my copy of 3ds Max doesn’t install on the virtual machine I have running XP. I would make a boot camp partition for windows, but right now my hard drive is so fragmented it can’t find space to partition. So I’ll be installing XP onto one of my external drives, or if that doesn’t work, wiping my laptop clean to partition boot camp (which I’ve been meaning to do anyway).

When I realized all of this, I looked around for other options for breaking apart the building. An obvious option was Blastcode for Maya, but I found it to be limited (nurbs only, and it extrudes surfaces for you, so I would have to remodel and convert my geometry).

The Revised Plan:

I am still planning on having pretty much everything 3d done by mid-terms, and rendering and compositing the next half of the quarter. Mikey and I have been debating the correct route to take with textures, and we decided the traditional UV route, rather than camera projections, would be best.

I’ve been watching lots of explosions, real footage and movies, to try and get as much of a feel on how this will look in compositing. I’ve taken note of a few details that are usually missed on CG explosions:

• Embers flourishing from the flames, then turning into smoke
• Poofs of dust from any piece of concrete hitting another
• Tons of smoke, seriously, almost hiding everything

A big fear of mine is spending all this time on details like a pipe bursting from one of the rooms, only to get to compositing and realize the entire thing should be covered in dark smoke. Because of this, I am planning on making an elaborate breakdown that will show any of these hidden details.

The Calendar:

Click the SCAD Studio 1 tag, or this link to look at all of my posts on this project.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 3:12 PM and is filed under VFX Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.