3 MORE STILLS

4 STILLS

MORE STILLS

Another randomly-chosen collection of stills...

HAND

GOLDEN

Sewed together with golden thread.

BOOK

Tired of all train all the time? Me, too. So here is an exciting shot of a book falling down.

LEDGE

No "On The Monitor" screenshots for awhile. The stuff I'm working on now is from the last few minutes of the film. You don't want to see any of that and spoil it. Right?

So, I'm posting random stills...

This shot has a great Whoooooosh sound as the camera passes between the two large boulders. Did you ever notice almost everything in Lord of the Rings goes "Swoooosh" as it passes by the camera? Birds, flowers, sandals, candles, even smoke.

INCUBATOR

The texture inside the incubator was made by scanning a piece of raw meat. The faces of the gauges are from WWII German fighter planes.

ON THE MONITOR

A cave-in...

PRACTICALLY SPEAKING (part 2)

You need smoke or fog in your animated movie? Here are your choices:

1) Use a plug-in or a particle generator... which, on the low-end looks like a plug-in and on the high-end looks great but takes 80 years to render... and if you need the fog to blow around in a certain way it helps to have a degree in physics.

or

2) Buy a $30 smoke machine, some black paper, and a flashlight:



Adjust contrast and levels, scale, add blur, composite:



These shots are from a dream sequence. Dream sequences in From Inside are animated 12 fps (instead of 24). That's why it looks a little choppy. This is actually helpful for stretching (slowing down) the fog footage. No frame blending necessary.

AFTER: AFTER EFFECTS

The image on the left is what a shot typically looks like as rendered by Maya. This is before color correcting and compositing.

Most of the 3D elements in this Maya render have been output as separate layers. The ground, the bridge, the train each exist on separate layers so they can be manipulated independently. Actually, the bridge is rendered in two layers because (you can't see it here) there is a part of the bridge that passes in front of the train earlier in the shot. That part of the bridge is on a separate layer, too. Some parts of the image are rendered in separate passes. The ground layer, for example, was broken into 3 passes: color, shadow 1 (shadows cast by the train), and shadow 2 (shadows cast by the bridge). So, not only is the ground a separate layer, the light and shadow that make up the ground are also on separate layers.

Besides lousy color, there are a lot of problems with the Maya render. (Click the image to enlarge it). Check out the edges of everything... The beams of the bridge are all very hard-edged. Same thing with the edge of the train. See that lower part of the passenger car? Looks like a crisp machine-made edge. That's bad. There is no shadow under the train. What shadows there are, are too hard and too dark. There isn't much depth of field; the tracks are hard-edge an in-focus all the way to the horizon. The horizon is a hard edge, too.

The Maya renders also don't have any particle effects -- no smoke, steam, fire...

These are all things that could be rendered by Maya (or whatever 3D pipeline you like), but those solutions are either beyond my computing power or would increase render times to something unmanageable.

So I usually fix it in After Effects. With duct tape.

ON THE MONITOR

Looks like HO scale....