CGI | Sci-fi Art

Started texturing phase on the freighter. It's looking a bit worse for wear.




Have to fix the center parts of the hull plating where there are mirror artefacts in the texture mapping, as well as finish the landing gear and the texturing on some parts, like the wings and greeble sections, but otherwise, it's looking pretty far along, now, I think.

Dan

Finishing her up.  The devil is in the details, so they say.  I'd agree.

Dan

After this bit, it's probably posting time.  It's not perfect, mind you, but what can you do on a shoestring budget?

Danny had some problems with other projects and was unfortunately too tied up to really help out with the score for Part II.  Fortunately, I do own a selection of royalty free music I purchased about a year ago, which is fairly good.  Using Sonic Fire Pro, I'm able to time the music appropriately.

It's a pretty good program.  Only a few crashes once in a very great while for me, and it's useful for what I need it to do.  So I'm happy, more or less.  Of course, we could always use John Williams to score a little here and there pro bono, but, you know, we could all dream, right?


Looking at about 2 or 3 more days, depending on work and whatnot.  Working two jobs is murder, I'll tell you that...

Hope you're all doing better than I am!

Regards,
Dan

Still tinkering with these two rooms.  The third in the set, the conference room, is unchanged from the original, so I decided to not show it.  The bridge itself is still very much a WIP.  I'm struggling with the consoles and really dislike them.

Just one more shot of the conversation scene in the Plagarus Part Two.  Then we're onto a nice, fairly easy musical interlude.  Hopefully it works well.


New rendering techniques have made the rendering times much faster.  For instance, the original Plagarus scenes were extremely noisy due to the fact that I had to use CPU rendering, while keeping render times reasonable.  Now that I've got a pretty good graphics card, GPU rendering has allowed render times of less than a quarter what it used to be on the i7.

Also, I've discovered that I don't need to have the background geometry involved in many scenes.  The shot above is taken with a simple equirectangular background image.  The advantage of this is that there is nearly instant rendering time for background elements, as well as the camera can pan, letting the background image move with it.

The downside, of course, is that it's almost impossible to completely merge it with the real background geometry when rendered for real.  So, the room will appear slightly different between shots where geometry is rendered and it's just the character in front of  a backdrop.


Also, there is the benefit of having better DOF effects in Cycles than before.  This is a huge advantage as well.  Additionally, something new since the release of the previous installment of Plagarus is motion blur.  This is a particularly useful technique which greatly increases the believability of the animation.

The downside? The next installment of the movie is probably going to start looking visually different from Part One.  This is going to be an issue which may involve me having to go back and re-render the entire thing.

There was a chance I had to do this anyway, as I was hoping technology would advance enough to allow me to render a 1080p version of the movie.  Right now, it's in 720p.

Hopefully one day this film will be done.

Here's hoping, anyway.

Dan

To be honest, I don't know what I'll do after Adamant is done!

Hope you're all doing great.

Dan