Text Render

Blender text render test from Clay Kent on Vimeo.

This will eventually go into my old project when I get around to rerendering it.

24p fix

For my project I am using live action with blender stuff composted in. I have a Cannon Vixia HV30 High def camcorder that takes great 1080 resolution video. It even does 24p - the option is somewhat buried, but it's in there. Problem is getting 24 p out of a camcorder into anything is a serious PITA. You'd think it would be automatic but not yet. The 24p comes coded out as 60i. Pulldowns and reverse telecine are big long blog entries in their own right (which aren't needed at all in HD digital video but for some reason they are still there) so I won't go into it other than saying that's the stuff you have to undo to get your 24p back. So if you want to get at your 24p video (like to match my blender renders) you need to decode it somehow. After much research I came across a couple ways to do it in compresor and cinema tools, (I think after effects can do it too) but then found much much easier way. Get yourself this freeware program called JES Deinterlacer


---------GET THIS------ http://www.xs4all.nl/~jeschot/home.html ---------GET THIS------


Launch it up, load your movie, select the project box, select reverse telecine and let it do it's thing. And voila, 24p restored. No more weird jaggies and hard to track video.

One more note, In yet another hold over from analog video, quicktime's default display for 1080 lines of resolution is actually 1062 to hide possible analog edge broadcast distortions. (Has 1080 video ever been broadcast in analog? Who made this nonsense a standard?) You don't need it and can get your 1080 back fairly easily. To get rid of this, open the clip in quicktime, cmd-J for the movie property windows thing (or from the windows menu), goto to aperture conform and select 'production' instead of 'clean' and instantly your 1080 lines come back. Save your changed movie and your all done. Then, take it into FCP or wherever and enjoy 24p. Better directions and more info here

You may also have noticed that instead of 1920 columns you have 1440 or something. That is becuase the HDV codec used in the camera uses non-square pixels which when rendered out come out to 1920. Nothing you can do about that. So no true HD yet. (ughhhh I want a red so bad)

Some better written info on all of this here:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/07/13/canon-hv20-24p-pulldown/

Project One progress

Very rough transformer sequence. Rendered on a netbook and assembled with windows movie maker......

(sorry for non vimeo video but Its late and I want some sleep and vimeo wont start converting for another half hour and the source quality isn't that great anyway and its a full moon ......)

Project 1 progress: slight hitch

So I was making good progress in Blender when my laptop decided to brick itself. Soooooooooo didn't really get as much done as I would have liked. (although I learned how to take apart a macbook pro) I have access to spare machines but nothing powerful and reliable at the same time. I was able to finish up most non computer stuff like shooting video (thank you nice weather) and recording audio but it looks like I'll be putting in a lot of time in the labs this week.

Lessons learned - next time buy apple care. Always have a spare everything - launching your mac while holding down the T button starts it up as a firewire drive to save your files to another computer (thank god)

Project One update

So here's a very rough update on project one so far. It won't make much if any sense yet but here it is:

The concept is 2 transformers (like the toy and the recent movies) meet up and have a short conversation. This piece will mix live action and 3D rendered animation. The render shot sequence (almost a story board except it doesn't make much sense on it's own) is sketched out (see pics below) and the script is ready. I'm recording the dialogue tonight or tomorrow and will record the live action video segments this weekend hopefully. That leaves next week to get a rough render for timing ready and the beginning of the week after that to start the 'real' render. All the while, I'll be working on the real models in Blender which I'll drop in and replace the placeholders in the timing mockup for the final product.









oh yeah - high quality art - I know you're jealous

Squash and Stretch - Follow Through - Timing - Exaggeration

Got Jello?

Short Little animation practicing some fundamentals of animation:

Jello Delivery from Clay Kent on Vimeo.

I got the truck and VW models from these sites:
http://www.katorlegaz.com/3d_models/index.php
http://www.blendermodels.org/


Some reflections on this project: I got pretty familiar with shape keys with this project but animating lattices is still hit and miss for me. I can tell it's really close to shape keys but different enough to cause some headaches. Specifically, can I have more than one lattice deformation key per lattice? Looks like it should be possible with being able to make more than one key but I had no success and had to create redundant lattices for every different transformation. Also, there seemed to be multiple IPO curves for the key and for basis but they were screwy to work with and seemed redundant but also not connected or functional. In the end I'm not really sure what I did that worked. Probably something simple but I spent quite some time on it and am still confused. All in all I wanted to make something that looked somewhat polished and not too 1/2 assed. Time wise that was tough but hopefully I've learned a bit to make next time faster.

Second thing I learned: Final Cut Pro is weird with alpha channels. Using the animation codec with keyframe for every frame selected, max quality on everything and no video channels muted out and a pre-roll image of 5 or so frames before any important action finally seemed to give not jittery (perfect copy) playback with functional alpha channel for every frame not to mention huge video files. Definitely buggy, but at least I found something that works. The AE cs5 demo comes out in a couple days I think. I'll download that and see if it's more friendly.

Array Animation Final(ish)

Animating with Arrays in Blender from Clay Kent on Vimeo.

I ended up turning off ray-tracing for rendering and I really like the way it came out. It's rendered out with alpha channels so it could be further tweaked in motion or AE (but my AE trial is downloading so I can't try that now)

Array Animation So far....

This is really horrible, I don't know why I'm posting it other than it might make the final version which itself might not be that great look way better in comparison. This version is wire frame only just to check the timing and not use too much render time. (which as it turns out the timing is complete crap) Definitely worth it checking your rendered work in progress for flow and feel before you but too much time into something fundamentally clown shoes. (Extra Bonus points if you can tell what's on TV in the background while I'm working, Anyone actually still read this far? ) Anyways,I'll probably I'll erase it all, start over by mapping it out in my mind, sit down with my stopwatch to get the better timing results and redo it........So grab some popcorn, but just 20 seconds worth and enjoy:

Really Bad Blender Array Animation from Clay Kent on Vimeo.

Best Theme Park Ride Ever

This is so cool. I highly recommend you ride it......

(view Full res)

Darwinator (Theme Park Ride in Blender) from Clay Kent on Vimeo.

Someday I'll finish re-rendering this with various tweaks fixes and HD res etc but I wanted to make this public in case that takes a while

Class Collaborative Project

Collaborative Project (roughish) from Clay Kent on Vimeo.

Here's my part