A short animation test (almost)

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Grimm
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A short animation test (almost)

Post by Grimm » Mon Jul 07, 2008 8:39 am

Here is a test image from a short animation I'm planning. I rendered the ship and the alpha mask with Indigo. The model, shadow, grass, compositing, etc. were all done with Blender. Matchmoving was done with PFhoe Pro. The image resolution is 1280X720 so I linked it in for those of you who have slow connections.

http://www.frostyfoot.com/images/indigotest.png

I'm having problems getting rid of the mask outline around the ship, anyone have a solution for that? I tried using the erode node but it took too much off of the mask. I have had some luck by first blurring the mask and then using erode, but then the ship came out fuzzy. I would like to avoid having to pass the mask through a paint package like gimp because they usually do not have good batch type tools and I will have several hundred frames to do.
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m.f.t.
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Post by m.f.t. » Mon Jul 07, 2008 10:33 am

i havent tried before but maybe you can make a separate model of your ship thats outline is 'a little bit smaller' than the original one and render for alpha mask.

the important thing is, offcourse, not to scale the model smaller but, making its outline smaller, like the command 'offset' in autocad...

good luck...

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Grimm
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Post by Grimm » Mon Jul 07, 2008 12:32 pm

Thanks m.f.t.,

That is a good idea, but it sounds difficult to implement. I think I have a fix, although it is going to make it much more difficult to animate correctly. I just put a plane in the background and set it up as an emmiter. I then texture mapped the video frame on to it and positioned the plane so that it matches the camera view. This worked great and fixed the problem with the mask outline.

http://www.frostyfoot.com/images/indigotest1.png

The problem is that, if I'm not mistaken, Blendigo will not be able to set the correct backdrop image for every frame of the animation. I can write a script to fix that. It's so cool that Ono decided on XML (or YaML) for the igs format, it makes it so much easier to write scripts for it.

I already need to write a script for DrQueue to distribute the animation to Indigo, then I can have a go at rendering this beast. :)
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m.f.t.
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Post by m.f.t. » Mon Jul 07, 2008 7:21 pm

looks allright now =)

i think you can use some texture on the ship, like a checker or something like that, at least a dirt texture, cause it looks too...hmm.... orange to me .)

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Post by BbB » Mon Jul 07, 2008 7:59 pm

There's one fix but I don't know if it's practical for you. I noticed the outline is always the same size regardless of how big your render is. So rendering at double the resolution and then scaling down your images might make it disappear. If you like, the outline becomes so small that it then gets lost in the AA.

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Grimm
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Post by Grimm » Mon Jul 07, 2008 8:25 pm

@m.f.t. - Thanks, yes I will do something with the color and texture of the ship. :)

@BbB - Another good idea, the only problem with it is that I'm trying to keep the render times down as much as I can. Even with this simple model, I'm still looking at around 12 min. per frame, with 275 frames that would end up at about 55 hours render time. That is with 6 cores and using render region. :( I'm trying for at least 400 samples per pixel on each frame. The cool thing is Blender's new node "Bilateral Blur" that is specifically used for noisy images. I used it for the images I posted in this thread to smooth out the noise. That allowed me to keep the SPP down a bit. :)

Now I'm having a problem with getting the background plane to follow the camera. When I matchmoved the video, the matchmover created a path with rotation and movement that the camera follows. I tried to parent the plane to the camera, but the plane does not follow the camera at all. I even made sure that they were parented in the outliner and it looks good. Is there something I'm missing? Does parenting the camera work differently then with other objects?
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Lord of the Rings Junkie
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Post by Lord of the Rings Junkie » Wed Jul 16, 2008 3:48 am

The ship looks too clean and crisp compared to the rest of the image, especially since it looks like the image is a bit out of focus. You need to add some CCD noise and/or blur to make it blend in more.

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Post by Grimm » Mon Jul 21, 2008 12:23 pm

Yes I agree LotRJ, this is just a test. I'm going to completely replace the ship with a better one. :)

I have got DrQueue up and running now on my cluster. I set up wine running the windows version of Indigo (1.1.5) on each of the nodes so I could use SmartDen's animation fix in Blendigo 1.1.5. I have it running right now on a 275 frame animation which is going to take around eight days to complete because it's in a high definition format (1280x720) and I'm exporting EXR's as well. I will post the results when I have something to show. Yay!! :)
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Post by Grimm » Mon Aug 11, 2008 3:25 pm

Well here is the animation. Not very happy with it, but it's a start. I wasn't able to use the EXR output because of the filenames so I went with the regular PNG files. I was playing with the tone mapping so they came out really over exposed. Instead of re-rendering I thought I would at least see what it looks like. I used the new bilateral blur node in Blender to smooth the noise out. I need a lot more practice on the particle stuff in Blender for the grass. I would have had this out sooner but I got caught up in all of that new fangled procedural texturing. :)

http://www.vimeo.com/1505724
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