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What I’m Working on (WIWO)

W.I.W.O: Week 32 – VSSEC Mission to Mars in Stereoscopic 3D

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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.

Mars Lander touching down on the Red Planet | VSSEC Mission to mars 3D animation

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!
Red/Cyan 3D Glasses - required to view Anaglyph 3DI 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!

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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
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]
August 12, 2012
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Digital Lode - Tony Robinson's London Games Unearthed

W.I.W.O: Week 31 – Tony Robinson, Element3D and a Stereoscopic movie

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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!

[divider_line_padding] The remainder of my week has been spent working on the 3D stereoscopic animation for the VSEEC. This project is now in the final compositing stage and i’m hoping that this coming week will be the final week needed to get it completed. On Friday I watched almost the whole animation in 3D (for the first time!) and it is looking pretty good! Very excited to see the final result on the extremely crisp projectors at the actual museum.

August 5, 2012
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Michael Wentworth-Bell - Birthday Dinner

W.I.W.O: Week 30 – Siemens, Adobe Roadshow & my Birthday!

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I’ve just started working on a new 3D animation for Siemens. It’s a fun project with a very short deadline (for 3D animation) but I am excited about it! I am working on this project for Alf Kuhlmann (Reel Pictures). The animation centres on Fed Square and luckily we were supplied with an accurate 3D model of the entire Federation Square site. It’s very cool!

The file we were given originated as a CAD model which is both good and bad. Good because it is a very true-to-life representation of Fed square with correct placement of structures, individual triangle tiles(!), pavement blocks, etc. Bad because it was imported as well over 60,000 individual polygon objects into 3DS max! CAD models are designed for accurate construction of a real structure, not 3D animation! It took the better part of a day to combine/merge all the pieces and cleanup the whole model, but it was worth investing the time because the model is now quite nice! I spent the rest of this week preparing the shaders and queued up some test renders for this weekend.

Here’s a few quick renders of the whole model at this early stage in production.

[image title=”Fed Square animation – Michael Wentworth-Bell – complete view ” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”2012week30″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/site_assets/image_uploads/FedSquareAll.jpg [/image] [image title=”Fed Square animation – Michael Wentworth-Bell – Overhead view” width=”544″ height=”306″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”2012week30″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/FedOverhead.jpg [/image]

 

Earlier this week I attended the Adobe Roadshow at the Melbourne Convention Centre. The first 45 minutes were quite underwhelming and I thought it was going to be a massive waste of time! The free coffee and biscuits during the break were nice though, as were the partner booths displaying new tech like the Cintiq 24HD, but the best part of the day was the 2 ‘video breakout’ sessions after morning tea. These sessions were held in separate rooms 3 levels above the main show, and the attendance for these sessions was much, much less (around 100 people instead of 1000+. but they were truly unmissable, hosted by Karl Soule and Jon Adobe, 2 adobe Evangelists. Karl runs a few video production blogs and hosts many ‘how-to’ videos on tv.adobe.com. They covered a lot of new features in CS6 Production Premium. Many of these tips were focused on Media Encoder, Audition, Prelude & Speedgrade and they highlighted new features that I was completely unaware of.

Adobe Media Encoder CS6 - New Features

 

 

The most exciting part was at the end when they demo’ed a research project using Premiere Pro. This is a feature that may be released in a year, if it works. It was called ‘Premiere Pro – Edit Anywhere’. It allows 2+ Editors to work on the same sequence together from anywhere in the globe! all the source media (typically over 1TB of footage) is kept on a central server. The effects processing and compositing is done using the server, so the editor receives only the input and output frames as they edit and perform compositing operations. It’s very fast and secure! Karl said that the editing experience would remain responsive as long as you had a minimum 1.5Megabit internet connection.

For someone like Alf, this feature would be awesome! He often works on up to 30(!) Swisse Advertisements a week, collaborating with 2 editors remotely (one is in Portland). this feature would save a lot of time that would be spent transferring Gigabytes+ of source footage via FTP, courier, or airplane (sometimes quickest on a tight deadline).

At this stage, Adobe were talking of releasing this as a software solution only, so it would be up to the customer to setup the server hardware and security. This is a good move, allowing big studios to set up their own international network exactly how they want it, but i hope Adobe offers a subscription-style cloud server model for smaller shops that might only need it for an occasional job.

 

This was the week I finally launched a preview of my website (and the official facebook page) this week. Very exciting! I am still working on portfolio items, tutorials and proper body copy of the site as well as business card, letterheads and stationary design before I launch the website proper.

Finally, this week I also celebrated my birthday and had a great few days of celebration, including an epic dinner with my Girlfriend Ivy at the Melba Restaurant, Melbourne.
[image title=”Michael Wentworth-Bell – Birthday Dinner” width=”544″ height=”408″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”2012week30-light2″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/MichaelWentworth-BellBirthday.jpg[/image] [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
(What I’m Working On).
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July 29, 2012
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W.I.W.O: Week 29 – Poster Designs & trying out Element3D

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Had a lot of fun this week! I finished up 2 projects for Moonee Valley City council; promotional material for the Push Start Battle of the bands & Fling Fest short film festival.

Here’s a quick preview of the Battle of the 60’s themed bands poster!

[image title=”Battle of the Bands Poster Design by Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”765″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012-29″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/BOB2012_Poster_Preview.jpg [/image]

The poster was finished in photoshop, using smart objects to link with Illustrator. It was a very helpful and powerful technique. I hope to write a quick tutorial about the workflow I used to create this poster, because it was very flexible, and a lot of fun!

This is how the Fling Fest poster turned out.

[image title=”Fling Fest Poster Design by Michael Wentworth-Bell” width=”544″ height=”765″ align=”center” lightbox=”true” group=”wiwo2012-29″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Fling-Fest-Purple.jpg [/image]

This poster was the first time I used After Effects to generate images for Print. The Lens flare, light rays and glows were all created in After Effects, and rendered out at 16bit for A2 Print resolution, over 700MB a frame!
I usually create 3D imagery for motion, so it’s a lot of fun to actually create 3D for stills. You can ‘cheat’ a whole lot more – creating effects, textures, shadows, light and other details in the compositing stage instead of having to do them in a 3D program so they will render and move correctly.

I’ve also spent this week expermenting with the new Element3D plugin from Video Copilot. Want to reserve a whole blog post to this plugin, but in short, it’s the most revolutionary and powerful plugin to be released for After Effects. It makes the new CS6 3D engine completely reduntant. This plugin changes my workflow enourmously and gives a lot more creative freedom to all After Effects users. Been a very exciting week!

I’m looking forward to next week, where i’ll be visiting the Adobe Creative Suite Melbourne Roadshow and celebrating my birthday!

Until next time!

[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
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]
July 22, 2012
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What i’m working on – 2012 – Week 28

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Another very busy week. Definitely one of the craziest this year. This week I helped Alf @ Reel Pictures finish the corporate video for Swisse. It ended up having a million changes that were all finished within the extremely tight deadline. Glad to finally see it finished. A lot of complex animations and effects were created for the video but subsequently removed as part of the changes. Very frustrating, but that’s the nature of the business!

This week I also finished the demo reel for Cole Ewing, which was quite fun!

I’ve been working on 3D artwork for the Fling Fest short film festival. I’m using 3DS max and Vray. Here’s a quick 3D render of the artwork so far:

[image title=”Fling Fest 2012 Artwork – Progress Render” width=”544″ height=”455″ lightbox=”true” group=”2012-wiwo-28″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/FlingFestRender.jpg [/image]

And here’s a screengrab of the 3DS max scene.

[image title=”Screengrab of the 3DS Max scene” width=”544″ height=”332″ lightbox=”true” group=”2012-wiwo-28″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screengrab.jpg [/image]

The lighting in this project has been the most enjoyable part. It’s lit using a HDRI environment and a single Key light against an endless background. I’m rendering it at Alf’s studio in Footscray. We’ve set up Distributed rendering there, meaning around 7 PCs can work together to render a single frame; a big time saver.

[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
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]
July 15, 2012
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What i’m working on – 2012 – Week 27

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It’s been an extremely hectic past few days! I’m unfortunately working through the weekend this week, which is never fun but made somewhat easier by the fantastic weather! I’ve spent most of the week powering through the SWISSE 3 (now closer to 4!) minute animation, working alongside Sam Van Ingen.

Alf has submitted a first draft of the entire animation, with the revised final draft due early next week. I’ve also signed onto 3 other contracts this week. I’m creating the promotional artwork for the Pushstart ‘Battle of the Bands’ event in Moonee Valley. This is the 3rd year i’ve worked on this project and it is always a lot of fun!

[image title=”Swisse Corporate Video” width=”544″ height=”306″] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Swisse_Ani1.jpg [/image]

I’m also creating a lot of content for the Moonee Valley ‘Fling Fest’ film festival, an event showcasing the best short films by VCE Media students in the community. I will first be working on the promotional materials (Posters, flyers, etc) which are due within a week. Later, I may work on the content for projecting the films on the night.
Finally, i’m cutting together a demo reel for budding Australian actor, Cole Ewing. Cole will be using the demoreel as he tries to get interest in Australia and L.A.

A lot of work to do this week, but the diversity of these projects makes it very fun! I love switching between Art Directing, Animation, Graphic Design for print & Video editing many times in the day, when I switch back to a project, I can look at it with new eyes and fresh ideas!

[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
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]
July 8, 2012
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Swisse Logo - Olympic Partner

What i’m working on – 2012 – Week 26

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My post is a bit late this week! I’ve been working again for Alf at Reel Pictures this week. He has started producing over 3 minutes of animation for a SWISSE corporate video. The extremely lurcrative health supplement company will be moving abroad in July and will use this Corporate video for presentations, shows, and eventually online.

[image width=”460″ height=”198″ align=”center”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/SwisseLogoOlympics.jpg [/image]

 The entire corporate video is to be animated in 3D – we’re using After Effects & 3DS Max. It is a very big project that must be completed in an exteremely tight deadline, so there will be a few long hours on this job.

I look forward to showing the finished product!

[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
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]
July 1, 2012
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What i’m working on – 2012 – Week 25

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I’d love to use my Digital Lode website as a way of sharing the projects i’m currently working on. Starting with this post, I will be aiming to create a quick, weekly blog about whatever project i’m currently working on.

This has been my first year out of uni and I have been working as a contract 3D generalist & Motion Graphics artist. So far, i’ve worked on jobs that last a couple of days and a few that have lasted weeks. I thought i’d make my first ‘What i’m working on’ (WIWO) post about a job i’ve been working on for around 6 weeks now; A stereoscopic 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 have been contracted by Alf @ Reel Pictures to help convert parts of this briefing video into Stereoscopic 3D. This has been a challenging, but really fun job!

The briefing video contains a lot of 3D animated content; showing the Ares space rocket launching from Earth and hooking up with the Mars Explorer spaceship. The Mars Explorer travels to Mars and the Mars Lander makes touches down on the red planet. There is about 6 minutes of content that needs to be re-animated and composited in Stereo3D.

At this stage in the project a lot of the animation is complete and I am now rendering & Compositing many of the scenes. I have included a couple of preview photos of how it’s looking so far – to view these images, you’ll need a pair of red/cyan 3D glasses like these.

[image title=”Ares1 Spacecraft – Orion Crew vessel detaching” width=”544″ height=”185″ lightbox=”true” group=”WIWO-Week25″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/S3D01.jpg [/image] [image title=”International Space Station in Earth’s orbit” width=”544″ height=”306″ lightbox=”true” group=”WIWO-Week25″ icon=”zoom”] http://thelode.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/S3D02.jpg [/image]

These are just the first preview shots, but I am pretty happy with the results! I have learnt more about the art/science of Stereoscopic 3D on this job then ever. The briefing video will be projected onto a 5 metre-wide screen, and will be viewed from a distance of 6.5 metres. With this information, we are creating the Stereo3D content to match that screen, which means, if you view these 3D images on a 5 metre screen and stand far back, it’ll look perfect! on a tiny screen, the 3D effect can ‘hurt’ a bit, or you may see some ‘ghosting’ around the edges of objects. The animation will be projected using a special projection technology from Germany. The VSSEC is one of the few places that are using, it’s not ‘active’ (most 3D TVs) or ‘passive’ (RealD at the movies) glasses, it’s something else, but it apparently looks awesome!

I’ve been using 3DS Max and Vray to create the 3D animation. It took about a week to setup a very solid 3DSmax -> Vray -> After Effects Stereo pipeline but it is now working well. I’m using a few Stereoscopic tools that ship with Vray to create the Stereo images. There are a few features that I think are missing from the Vray stereoscopic toolset and I have made a few feature requests on the Chaos Group forums. Vlado, the creator of Vray has replied and said he aims to add these features, though they might not be finished before my project’s done. Still, that’s what I call insanely awesome customer service! You can try and make a feature request for Max or After Effects, but the chances of getting a response, let alone getting your feature even half the way you want it, are very thin.

So this is the project i’ve been working on this week. I’ll still be working on it over the next few weeks amongst some other jobs that may need quicker attention. I hope I can post some new and improved Renders as I get seriously deep in 3D compositing!

[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
(What I’m Working On).
[divider_line]

 

June 21, 2012
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