Tag

Stereoscopic 3D

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

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)One Comment

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

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)No Comments

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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What i’m working on – 2012 – Week 25

By Current Projects, What I'm Working on (WIWO)No Comments

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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