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.

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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

Plagarus Part 3 Work

Still plugging away on the ol' project.  Not sure if I'll ever finish, given other, more important responsibilities, but, alas, I'm not giving up! :)

Got a lot of animation still to do.  But it's considerably easier, now, with the updated armatures for the two main characters.  Now, to update the rest of the characters before I've got to use them...should be fun.

Design for Padoen's hover bike:

Still to do:

1.) Loads of stuff.  Most notably, finishing a short fight sequence (ugh...), remodeling the exterior desert landscape, which is in bad need of repair.  It stood up fine in the 720p renders of Parts One and Two, but in 1080p resolution, the desert landscapes just don't stand a chance.  Every imperfection shows up terribly.

Hopefully it'll be good.  It's showing promise, but a lot of work to do.  Just wanted to show I'm still plugging away on this thing. :)

Dan

Dan

Padoen's Apartment 2

Still working on the details of the main area of the apartment.  After this, it's creating a door and atrium area, and furnishing and detailing the bedroom loft section.

After I'm finished the publicly available version, I'll put in some additional details, mostly consisting of personal decorations which are specific to the film, and then start blocking out the animation.  Fun times.

Have a happy week, everyone.

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

Plagarus Part II Scoring Nearly Done

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

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

Plagarus Movie Poster

Dan

Plagarus Voice Recording Tomorrow

So, finally getting around to recording the vocal audio with a friend of mine who is an audio artist (also named Dan!) tomorrow evening.  Hopefully it turns out we get most of the dialogue recorded.

This is the proposed ending spot for tomorrow!

His sound equipment is far superior to mine (which consists of a USB microphone, which I used to record Part I of the movie).  He also is a college student in audio with experience in vocal recording, so it should be good.  I think the main problem will be getting the performance to be better than the first time around, as there is a load of more voice acting in this one, including more nuanced scenes.

Many thanks to #1 Dan for his help.

Meanwhile, in preparation, I'm blocking out the scene and the placement of characters in it.  Suffering from severe lighting issues with the characters (the set is overblown and too flatly lit and the characters are too dark), so I'll probably work tonight on getting them with a lighting set-up of their own which is separate from the room around them.

Oh well, guess this project won't let me take the lazy route, will it?

Room = too bright! Characters = too dark! All around = too flat and overexposed!

Another angle = same problems.

Hope you're all doing awesome.

Regards,
Dan

Sci-fi Apartment Update

I find there can be a certain beauty in science fiction art.  The greebly bits and the techy lines and glowy lights--sometimes it all conspires together without the artist's implicit consent to create something special.  I don't know where it comes from.

It's good when it happens, though.

UPDATE:

Dan

More Material Tests

Been looking around for some material ideas, still.

Dan

Material Tests on Plagarus Set

Doing some material testing on a set for Plagarus, Part II.  Trying metallic materials.

Selecting materials is hard, considering this paint scheme has to work in two different rooms with different lighting schemes, and two very different characters with a wide variation of skin tones, yet still look cool.

Chewbacca-Yoda Syndrome and Plagarus Part 2 Redesign

I guess the ol' project isn't quite as dead as I thought.  I recently received a phone call from an old client of mine, Seth Deming.  During the course of our discussion, he unknowingly (I think) gave me some encouragement to keep going on Plagarus, and I guess I took it to heart.  So, here is some extra work I've done.

Here is the run-down, nitty-gritty:

I was never pleased with the opening of Part 2 as it stood.  This was the main reason I never got around to posting it.  It was dreadful.  The audio quality (something persistently pointed out by the viewers for Part 1) was about as bad as it could be, yes, even worse than Part 1.  The voice acting was rushed and didn't have enough nuance and the scene involving the protagonist and the snake robot repair salesman, Ackla, was just not what I wanted it to be.  In fact, I consistently cringed in horror as I watched it and often skipped it because I couldn't bring myself to endure the spectre of its very existence.  I could never bring myself to the inevitable embarrassment of having to upload such a piece in its current state.

So I've decided to bite the bullet and redesign the set and completely redo the entire opening scene of Part 2.

Here is some progress on Ackla's apartment set, about a day's work so far:

The challenge with designing sets for this particular movie is that the protagonist, Lethgoshis, is almost 8 feet tall, whereas the rest of the characters are about average human height. This presents challenges in designing the sets, as many of the doorways have to be big enough to accommodate the height of Lethgoshis while at the same time make sense stylistically.  Also, camera angles have to be carefully contrived whenever Lethgoshis appears in a shot with another, shorter character.  (I call this challenge of putting two characters of greatly varied height in the same shot "Chewbacca-Yoda Syndrome".)

In this case, this apartment complex services a number of alien races, and so, I imagine that the building designers probably tried to accommodate as many species as they could. I can get away with the ultra tall door here, but elsewhere, it may present a problem.

And here is a refined flip/jump that I'm trying to get a rather ungainly Lethgoshis to accomplish.

I'm completely redoing most of the work I've done so far on Part 2, simply because my skills have improved as well as the tools in Blender have gotten more sophisticated, allowing new techniques to be used. Therefore, Part 2 will hopefully be a great improvement over the original version, as well as slightly longer. I'll be rerecording the dialogue as well, once I get a useful microphone.  This will be the most expensive thing I could do in the movie.

Dan

Plagarus Bike Travel Unedited Establishing and Wide Shots

An unedited compilation of the wide angle and establishing shots from the bike travel montage from Plagarus Part II.  Not very exciting, I'm afraid, due to lack of editing and sound, but this gives an idea what's going on so far with the great project that'll never be finished.

Without proper editing, such as cuts to close-ups, or different angles and perspectives, the scene seems to drag.  At least with proper music, it doesn't seem so bad, but the initial shots can be very long, at about 500 frames a piece.

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

Plagarus Part Two Update

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

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