Working the Robot

Via Ian, and from here, is a great explanation of the difference between IK and FK in 3D models.

John.d.h:
In Blender's armature system, there are two main types of kinematics, or ways motion is calculated.  These are forward kinematics, and inverse kinematics, or FK and IK for short.  FK is the default, where you move one bone and all its children move with it.  For example, you shrug your shoulder and the rest of your arm shrugs up with it.  IK is the opposite, where the child bone "leads" the chain of its parents.  For example, you throw a punch and the rest of your arm and your shoulder naturally follow your fist.  The two ways I know of using IK are 1.) put an IK solver on a bone (this is how a lot of lower body rigs work) and 2.) use Blender's Auto-IK switch.  The Auto-IK switch is much more convenient when you will be going back and forth between FK and IK.  One approach I've learned is to use IK for the general shape of the motion you want, and then FK for manipulating the details.  The convenience of IK comes in the fact that you need only manipulate the leading bone to get the motion you want, instead of rotating each of its parents first.  Returning to the punch example, using IK you could simply grab the hand bone of your armature and move it forward to the target, and the rest of the arm and the shoulder would naturally follow.  To fine-tune your rig for easier IK, you may have to break some connections if you don't want the whole body to follow a single bone.

Two Great Tastes In One

Do you like projection mapping? Do you like Blender? Then you'll love projection mapping in Blender.

Warning: dork alert.

Meet Your Marker

We need markers -- mostly for the purpose of camera tracking but also so that we have a little indicator of where force fields go. I thought there would just be some markers out there in the wilderness of Necrosis 6. Brian has drawn this. I think a pair of them would make excellent markers. (Imagine it about 3 feet tall.)

Mac keeps acting surprised that we're shooting in two weeks. He keeps saying "but do you have any money?" I keep telling him that we're making the movie for $1.98 and half a bag of potato chips. Somehow he doesn't believe me. Perhaps that's because in his contract there are provisions for him getting paid if we should get outside financing and he dreams of quitting his day job. Poor fellow, he was hoping to ride our coattails on the way to fortune? He's just going to follow us down the rabbit hole only to find a bottle labeled "Drink Me".
Which is better than getting cut on the mirror on the way through.

Gettin' Me Some Learnin'

I've been reading this book: "The DV Rebel's Guide" on production and post production.

The guy who wrote it, Stu Maschwitz is one of the founders of the Orphanage.

Things I've learned:
1. When shooting DV (of any format) it doesn't really matter inherently whether you're shooting green or bluescreen. Because the colors are all compressed by the camera anyway, it doesn't matter how much happier the chip was to see green rather than red or blue. What's more important is the color of the eyes and clothes of the people you're shooting.
This is the first time I've ever heard such advice.
However, I'm believing it.
Indeed, my experience would actually bear this out. This image of "Eve" from my movie Apostasy (rule #1, do not name a movie something which only half your cast can pronounce and only one or two know the meaning of. Lesson learned. Ahem) was shot on a paper blue screen and compositing it was a painless experience. No - not just because it's a nekkid woman neither. Get yer mind outta the gutter, boy.
We shot that movie on Canon and Sony DV cameras. Indeed, the Canon we used is now the "booth monitor" camera at Theatresource.
In any case...

2. Shoot the HVX200 in 720 24pn mode. (This is at least the advice for us.)

3. (This is just my personal inference but) Shoot 16:9, crop to 1.85:1 for the DVD full-frame safety. But the real version of our next movie is going to be 2.35:1 (which is apparently actually 2.40:1, but understanding that is a bit beyond me) so we'll put marks on the monitors for that aspect ratio. But because we're shooting HD we can do a pan and scan in AfterEffects to make the SD 1.33:1 pan-and-scan master.

3. The "fit to comp width" command in After Effects is shift+opt+cmd+H (Mac) or shift+alt+cntl+H (PC).

4. Stu likes CineGamma D, with the option of CineGamma V if you're having trouble with blown out images. I don't remember which one we tend to use but I feel like we're pretty good about keeping highlights under control when we have a little "bloom" in the high end. So yeah, I do like to shoot with a wide dynamic range. Lights blasting right down the barrel of the camera. Get over it.
Ahem. Matrix NONE and detail turned all the way down.

Also, from the message board:

• Shooting a normal exposure and blowing out in post is advantageous in a number of ways.

1. It gives you the option to change your mind later.
2. It will let you tint the footage without revealing that you're missing detail in the highs.
3. It lets you control the nature of the roll-off into blowing-out, i.e. design your own "shoulder" with Curves.
4. It will facilitate transfer to film, where having extra highlight detail means mapping that detail up into the natural shoulder of the print stock.

And I'm thinking about getting a pair of lenses: Canon 50mm and 85mm. They're a lot less expensive than Nikon. Anybody got a reason for me to do otherwise? Tell me!

ProLost, Blurs, Truth in Advertising

ProLost: A tale of three blurs

My brain is getting close to exploding. So, we're not supposed to use Gaussian Blur now? Gee whiz.

I'm reading this book by Stu Maschwitz. More about that... soon.

But here's another link: http://prolost.blogspot.com/2006/10/corona.html

Like I said, my brain's going to explode.

In any case, here's some of what Laura (whom I'm envious of because she just got cast as a neurotic New Jersey housewife in some video game) wrote to an actor regarding casting:

"To come clean with you right from the start, this is an
extreme-low-budget, non-SAG production. There's no pay up front, but
there's a schedule of payments on the back end that would kick in if
the film sells really well."

Notice we say "sells really well" rather than just "sells". Continuing:

"You can check out trailers for our previous two films at
http://www.pandoramachine.com/films/. Yes, they're no-budget, but we
hope you'll agree that they have a distinctive and high-quality look.
Pandora Machine is still available at Blockbuster and Hollywood Video,
and Millennium Crisis has sold pretty well overseas and should be
available on US home video later in the year.

The new film is called Angry Planet. The script is posted at
http://www.pandoramachine.com/films/0701/. There are juicy female
roles still available: Athena (lead), Nora (supporting), and Hurka
(supporting). Athena requires some nudity and a larger time
commitment."

Build a Planet

Adventures in CG have included making this planet. This will be Necrosis 6 from Angry Planet. I worked it out in 2D (Photoshop) using this tutorial.

Ooh -- update! Phillip Drawbridge sent me this link for even more better planet making tutorial action! Actually, there's all kinds of space-imagery Photoshop magic there. Thanks Phillip!

Oof!

So, here's a helpful little hint when working with Blender. When you can't find the "File" menu, you have to open up the User Preferences tab to get to it. The File menu. That's right, it's not at the top all the time.

Welcome to my hell.

As for learning Bryce, well... I don't know that it renders as nicely as Blender. But who knows? Some very nice photo-real stuff has come out of Bryce but the artists who used to use Bryce seem to have moved on. Maya snobs probably think some... thing. But the nice thing about Blender is that it's actually free. (Actually, Bryce 5.5 is free also, but it's not open-source.)

But the killer is motion tracking. I don't know if we can actually have a moving camera or if we will shoot locked-down and then lose HD resolution while we fake a moving camera. Duh. I just don't know.

Apparently, using a Python script, we can import motion-tracking information into Blender. I can't believe I just said that. Python. It is a snake. And it is about to bite you. Here's a little tutorial on the process. I don't think that 3ds Max will motion track inside of the program.

Update: about 3ds Max, I am so very wrong. It basically works the same way as Blender with motion track script importing except that programs which motion track will typically export specifically for 3ds Max. So there it's one up on Blender. Feh. It's also, like, a gazillion dollars.

Oh Hai

It's the 4th of July. Im fixin ur fireworkx.
Today: must learn Bryce, design musical, schedule shoot.

Clarebot vs Google is Evil

Very unhappy. Google is Evil. Some jerkwads "flagged" the lovesong video and then some buffoon Inquisitor at Google decided that this music video violates their terms of use. It's absolutely absurd. Of course, they give no reason -- they can't say it's pornography or violates any copyright -- they just took it down.
Now I'm scared of Google. I want to move my blog in case they want to take IT down too. And obviously, I have to find another means of hosting my videos.

A Robot for You

Wilkapunking