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On The HorizonWorking on something? With a 2D or 3D app? Is it SF - Fantasy - Real world? Let's see it!
To post art for Battlestar Galactica, go to our sister site- Colonial Fleets
@evil_genius: it just seems like it's too long for one scene, is all I wanted to make sure that there wasn't any "fat" on this one if I could avoid it. This scene is mostly to answer the questions the audience had, I was trying to explain everything but I wanted to make sure the focus wasn't on things that weren't of interest.
As for Cargo Bay Six...read this at your own peril Big spoilers ahead:
@Taranis: nothing wrong with that just means you get the full benefit of surprises when they come. And there are quite a few coming up in the next few scenes!
@evil_genius: since Scene 37 is going to be the work of probably a full week if not more to make, I thought I'd post a quick preview clip in the meantime: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MxaJidZ4rQ
I'm particularly eager to hear what everyone thinks of the very end--the bit where they all nod was something I hadn't originally planned on, it just seemed appropriate. What I was going for was Prentice asking, obviously in an unspoken way, for the support of his senior staff, and they all giving it, first Ronston and then the others. Hargrove, naturally, is the last one, but even she does after thinking it over (and that little exchange between Kal and Mitchell strongly implies that their exchange earlier is the reason why).
And the conclusion of the exchange between Prentice and Reyf. Between the way Reyf reacts to Prentice's final question (and in turn, Prentice's reaction to that) and the music, I'm trying to hint at something. Specifically:
I'm particularly eager to hear what everyone thinks of the very end--the bit where they all nod was something I hadn't originally planned on, it just seemed appropriate. What I was going for was Prentice asking, obviously in an unspoken way, for the support of his senior staff, and they all giving it, first Ronston and then the others. Hargrove, naturally, is the last one, but even she does after thinking it over (and that little exchange between Kal and Mitchell strongly implies that their exchange earlier is the reason why).
Yeah, that was nicely done. They had a few moments like that on the shows, it's always a nice moment.
That's a rendering glitch, not a design shortfall on Garr's part Note that her appearance in the "Previously On" sequence at the start of the movie has her with a full ponytail instead of just the framework for one.
Hmm, that's a weird rendering glitch, though not the weirdest I've ever seen. Did you maybe reach the texture limit for your software? (trueSpace will sometimes not render certain textures if the memory is all used)
Basically you nailed it, the ponytail is from Neftis Studios, and it's an extremely high-quality product, but the drawback is that at the settings I routinely use to render shots of the other actors, Poser can't handle it, so it's simply rendered as a wireframe. (Look at the "Previously On" segment at the very beginning of the movie, you'll see a shot of her with the ponytail rendered properly--it's a very short shot but it took north of 30 minutes to render; just as a test, I rendered the pan from Holo Garr to her from Scene 38, and it took almost two hours!)
@Taranis: it's not permanent, notice also that the background plate of the corridor in the beginning of the scene is also rendered at ultra-low resolution and the frame rate is off. I had to do that to get in a placeholder, the real plate is still rendering (been going for two days and a half now). While that's finishing up I'm also working on re-rendering the shots with Kristie at their proper resolution. The part where her ponytail swings is particularly impressive--Neftis did a heck of a job when they designed that prop.
Are you rendering some elements separately with an alpha channel and then compositing them together? It seems to me that would be the best way to get past that glitch (though, I know nothing of your software.)
The suite of software I'm using is:
Sets and Props: Bryce 7.1.99
Characters: Poser 7.4
Editing: Ulead Media Studio Pro 7.4
The short answer to your question is, yes. The character animations are rendered in Poser against black, which cues Poser to build in an alpha channel for the black background. My video editor, in turn, is smart enough to pick up that alpha channel, and use it to key in the backgrounds behind the characters. (When the camera moves, the process is a little more complicated and doesn't involve alpha channels, so we won't get into that.)
With the Bryce backgrounds, the workflow is more involved. Bryce doesn't know how to encode an alpha channel into its renders, so whenever I want to use alpha channeling there, I have to render out a separate animation explicitly for alpha-channel purposes. (Anytime you see a door opening, for instance, there are three elements: the "visible" portion, which is just the straight animation of the door opening, the alpha-channel animation that defines where I want the area past the door to be visible, and then the background plate itself.)
The trouble with Kristie's ponytail can't be solved by alpha-channeling. No matter how it's handled, the ponytail prop is still super high-poly, and it's still too much for Poser to handle. Recall that even at the "preview" settings I'm using to render all the other crew animations, animations involving both the high-poly Victoria 3 character, her clothing, and then the ponytail prop, still take a long time to render. At the settings necessary to make the ponytail properly visible, renders can literally take hours (a 258-frame animation--Garr's line about that "she was the symbol of everything he'd lost"--has been rendering for about five hours now, and it's still not done: 233 frames so far, 25 yet to go).
For the most part, 30fps. The only exception is when I want to go for effect (i.e. some of the shots in the "previously on" sequence were 5fps, and the "intelligence footage" Reyf showed of Garr at the start of "Reyf Tells All" was 15fps, and slowed down by 50%).
This is actually a bit of a "hybrid" scene, featuring proper renders of most of the shots of Kristie and animated LCARs displays on the back wall. The main attraction in this clip is at the end, what I think is a super-cool montage sequence showing the crew preparing to implement Prentice's plan.
Re: Star Trek: Retribution
I wanted to make sure that there wasn't any "fat" on this one if I could avoid it. This scene is mostly to answer the questions the audience had, I was trying to explain everything but I wanted to make sure the focus wasn't on things that weren't of interest.
