New Updates
Well, another busy weekend has past, and another busy week is coming. We've got a lot of work to do on this movie before I break for Christmas break! Luckily, the majority of the visual effects work on my shots will happen in the new year. However I still have two to final before next week!
Like on The Mummy 3 earlier this year, a majority of the items I've been tasked with have been 3D in nature. I mentioned quite a bit of the obstacles we faced during Siggraph. There has been more and more 3D compositing this past year than most, simply because it is one of the most efficient ways to composite! The film plates are shot with a camera, it only makes sense to create our visual effects using that same camera! It also make life a lot easier than the old fashioned way, of trying to manually warp and track 2D plates to other 2D plates. Ugh, that time is behind us. Unfortunately, if you're not using a 3D compositing software package, you may be up a creek without a paddle!
VFXWages hit the next milestone last night, with a couple vital bug fixes today. We've cleaned up the interface, added some new options, and hopefully made it a little easier to navigate. I don't foresee changing from the current layout for a little while, but we will be adding other tools in the menu system and the biggest pages, Wages and Jobs. We're fairly on track to release our public milestone in January sometime. I was hoping for early January, but that may well turn out to be the end of January! I think we'll be able to push out an interim update before then though. One of the big things that I'm excited about is the inclusion of an invite system! Current users have up to 10 invites where they can invite friends and coworkers to the site, and help improve the data that we have! Drop me a line if you have any concerns, critiques, or comments.
Hey Aruna,
The guys in ShredCo showed me you had this blog up and it's a great read to catch up on what you've been doing since the days of playing Q1 together. :)
I actually still have your original demo VHS tape in storage that you sent out all those years ago when you were still in Vancouver finishing up school.
Talon
Mike
December 17, 2008 8:51 AM
I don't know how life would be without Nuke 3d... it's simply awesome!
How many scanline render nodes do you usually average per shot? It simply can't all be done with one, right?
Geronimo
December 19, 2008 1:51 PM
Geronimo, you are correct.. Trying to get all your 3D done through one scanline can be more of a pain. It does depend on how you construct your scene and your plates. On larger shots I can usually hit more than 10 scanline nodes, while on smaller shots maybe two to three. Of course, these are all prerendered directly after the scanline so it makes it much easier to comp with later down the tree!
Hey Mike, good to hear from you! Glad Shredco is still around. :) Keep that VHS tape! It may have some value in the future..To whom, I don't know. Hehe. Do you have a digitized copy of it? I don't even think I have it!
Aruna
January 6, 2009 12:20 PM