My inspiration this week has definitely been Red Rose Speedway by Paul McCartney and Wings. I’ve been collecting the Wings albums on Vinyl for a while now and haven’t got many left to go. Though i’d heard the singles before, somehow i’d not yet listened to this album all the way through. I’ve discovered the album at the start of the week and been slowly annoying everyone at the studio I share space with by playing it over and over on repeat!
Here’s a quick summary of the new content this week:
Tony Robinson’s London Games Unearthed – 3D Zeus Animation – Live action & CG animation created for a recent London Olympics Documentary on the History Channel.
Shaping Education – Henry Bastow Part III – created over a period of 5 months in 2011/12. I created a 3D cafe and filled it with about 3 billion pieces of junk!
A series of four 2D animations I created in 2008 – created as part of my 2D animation class in first year uni. Each animation focuses on a different 2D animation technique.
Experiment 091637 – filmed and edited in 2005 (7 years ago!) when I was in year 11 highschool. Included in my archives for a bit of fun!
As of August 2012, the LODE site is still a fair way off from being officially finished, but I am close! Before I complete ‘version 1′ of the site, I look forward to uploading a 2012 Showreel, add and refine 9 portfolio pieces and upload content for the ‘Motherlode’ tutorials section of the site. The Showreel is my main focus at the moment, and I hope to complete and upload it very soon.
A double journal entry this time. I’ve had a pretty exciting past 2 weeks!
I spent a lot of this time working on animated content for an upcoming Kubota Truck Launch. The Animated content was created for a 40 metre wide screen!
All the animation was done using Video Copilot’s Element 3D plugin. I thought this project would test the plugin to it’s limit but it would render these massively large animation files without any issue…although I was doing a lot of this work with a beastly GTX 680, which may have had something to do with it!
I worked primarily on a ~90 second animated sequence for the main Kubota truck launch. I look forward to sharing some of the work after the launch!
I also helped create animated content for another upcoming ‘Go For Gold!’ corporate event, this time completing all the 3D animation in 3DS Max with Vray.
[divider_line_padding]In this past week, I also attended the first ‘meet and greet’ for Pause Fest, Melbourne. It was interesting to see the showreel of clips that will be featured in the upcoming festival at the end of the year, and I also bumped into my first year 2D animation Teacher, Megan Nairn, who amazingly still remembered me! I created 4 2D animations for her 2D animation subject.
In week 33, I also celebrated my 2 year anniversary with my girlfriend, Ivy, and enjoyed some time off!
I’ve used some of my time off to start a few new personal projects – more info on that soon!
[divider_line_padding] I try to create a quick journal entry at the end of each week that covers the projects, events and highlights of the past 7 days. These weekly blog posts are known as the ‘WIWO’ Series
After almost 5 months, I am happy to announce that I have finished my work on the VSSEC Mission to Mars animation. I have been working on around 4 minutes of 3D animation for the ‘Mission to Mars’ space experience at the Victorian Space Science Education Centre.
The Mission to Mars program allows secondary school students to spend a day simulating a trip to Mars. At the start of the journey, the crew watches a 12 minute briefing video which was shot, edited & produced by Chris Joiner and The Pod. I was contracted by Alf @ Reel Pictures to help convert this briefing video into Stereoscopic 3D. This has been a challenging, but really fun job!
I worked on 4 sections of the movie, all requiring 3D animation, which was done in 3DS Max and rendered for Stereoscopic 3D using Vray. There are a few still frames included below that are rendered in Anaglyph 3D. You can view these in 3D by wearing some Red/Cyan 3D Glasses. Click the images below to view them fullscreen. All of the 3D content was created to be projected on a 5 metre-wide sceeen, and to be viewed from a distance of 6.5 metres away. This means that some of these Stereo3D renders below may not look very ‘comfortable’ when viewed close up on a small computer screen!
[image title=”VSSEC Mission to Mars Animation – Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012-32″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/VSSEC_Mission_to_mars_3D_animation_011.jpg [/image] [image title=”VSSEC Mission to Mars Animation – Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012-32″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/VSSEC_Mission_to_mars_3D_animation_03.jpg [/image] [image title=”VSSEC Mission to Mars Animation – Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012-32″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/VSSEC_Mission_to_mars_3D_animation_04.jpg [/image]
Most of my 3D animation focused on the journey of the Mars Explorer crew, with their journey from Earth to the Mars Explorer in orbit, and then the Mars Lander’s path to it’s landing site on the Red Planet.
[image title=”VSSEC Mission to Mars Animation – Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012-32″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/VSSEC_Mission_to_mars_3D_animation_02.jpg [/image]I modelled the terrain for the landing site in 3Ds max using the artisan brush, and created a procedural texture that would cover the entire the landscape. I painted a black/white blend map to mix 4 different rock & sand textures over the whole terrain. This is a new way of painting textures that I will use from now on! The last shot in the animation lasts for over a minute – A large Zoom shot that reveals the entire desolate mars landscape. Over 1,400 frames long, it took an absolute age to render!
[divider_line_padding]I’ve had a heap of fun working on this job! My eyes are a bit sore from constantly looking a 3D images, but I learnt a lot along the way! I further refined my stereoscopic workflow for After Effects as a result of my work on this job & I hope to make a quick tutorial soon to share some tips, scripts and plug-ins that were indispensible!
[divider_line_padding] I try to create a quick journal entry at the end of each week that covers the projects, events and highlights of the past 7 days. These weekly blog posts are known as the ‘WIWO’ Series
Early this week Alf Kuhlmann received a DVD copy of recent hour-long documentary – Tony Robinson’s London Games Unearthed. The show looks at the history of East London – the site of the 2012 Olympic games. A few months ago, I worked for Alf on a few sequences for the Documentary.
[image title=”Tony Robinson’s London Games Unearthed – Zeus Sequence” width=”544″ height=”386″ align=”center”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Zeus_Title.jpg [/image]
We created a 3D statue of Zeus and animated the 13 metre statue in some live action sequences with Tony Robinson. We then had to make the Zeus model crumble into a pile of rubble. It was a lot of fun! This week was the first time we actually got to see how our sequences were used in the final documentary. I edited together just the sections featuring our Zeus model & made a new project page in my LODE portfolio about the project.
[image title=”Tony Robinson’s London Games Unearthed – Still Frame” width=”544″ height=”304″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012w31″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ZeusSCreenshotB.jpg [/image]This week I have been helping Alf a bit on a big product launch for Kubota. He is creating the animated content for a massive screen that will be on stage. We are using Element3D for the 90~ second sequence – this is the first time we’ve tried out the plugin and there have been many quirks and bugs, particularly when trying to create 3D models from Illustrator or Vector paths.
Video Copilot have just released an update for Element3D so we will install it on monday and hopefully that will address these issues. None of the bugs are show-stopping; the plugin is very powerful and we can find workarounds to get our final renders out, it just takes a lot of time at the moment trying to troubleshoot these glitches!
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