AstroKiste

Meeting notes + upcoming task

May 082012

Hi there (or there?),

last meeting we closed the storyboarding task. The storyboard is done and we learned A LOT of it! After a 6 hour lasting discussion we opened the next step: Sceneblocking task!

Thus, we will start off with the animatic of the very first scene of our film next monday. The scenefile is done and so is the rigfile for the character animation proxy. Holcha will do some sound/audio/score tests for monday as well so we can review some of the earpiercing stuff. Felix is still working on the concept art foobar and now he has some more insight into what is gonna happen visually. Murxx is working on the shots as they come up in the animatic for scene 1.

I’m still doing some research on the general data structure for all the scene-, prop-, rig- and shotfiles we will use. Most of the structure, however, is clear – just working on minor design decisions…

For all who are interested in a small sneak peek of the first scene: Here is the space ship command station as we will use it for the scene blocking on next monday:

Regards,

meikel…

Meeting Notes

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Apr 162012

Hi there,

last meeting we had a big review of all the stuff so far together with our concept artists felix. We could specify the look and design of the pilot more precisely. Furthermore, we had a look at the storyboard and some already (almoste) finished props. I did some test with the smoke simulator for the firelighter and we checked for the teeth and mouth interior of the pilot’s head.

Now we (meikel&holcha) will go on finishing the storyboard and felix will dive into some more concept art stuff.

See ya soon,

meikel…

Meeting notes

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Mar 242012

Hello,

the last meeting we had a look at the storyboard so far. We now have a complete slideshow of the film ranging consistently from scene 10 to scene 15. We also have scene 3 to scene 5 completed.

According to the slideshow it is now clear that the interior of the space craft has to be much smaller than we have it in the story board so far. Regarding the story itself, one of us (murxx) suggested to change the story slightly in order to have a more convincing cause for the pilot’s fate. However, since we are almost done with the storyboard I approve changing the story until the first week in april – including a changed script. After that date, the story stays as it is if there is no altered script.

Moreover, we had a quite long debate about the general look and the color palette. We came up with lots of screen captures from well known movies and one of us (holcha) loaded them up to our production forum. Plan is to have two color palettes done until the next meeting.

So, slowly things start coming together in this post-production phase

Regards,

meikel…

Face rig test

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Mar 242012

Hey guys,

I did a quick test with the Face Bone Tool add-on just to see if we can use it for our character. This is what I got after parenting the mesh to the armature using automatic weights. Looks pretty odd. Thus, we will create a custom face rig since I have the feeling that the auto rig is not saving us time but needs a lot of tweaking and such:

regards,

meikel…

Meeting Notes

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Mar 152012

Hey guys,

two of us (holcha, meikel) had a somewhat unusual meeting this week. We had mussels for free on an all you can eat basis. While eating we developed some nice ideas on how to enrich the story of our pilot. Besides that, we are still working on the storyboards and we are painting them as fast as we can now that the story is done. We also have a new member (felix) in our team who will do some drawings basically for the production design. The ship and the pilot are our most wanted designs so we are looking forward to what felix will give us

Stay tuned for the first designs!

It’s done when it’s done.

meikel…

New animation proxy mesh for the pilot

3D Test, Animation, Modeling 1 Response »

Feb 222012

We recently discussed the overall body mass index of our main character. It turned out that we want to have him look a little bit chubby because we saw enough super-hero-muscle-dudes in movies. He will also wear glasses. Hence, he will be a pretty average kind of person.
I did a simple and quick to animate proxy mesh of the pilot which resembles the actual hires mesh quite well. This is a short (loopable) turntable preview of the proxy mesh. Notice that the color is favoured by us for the time being.

- Turntable video -

Meeting notes

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Feb 152012

Hey,

we had project meeting today and we had a nice first slideshow of the storyboard. We are almost done with scenes 13-14 and 16-18. The remaining ones are left to draw in the next two weeks. After that there will be a polish phase where we will tweak some minor things and add this and that to the storyboard.
We had a discussion about how to go on from there. Bottom line is: we’ll go for animatics of all scenes after the storyboard is finished. For this scene blocking we’ll use the character animation proxy I did some weeks ago.
We estimate that we have first blocking shots in 2-3 Months.

Oh, and we had some nice ideas about audio/sound design and about the pilot’s space suite

Stay tuned!

Storyboarding is running

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Feb 122012

Hey guys,

we didn’t post news the last week because we are working on the storyboards now. The script is done and we devided the scenes up so everyone of us can draw the storyboards…
I guess we might show off some of them when we are done but don’t expect that to be very soon. We are all no experts at drawing ;P

However, there might be two new dudes joining us: a 2d artist and a 3d artist. decisions on that will be next tuesday at the next project meeting. We’ll keep you updated.

regards,
meikel…

Pilot’s head is almost done!

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Feb 032012

Well,
looks like the pilot’s head is nearly finished. We will do some minor tweakings when we come to actually render the scenes and such. Eyebrows might need some color treatment and the skinshader’s waxyness may be reduced when the final lighting setup is done.
For now, the head is done and I can go on working on the storyboards…

First scene peek

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Feb 012012

This is part of the set for one of our scenes in Force Feedback. The model is not 100% done but it’s close to final.

Eye, close-up

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Feb 012012

This is a first close-up of the pilot’s eye which plays an interesting role in the story.

Eyelashes re-loaded!

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Feb 012012

Yeah,
I got the eye lashes redone using simple geometry for them. Adding a super-simple diffuse material is a piece of cake. And now, here is the cake:

Eyebrows and lashes – FAIL!

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Jan 312012

Hahaha,
this was a first test with particle hair for the eyebrows and lashes. I’ll call it an epic fail. Looks terrible! Thus, I’ll go for some alphamaps for the eyebrows and maybe geometry hair for the eyelashes. I guess that will do it (at least it worked pretty nice for MATERIA2 back in those days…) and rendertimes will drop as well.

He has nice hair

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Jan 292012

Hi,
the hair is done in terms of styling. The color (material) is still an issue but for now I move over to brows and lashes.

We are on twitter

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Jan 282012

AstroKiste went on twitter recently. Follow us on the latest news and stuff.

Pilot: textures, skinshader & hair

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Jan 272012

Well,
here we have the basic textures for the skin shader plus the shader node tree. The actual textures are all at 2k resolution except for the normal map which is at 4k resolution (not shown here). The shader node tree includes also a backscatter layer plus two specularity nodes.

I also tweaked the hair a bit. (no eyebrows and eyelashes yet)

Hair added

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Jan 252012

I added some basic default hair. No tweaks here. I will change the hair color a bit and make it more looking like hair. Moreover, the eyes needed some polish. Now they look a bit more life-like I’d say…

Skinshader for Pilot is done

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Jan 242012

The skinshader works nice. Maybe a bit too much of backscattering. But this is more due to the bright background light.

Subdermal texture done

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Jan 242012

The pilot wearing his blood/gore subdermal skin. This is the layer which is the bottom most one. The epidermal layer is above this subdermal one and then the diffuse layer is the third one. After that, two specular maps are added to account for different specularity features…

Epidermal texture done

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Jan 242012

This is the pilot wearing his epidermal skin. I painted it by hand and used the subsurface scattering of blender’s shader system.

Diffuse texture done

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Jan 232012

Hey guys,

the diffuse texture of the pilot’s head is now done. There is no specularity since this is diffuse only. I added a little bit of normal map to it to give it a bit more depth. Color turns out to be okay as far as I can tell up to now.

Bumpmap test

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Jan 172012

First draft of a bumpmap painted completely by hand in photoshop using the good ol’ wacom. Looks o.k. for first try I guess?

3D project update

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Jan 152012

The 3D shortfilm project has a working title! In the last four hours we had our film meeting and the working title is “FORCE FEEDBACK”. One of us (holcha) showed up with the first draft of the script and we are happy to announce that it only takes a few minor tweakings for the final version.

So, welcome to FORCE FEEDBACK!

Skinshader test

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Jan 152012

Here is a cut-out from the skinshader tests I am working on. It looks quite waxy but this is because I only used a single-color subdermal texture. Since I use the 3layer-sss-shader proposed by Ben Simonds the overall shader will become more skin-like with the upcoming texture layers.