Old and New Projects: Plagarus, Adamant Command Deck, and Jaspera Interspatial Station

Hey all,

Well, it's been a crazy few months, with commissions and stuff.  But it's time to get back to my personal projects that I've been putting off.  I have a mind-shelf full of ideas and I need to get them down in a more-or-less polygonal state before they get stale.

Jaspera

Since I've been a kid, I've had this idea of a space station that is, essentially, a giant mall in orbit of a very affluent planet.  This station, called Jaspera, had inflicted upon it one inept attempt thus far to build it.  I need to do something better this time:

A very old model I built over ten years ago... eww. :(

The scene above is very old.  But it's a general approximation of what I want to do with the space station.  It does capture the mood, as it was described in my original one-page description of the scene I wrote up when I was about 15, sitting in a lobby of a Chinese food restaurant that my father cleaned in Skowhegan, Maine.  (I had finished my job of vacuuming the carpet on the main floor, by the way, so I wasn't being lazy, as I recall...)

I want to build the following sections:

1.) Main Atrium -- This is pictured above.  It's a 20 - 30 story tall inner core with a skylight above pointed at the sun.  There walkways all around the periphery that connect to the various storefronts along the external hull of the station.

2.) Industrial Docking Bay -- The docking bay is at the bottom of the station.  It's where the thousands of space ships that visit the station every day have berths and refuel gantries to resupply the station.  It's a more industrial part of the station and less pretty than the civilian areas.

3.) Passenger Docking Bay -- At the top of the station.  It's a more elegant docking area, where yachts and whatnot dock.

4.) Shops -- I want to build some of the generic shops.  These can be modular in design so that I can make a bunch of 'em if I want.

5.) Ol' Baid's Bar -- A bar in my magnum opus, Armranath (a colossal film project which will never be made), but it would be cool to have the bar.

6.) Hotel Area -- An outer ring of the station is a massive hotel, with windows facing space or the inner core, depending on what you desire.  It'd be cool to see that actually completed.

At any rate, that's the goal.  Probably will take the better part of a year to complete.

Plagarus, Part 3

Plagarus... :\  I'm still working on Part 3.  Got a bit of work done on it this month!  But it's slow going simply because being a one-man animation machine is tough.  I may have recruited a real life friend to help me out on some of the animation, but he's still hammering out school over in Full Sail, so it might take a bit of time, unfortunately. So I apologize that this time around, you'll still probably be dealing with my crappy animation skills.  :(

I'd just like to say that the stills look a lot better than the actual action. :(  I'm dreadful at character animation, and try to avoid full body stuff at all costs.  But, I've chosen to focus on modelling mostly.  Movies are, by far, the most complex art form out there, and it takes more than one person to make one.

At any rate, I'm expecting Plagarus, Part 3 some time this late spring/early summer, depending on how much I get done.

Adamant Command Deck

Also, there is the Command Deck of the SSC Adamant, which I still have to complete.  I'm planning on getting that thing done pretty soon, as I was thinking about incorporating a scene on the Adamant in Plagarus.  We'll see how that goes, though.

------

So, there will hopefully be more updates coming on this page now that I'm through the woods and get to start putting attention on my own projects again.  I'll definitely try to put up a link to the Star Wars fan projects I was privileged to assist with for the Star Wars Fan Film Awards that are scheduled to be released in a few months.  Also, huge shout out to Ansel Hsiao who was gracious enough to allow me to use his awesome Star Destroyer model for the space scenes in one of the films.  I finally got to meet a personal inspiration--the guy that got my butt into gear with spaceship modelling in the first place--and it was awesome.




Well, that's about it.  Hopefully everyone is doing awesome and that things are going well.  If not, I hope things get better for you soon!

Dan

Vocal Recording Session

So, this is a behind-the-scenes video of the vocal session which happened on Saturday afternoon.  The equipment and engineering expertise came from my friend Danny from EarShock.com.  Many thanks for your help, Danny.

The video is not professionally done, but at least it gives an idea what the sessions are like for recording the dialogue for these things, and how we do it.  Sometimes it does get silly, and it almost always feels weird doing these characters and acting like this, especially when playing a scene where the characters are supposed to be in horribly perilous situations and you're standing in your bedroom.

Hope everyone is doing awesome.

Dan

Plagarus Part Two Released

Hope everyone enjoys it.  Watch in 720p full screen for best results.  It has English closed captioning as well.  This represents several months' worth of work all squeezed into just 2 and a half minutes.  Film making is tedious, slow and hard to do.  But if at least a few people enjoy it, then it was worth it as far as I'm concerned.

So, I hope someone out there likes it.

Thanks to Danny Rivera for helping me out on recording the voice overs and then doing the voice effects afterwards.  Thanks to the Blender community for their help, and thanks to the Blender Institute for making Blender.  I wish there was more one could do to promote such a great piece of software, but I guess the best way to do it is to produce as good art as we can with it so people can see it for what it is.

Hopefully, we get Part 3 out a little sooner this time.

Thanks,
Dan

Nem Gate Work

More work on the indie film Nem Gate.  This has been an extremely challenging set.  It needs to fit inside an existing building, and it has a large number of components.  It is seen both from the perspective of a small control room (previously modelled) and from outside, as well and must connect to the outside of the building for a couple of shots.

Add to all this the usual challenges of designing the aesthetics of the concept, and you get an interesting challenge, that's for sure.  We're finally getting somewhere, but it is still very much in a messy work-in-progress state, I'm afraid.  So please keep that in mind.

It's unlikely that the exterior will be so brightly lit, but I figured I'd load in some detail just in case we've got some close-up shots here and there that'll need something in the background.

From the perspective of the control room built earlier

And this the control room set built earlier that connects to this hangar.

Hope you're all having a good day.

Dan

Logo Design

For his help on Plagarus Part II, I used all my graphic skills to produce a proper logo for MacDanny's cool start-up sound company.  Let's see how this goes. 

But now there is a problem.  The problem, of course, is that this is the logo for my company at the start of the movie:

And, directly after, appears this:

It doesn't make much sense for the graphic artist to have a lesser logo than the sound design person!

This will not stand.  Now begins the Great Logo War of 2014!


To battle!  To war!  To logo greatness!

Dan

Nem Gate Sets Dressed and Painted

I just got some images back from my client, Tom, of one of the Nem Gate sets I made for him textured and prepared for appearance in the movie.  Interesting to see how different the lounge set looks like from what it appeared as without materials.

Still a WIP, of course, but it's getting there.  I did not render these out, or do the materials.  I only modelled the room geometry.

Dan

Part II Scene I

Work continuing.  Animation is going along about at the anticipated speed.  Shot construction and completion is about half of that of Part I, mostly because of the complexity of the second part.  Several sets, this time, and about five characters to animate.

As I did in Part I, I'm using noise modifiers in certain bones on the character rigs to give the illusion of random movement.  Struggling with keeping the characters out of uncanny valley.  The problem will be greatly exacerbated by the very human-like characters in Part III.  Danny and I are starting to look around for a more talented character animator, and I'm looking into re-rigging the character models for the next part.  The current rig isn't sufficient (it's very old, now) for what I'm looking for in performance in the next few parts of the movie.

 Raw Render:

Color Corrected Render:

Sent off the raw cut of Scene I of Part II to Danny this morning, so he can start mixing the sound.  Looking forward to seeing what he's got up his sleeve.

Dan

Blocking and Animating Plagarus

By far the most complicated part of making Plagarus is the character animation process.  Creating shots and ideas is extremely time-consuming and difficult.

The first step is always writing out the script.  The second part is recording the dialogue.  Both of those steps have been done for Part II.  Now we're onto the process of actually animating each scene one shot at a time.  This is the most complicated and difficult part.  It requires absolute quiet in the house and absolute concentration.  This is rare when you've got a family.  Patience is a must.  Frustration is your enemy.  Tempers can flare.  Feelings can get hurt.

Typically, the process involves listening to the recorded dialogue and laying it out in Blender's non-linear video editor.  Then I take the sound, and start blocking out shots and camera angles as I think they'd appear.  Character animation involves taking key-frames and refining them down, adding more and more frames until the final product is able to be animated.  See the 11 Second Club blog site for a good trainer on character animation.

Then comes the final render, and inevitably, a few re-rendered shots to correct any problems, such as fireflies and whatnot in the final render.

This could take days, or weeks.  The more time you spend on it, the better it looks, to an extent.

Dan

Plagarus Movie Poster

Dan

Plagarus Voice Recording Session

A good evening spent with friends also produced much more amazing results than I ever anticipated.  The quality of the vocals (there is a comparison between the original Part I dialogue and the new, unedited, Part I recording at the bottom of this post), was far more superior than I ever imagined possible.  This was despite the fact that the environment we were recording in was still less than ideal.

Thanks go to #1 Dan for his enormous help and expertise.  It's great to have someone around who knows what they're doing.

What voice actors stare at for hours on end

Danny's a Mac guy. We shall call him Mac Danny from now on

Mac Danny.  The hat picture is the only picture we've got

The nameless voice actor, of questionable taste in hats.  The sign next to his head may indicate what's usually on his mind

We decided to use a Blue Baby Bottle microphone.  I admit, I was incredulous at first when I saw it, but it turned out to capture the voice much, much better than my own microphone, which was used to record Part I.

We got all but three lines done on the written script (the last part still needs to be written out). We're aiming for this Sunday to pick up the last few lines. There are a few issues here and there, but overall, the recording was surprisingly rich and clean.  We averaged about three takes per line of dialogue, with four characters, all aliens, being represented.  The quality is a vast improvement over the previous Part I recording.  Take a listen.

Hope you're all having a great time.

Dan

Lessons Learned in a Fictional Laboratory

I'm a second generation small business owner.  My father owned a cleaning business back in Maine.  One of the things he taught me was professional pride is a healthy thing and that if someone doesn't take pride in their work, its quality will suffer.

My previous job as a house painter here in Florida a few years ago helped drive this lesson home for me.  The owners of the company weren't afraid to absorb cost if it meant that it would save their company reputation or add to it in some way.  They say that they lived by an old Hebrew proverb, and I believe them. 

"A good name is better than good oil."

I finally learned this lesson first-hand with my own business.  And especially in the laboratory set I recently built for Nem Gate. Lesson learned: Don't be afraid to absorb cost for a customer if it means getting the job done to your satisfaction.

As it was, the client did not indicate he was happy with the completed set, but was unable to spend any more time or money on getting it to spec.  This left me with a conundrum: do I want to go the business-first route and put out a product neither the customer or I was happy with, and potentially could lead to embarrassment if it was released to the public? Or do I go the artist-integrity route and absorb a chunk of money and make sure the final product is up to snuff?

I chose the artistic-integrity route, I guess.  I can only hope it pays off in the end.  If not, I will have to be content with the fact that the client was happy, and I'm more satisfied with the results, though there's always room for improvement.

Make the day of death better than the day of birth.  When you're dead, you can't enjoy the money.  But if you leave a good reputation and people speak and think well of you after you're gone, well, then I guess it's all well and good.  I'm never completely satisfied with any of my work, anyway.

Dan

Viminal Interior Walk Through Animation

Dan

Commercial Work

Well, normally I can't show my commercial work that I've done with the public, as typically I'm under a non-disclosure clause.  But I've received some leeway in this to show that while I'm not updating this site, I'm indeed working.

These shots are from my interior modelling I've done for an independent film called Nem Gate. 

I'm just a modeller on this, so I'm showing my work only (without final materials).

The third model, the large lobby, was a model I received partially built, but I changed it enough that it barely resembles what it used to look like.  The only things that remain from the original model are the pillars, part of the exterior wall and the floating sculpture in the center of the room.

Please bear in mind that all of this is definitely work in progress, as the textures and materials haven't been added in these images.  Also, additional changes to the geometry may be made sometime in the future to some of these models as the director changes his mind or needs some object moved for continuity's sake.

 

 

Additionally, I've got some work being hung in Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.  My work ended up being featured in an exhibit they're putting up about the future of space flight.  The exhibit isn't up, yet, I don't think.  It should be up sometime next year, they tell me.

Always thought an artist had to die before his work was put up in a museum. I don't know if I'll ever be able to make it there to see it in person, but if anyone ever is in Melbourne, please stop by the museum and take a picture of the exhibit for me, if you can.  I'd really appreciate it!

There is also more work than this, but I've spent a lot of time on this post already, so I'll let you all go.  Happy Blending!

Dan

The Misanthropic Retreat

Misanthropic: (adj.)

1. Of, or relating to a misanthrope
2. Marked by a hatred or contempt for humankind 

Retreat: (v.)

1. (a) The act or process of withdrawing, especially from what is dangerous, difficult, or disagreeable; (b) The process of receding from a position or state attained
2. A place of privacy or safety: REFUGE

A good old classic space scene with a spaceship, the Misanthropic Retreat, Lethgoshis's private spacecraft from Plagarus.  A spaceship is a great way to get away from it all, isn't it?

Dan

Plagarus Animation Blues

Character animation remains the singularly hardest aspect of this movie I've run into.  I think the problem stems from the fact that we see real life people moving all the time, so when a CG character starts doing it on screen, any irregularities immediately start popping up all over the place.

Take this animation I did:

Weighting seems off, as far as I can tell.  There is definitely potential, here, but it just seems very embarrassing, to be honest.  I've asked for help on Blender Artists.  Waiting for any clear advice that'll help me improve on there.  Hopefully by the time the more sophisticated character animation comes along in the film (Parts 3 and 4), we'll have some pretty solid animation ready for the heavy stuff.

Otherwise, I think the film will sag under the weight of the failure at animation, and probably collapse.

Hopefully that doesn't happen!

Dan

Plagarus Part Two Update (Again)

Working on a movie by yourself can be pretty daunting.  The biggest problem seems to be discouragement, believe it or not.  The general quality of all aspects of the film seem to suffer when one person has to work on basically everything.  And when you're a perfectionist who must send stuff out without being up to your standards...

Unfortunately, it actually may take more time and effort to coordinate with others than to simply do it all myself.  In the end, Plagarus won't be the best movie out there, but it'll be the best I can produce in the time frame we're looking at. :)

  

Considering that it's my first movie I've ever actually made, I'd say that's saying something.

 

Dan

Craig Stuart Garfinkle

New music for Plagarus.  In addition to the Amotz Plessner piece (which receives multiple uses throughout the film), another signature tune I purchased rights to recently was from another pretty big heavyweight in the music industry, Craig Stuart Garfinkle.  He has composed work for video games, film and TV. 

The piece I bought fits pretty well with a particularly dark part of Plagarus just before an intense action sequence breaks out.  Hopefully the effect will work like I have in mind.

We'll have to see.

I have also finished upgrading my computer.  It's now pretty much maxed out and can't be upgraded anymore.  Because of this, I figure I've got two to four more years on this machine before complete replacement.

The upgrades:

16 gb of RAM.
New solid state drive for the OS.
New storage hard disk.
New graphics card. An nVidia GTX560TI 2 gb monster.

The graphics card is the big one.  I can now GPU render using Cycles in Blender.  This will slash render times into fractions, and I can produce more shots quicker that way.  Interestingly, I can now also render two scenes at once.  One scene can be rendering on the CPU and another on the GPU.  This should make life much easier. =D

So, yes.  Plagarus is on the roll. =)  Part II is probably going to expand a bit, because right now it's quite paltry and needs help.

Have a great day, everyone!

Dan

Characters for New Film Project

One of my favorite things to do is character development.  I've been thinking of a short film that will happen after Plagarus.

Drannica. =) Yes, almost all of my movie titles are just one word.  And they're usually planets, for some reason. =D

Some characters. (And a couple of familiar faces, if you've seen Plagarus!)

Captain Lostra (Or Lolstra, depending on my mood.)

 

Ah, good old Asitus.  She's not your typical Isus.  She's sly, sarcastic and never takes much seriously.  She and Lethgoshis really don't get along.  A vagrant Isus, by the way, is very strange, if you know much about the typically stalwart and enigmatic species. (Yes, she is glowing.  She's an Us. =) )

Best buddies.  Lethgoshis, a typical Isus (he's an Is), is over 7 feet tall (Asitus is the same height, more or less).  Padoen, on the other hand, was stunted by his mother's drug abuse while she was carrying him.  He's just over 5 feet tall.  After Plagarus, the two friends start a small two-man mercenary business and they travel the Thrassi Republic looking for odd jobs to support themselves.  Lethgoshis has basically taken it upon himself to care for and protect Titus.  It's the bodyguard in him.

Still working on a couple of other characters which will appear in the movie.  But besides these four, there's just the first mate, the helm officer and another Isus bit character!

That's it.

Dan

Computer Troubles Are Over!

Well, I had some computer troubles!  I installed Windows 7 last week to play Star Wars: The Old Republic as well as to use the Unity game engine for my new job, and 'lo and behold, Linux no longer boots.  Turns out Windows likes to play around with the boot sector of hard drives and told my computer that Linux simply didn't exist any more!

Thanks to a nice boot CD-ROM, I was able to fix GRUB and now Linux boots nicely.

Ahh, the wonders of the digital age. =)

So, back to rendering the movie and back on schedule with Plagarus! YAY!


Dan

Plagarus Success and Part Two

Well, the movie was a bit of a hit, actually.  That's a pleasant surprise! =)

It ended up on the www.blender.org website for a day and a half thanks to Bart, from Blender Nation, noticing it.  Thanks to that, the movie got almost 5,200 views on April 10th, with the 11th seeing an additional 1,000 views.  That felt nice to see people looking at something I made. =)

The movie has received far more hits on Vimeo than on YouTube, but I put it on the Tube because some had trouble seeing it on Vimeo.  So here is the link to Part One on YouTube, just in case. =)

One of the chief complaints people had about Part One was the quality of the vocals.  The recording quality was low, as I used a cheap microphone in a noisy environment.  My friend allowed me to borrow his better microphone, and I'm looking into building a small audio isolation booth.  I looked into how expensive these booths are, and the cheapest is usually around $1,000 (US).  That's way beyond my budget, unfortunately.  So the alternative is to build a small booth around the microphone itself.  This can be done for as little as $10, but the quality is probably not going to be very good.  A much better set-up can be done at around $40, which is probably what I'm going to do, so that the dialogue for this movie and any future ones will be as high a quality as I can get on a shoestring budget.

Hopefully it all works out.

Rendering and animating Part Two as fast as I can. It should be uploaded in a couple of weeks.

Hopefully everyone is doing okay.