Dusting Off Plagarus

Wow, things have been slow around here.

I apologize for that.  Have had some serious issues come up, and I needed a hiatus from 3D art for the most part, anyway.  Though this one was forced on me more than anything!

 At any rate!

Plagarus Part II.  I was rummaging through my folders today and discovered that the second part of the short movie I'm working on is nearly completed, save for three shots which need animation and rendering, and some sound effects which need to be added.

So, I suppose, Part II should be out by the end of this month, maybe?  Let's see if we can do it!

Adamant Dimensions

Someone wondered how big the Adamant was.  Here's a run-down on her stats:

Length from bow to end of armor hull: 403 meters (1,322 feet)

Height from lowest point to highest point of armor hull: 318 meters (1,043 feet)

Width from tips of wings: 541 meters (1,774 feet)

Width of body: 192 meters (629 feet)

The speck next to the gunship is an average height man.

She's a big, beautiful ship. =D

Dan

Adamant Turntable in Cycles

Well, another boring turntable. =D  This time it's of Adamant.  Rendered in Cycles, now, she's looking a fair bit prettier than she did in Blender Internal! =)

Hopefully you all like it.

Turret Beam Test

So I made a blast beam turret for the Adamant. This is a test to show off the aiming and firing. It's very quickly put together, so it's not supposed to be professional, and there are currently no real details on the turret, but this gives you an idea, hopefully. =)

The laser beam itself is a simple 8 quads arrayed in radial fashion and given a stretch-to constraint, which is tied to a target empty which the turret also is constrained to.

The beam is given an emission material in Cycles and a beam texture with an alpha map to give it fall-off and then it's rendered. Voila, a laser beam cannon! =D

Hope you're all doing awesome!

Dan

SSC Adamant Details

SSC Adamant is still in production.  I just took a hiatus from her for a bit.  Now she's getting the love and attention she deserves once more! So I've started working on the interior, and adding working turrets!

The turret's parts are parented to empties, which all track via pivot points to a target empty.

The two empties on the barrels are used to control the barrels' recoil when the cannons fire. Two empties for four barrels. The cannons fire in pairs, so there's only a need for two empties instead of four.

All of these empties have constraints added to them which either prevent the empties from rotating on a certain axis or restrict them from rotating too much. The turret currently turns 360 degrees on its main axis, with the gun placement able to pivot 40 degrees on the x axis. All of this uses local transforms, and all the empties are ultimately parented to the base of the turret, which, in turn, is dropped anywhere on the ship I please. Quite a useful set-up, if I may say so, myself. =D

An AO render from Cycles.

I've also been working a little on modifying an old interior I made for another ship and making it for the Adamant instead. I figure since she's a naval vessel, she would be maintained to a very high standard. I assume Captain Lostra is also very meticulous about the upkeep of his ship as well, which would explain why the interior is quite immaculate. =)

All rendered in Cycles, obviously not with perfect results, but I prefer a bit of grain to my images as it gives a sense of organic film instead of perfect digital artificiality. =D

Hope you're all doing great!

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.

Plagarus: Part One

Yay! Part One of the short film Plagarus is done! =D  Starting work on Part Two.

Hope you all have a great week!

Dan

Final Render and Composite

Rendering the final shot now!  Things are shaping up.

Now I am passing most of the shots through the make-look-good-erator, which is basically a node setup that adds bloom effects and other nifty, sneaky techniques to make the video look more... uh, more... more good! =D

 As you can see, the images are very similar to each other, but the lower one has passed through the make-look-good-erator and therefore looks more good. =)

Rendering final shot, will be done by Sunday.  Final composite and uploading Part One probably Sunday or Monday! =D

Yay!

Dan

Part One Nearly Finished

Getting there.  Nearly done rendering Part One.  Probably will be able to upload it to Vimeo by Saturday or Sunday night, depending on how busy the weekend turns out to be!

While the render is going on, started work on the characters for Part Two.

Started final editing of the film.  Again, using Blender 3D's sequence editor to do the work.

Final sound mix will happen sometime this week, once the final dialogue is recorded.  All the blue strips are the sound effects.  As you can see, it can get a bit complicated! =D

Hope everyone is doing great!

Dan