Sunday, September 30, 2007

5,000 Views @ deviantArt

I'd like to point out that my deviantArt gallery has hit a new milestone and has reached 5,000 views. You can view my gallery HERE. My deviantArt gallery is my main photography gallery.

In other art news, my Mom, scrap booked some of my art from my grade school years. It's quite an interesting look back to my previous works and see how far I've come. There's this painting I made in Kindergarten, or was it Grade 1 and looks like it's a finger painting and called "Man Running Around In Circles". I found it interesting and may upload it to deviantArt later.

In Roy's Revenge news, music/sound is still being worked on. So you'll have to wait a bit longer. I know, I know.. I'm excited too. I want to see the end result as well.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

CATO September '07 Final Film Premiere Reviews

Tonight I got to witness some premieres of some student films. Sadly my short isn't quite ready yet, music is in the works, see previous post.

12 and Hyde - I walked in a bit late on this one and pretty much found it to be a boring torture porn film. I have to admit it had some nice lighting and colours, but script and violence and ending was not there. Something tells me I'd still feel the same if I saw the first handful of minutes. Grade: C

Short Tail - I have no idea who directed this one... but there was some real problems with it. The story was about two pot heads played by two guys who can't act and an archaeologist who is digging up dinosaur bones. I know, dino bone hunters are called Paleontologists. Anyway, the Paleontologists over acted and the pot heads underacted and brought the film to a climax that was meaningless. There was also a huge continuity error when one of the pot heads losses his beard between scenes. The credit sequence was also tough to read, had no connection to the film and went by too fast. Remember people, you should be able to read a credit about 3 times before it disappears. Grade: F

The Very Long Goodbye - Due to technical difficulties, the film was shown was very grainy, but at least it was there. The film was over the 20 minute mark, but was far better then the previous films shown (* my trailer not included since it was a trailer, not a film). The short was a nice homage to the film noir and detective stories from the golden era of Hollywood. Script was good, but another rewrite could have really tightened it up great. The use of black and white was nice, but contrast could have been pushed to get rid of some greys. The film had a lot of homages to such films as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, with similar angles. One of the main problems with the short was it's audio qualities, the bad compression could have added to it, but there was always a white noise and the voice over changed volumes several times and got a little annoying, that and there were some audio pops in there as well, most notability the door knob falling off the door (nice touch). Grade: B (better contrast and sound would have landed this film at an A-.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Waiting for the Music

Roy's Revenge is completely rendered and ready for export, except the music. My audio engineer, Amber Smith is hard at work on it and so far it's sounding awesome. I'm looking foreword to the final product, which might be a small wait. But now comes the scary time between school and a job in the field of animation. Unfortunately the wait will last a bit longer then I want because I need a new computer to work on more animation, improve my demo reel and burn DVDs with. My currently computer at home is a nice little machine, but it can't handle a program like XSI.
Roy's Revenge finished rendering on Tuesday and since then I've been working on my Rabbit from Z-brush class. I brought him into XSI and begun to rig him. And here's the result (see right image). I haven't given him a proper texture yet. But his rig works and can't wait to animate with him..... whenever that will be. Hopefully I don't go crazy not animating..

Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Final Scene

The final scene of Roy's Revenge has just been sent to the render farm to render. Funny thing is that the final scene to be rendered is the first scene Roy is in. I'm at least 4 days ahead of myself and feel very confident in my abilities. I'm very excited to see it completed with sound and present it to everyone. I guess I should begin designing the DVD package. I'm thinking of charging 5 bucks per DVD. Does that sound like a good price? Would you buy it? Not only will it come with the completed version of Roy's Revenge, but also the trailer, my demo reel, some of my shorts, my trailer for Blackout Mod, a slide show of my photography and whatever else I can shove on there. Place your orders now!

(rejected scene from Roy's Revenge shown)

Don't forget that Wednesday, September 19th is Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

RR: Live From the Render Farm

Hey, it's just a quick update. I'm currently rendering 7 different scenes on some computers here at the Centre For Arts and Technology. Things would move faster if other people didn't need to use computers or XSI. Sadly the school only has so many licenses and we're using them all up. Hahahaha. A couple of renders will finish tonight and then I can move on to the next batch of scenes to render. The final scene (which will show up after the credits) was pretty quickly done. I modeled the scene and textured it with the assistance of Luke Ritchie on Sunday, finished modelling and texturing on Monday and by Tuesday it was being rendered. I have the sound files for the lip syncing scenes ready to work on for tomorrow. But for now, I can't do much. Some renders only have 3 hours left, which will be after the school closes for the night, if only I could stay longer. Oh well, they'll be ready for me tomorrow. I might as well turn on another render and go home and have some hot chocolate. Mmmmmm.

Friday, September 07, 2007

Final Gathering Band-Aid

I've been working with the renders of Roy's Revenge for awhile and have come across a problem with my outdoor scenes. In the scene, Princess, Roy's next door neighbor's dog is white standing in some green grass and a big blue sky. But there's a problem, when it renders with Final Gather it looks like this:

As you can see, the green from the grass and the blue from the sky bleed onto Princess and makes her look ugly. Why does it do it? It's the way Final Gathering works, it makes everything a light source, so the giant green ground the little dog is standing on becomes a giant green light.

How do you stop this? Well, I figured out how.
First create a giant grid to cover the ground and set it a couple of inches (in terms of the scene scale) above the ground. In my scene, it's just up to Princess's ankles. Then give it a new material, Pong, and make the Colour, Ambient and Specular all white.
Once that's done, go to the Selection Button on the Right and select Visibility. In the Rendering portion of the Visibility deselect Shadow Caster and Receiver since we don't want this thing to give off shadows. Then turn off the Primary of the Ray Visibility off. Here's the result:

Ta-da! Fixed! Princess is no longer greenish! I also do it with the sky so Roy doesn't turn up blue.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

RR: ReRendering Perfection

I'm being a bit of a perfectionist lately. If there's something wrong with a scene that doesn't take too long to render, then I'll fix the problem and rerender it. For an example, see the picture. The subsurface scattering on Roy's hand looks absolutely stunning, but the desk behind hit has a massive specular problem and the background has a huge line that makes it look ugly! Also, once in the shadow of the screen, Roy's hand turned grey and that would be weird. So I corrected the lighting problem, fixed the spec and gave the background an image. It looks much better now.

In other Roy's Revenge news, I'll be recording my lines for Roy tomorrow along with Kristen Lucas voicing Princess along with Amber Smith as my official Audio Engineer. I'll add some links to their blog/website on the side bar once I get them.

Stay tuned for more shots! Also, at the top of the blog you can see a Render Status about Roy's Revenge. I'll remove it once all finishede.