Yes, I’m a 3D nerd. Ordered the latest version of Cinema4D and am exited about it.
It features loads of new possibilities for our studio. Better lightning (LWF), enhanced viewport openGL, tons of dynamics tricks and some cool updated character workflow improvements. And more, but not gonna list them all. Check the Cineversity site, there are video’s there explaining the new features.
So we can’t wait to put this all to the test in upcoming projects.
Ow, and we got a new server rack for our renderfarm
Installing it this week I hope.
I don’t know how long exactly I follow this guy on the internet, but he’s doing great things.
He started up 5 second projects a while ago. A good initiative because for practice the main thing is to have a theme and a deadline, otherwise it stays an idea and never gets off the ground. So finally I participated. Well, did another a while back but didnt make the deadline, work before play eh…
Naturally I didn’t start 6 weeks ago, at that time I had a vague idea only. Sat down a few days back to start modelling and the machine totally took me over. The machine had to make sence, so ran into some things I didn’t know and had to figure them out (like constraining vertexes of a (dynamic) spline to nulls, moving them to simulate wires and stuff.
Next thing I know, it’s 2 days later. Har har. The goal was a feeling that I saw in the Fanta-play commercials, all Ambient Occlusion 3D, pretty neat.
Got pretty far, but had to little time to tweak the lightning and materials in my opinion. But hey, it was a good practice, learned some stuff and had fun.
I was asked to join a project that involved projecting animations onto the facade of the Creative Factory. Having seen some amazing stuff done with this technique I was eager to work together with Jasper (100% ontwerpen) to get this off the ground.
This was a pilot project to examine the possibilities. And as with every first pilot, we got along with trial and error. I.e. it was the hottest day of the year and it was a stacked setup, and those things produce a lot of heat. Even with 2 airco’s they wouldn’t hold, so finally decided to use 1 beamer.
But the end result is very cool, we asked 5 animators who each made there animation(s) based only on ‘tour de france’, an color pallet and a grid. It was nice to cooperate in that way because it results in very different type of animations, and that was exactly what we wanted.
So credits go out to: Jasper Spronk, Frank nanninga, Michiel de Graaff, Erik Katerborg, Ivo Schouten, Jarno Cordia and myself.
And thanks to the guys at MK2 and Deelgemeente Fijenoord en Charlois.
I found out a neat trick that might come handy when playing with Mograph Dynamics.
First of all, cache (pronounce: cash)
Saves a load of time and CPU power AND you can actually scroll backwards in your viewport (Which is very handy)
Say you have some neat box of cereal? that must fall onto the ground. So you make a cloner object (set to 1), with only one cube under it, add a floor and voila.
But what if the cube exists out of multiple parts, or it’s so high poly that the simulation goes slower then a turtle.
In the first case, every sub object will have dynamics, and therefor will go it’s own way. In my case it was a box with a lid which were 2 different polygon objects.
The lid had his own life.
So what I did was made a proxy box/cube. Played with the dynamics on that till I was happy with the results, put a Mograph Cache on it from frame zero to end of my compilation.
Then I switched the proxy cube with my 2 object-based box, and it animated the way I wanted.
So why do all this hassle?
Well, Mograph is a lot of fun and saves decades of time in most situations, but the objects under a mograph object don’t actually make keyframes. Therefor it’s not possible to PSR constrain anything to it for example.
Which I found very annoying.
Sadly it won’t work with cameras, you can see the camera fall down in the view port but when looking thru the camera, it stays in initial position.
Would be a nice feature for a new release, convert cache to keyframes (or motion clips for that matter).
Well… last friday we had our Koelstof kickoff party. Maybe you heard of us thru our mailing list. We are joining forces to take over media land No, not that seriously, do not worry, we love working together with other specialists in the media sector. But it’s a fact that moving media productions can and will be done with our new collective.
The party was bigger then just our kickoff, later on the evening the party went on the 7th floor together with some other companies here in the creative hub.
Some of them are: IS3D, SonicPicnic, AirRebels, the1stfloor (us), CCCP, KristaIzelaar, Kojaki, 100%ontwerpen and more.
Some snapshots of our office at the start of the party, pictures of later that that are too embarrassing
Not every model has to be 1 million poly’s plus with normal mapping, hdri, etc etc.
For our Kennisnet project a simple model of an owl was made and not even rigged. Just a morph and some deformers connected to Xpresso did the trick to make it alive enough.
Haar tijd zit er alweer bijna op, de tijd van onze stagiaire heb ik het dan over.
Gedurende haar tijd hier heeft ze veel meegewerkt aan diverse projecten, waaronder het project voor Kennisnet waar we nu de hoogtijdagen van beleven. Eind juni zal de finale dag zijn in het Efteling theater.
Anyway, vorige week kreeg ik een belletje van het GOC over het erkennen van the1stfloor als erkend leerbedrijf.
Welke het vanaf vorige week dus ook is. Toch wel leuk om even te vermelden.
It’s fun eh, 3D, and the things you can do with it.
Still getting used to sitting on a new location but get more eager and eager to make it my dreamoffice.
The fun thing is, I realised, that way back my fantasy was to work in an environment as I am in now.
So making the office more cooler step by step I dove into 3D to figure out a nice lunch table for us all to eat at.
Or play poker, who knows…
Going thru the 3D world cd’s that are stacked up on the side of my desk, putting them one by one into the moving box, I come to realise that change is at hand.
Soon we will be moving our workstations to the new workplace, and not only is this a new environment to work in, it is also the start of more collaboration.
We are still staying at the creative factory, only moving up 2 floors.
I gradually joined up with IS3Din projects over the last 1.5 year, now the team gets bigger withAir Rebels and Sonic Picnic. I’m excited about it for several reasons, these are guys that take the industry serious and want to make good products. Also it means expanding our networks and and type of projects. With inhouse posibilities for camerawork, compositing, post effects, compose music, creating sound effects, recording voice overs, Motion graphics,3D animation and Realtime 3D, I’m positive a lot of great projects are coming up this year.
And we all can use that, 2009 wasn’t the best year with the crisis and all, but I still have confidence in the joint venture of freelancers.
And yes, if you read this with possible projects in mind, don’t hesitate to contact me (a bit of shameless acquisition in is place here ).
Maybe we can get acquainted at our opening party!
The companies involved are:
IS3D – 3D animator / Motion graphics
Air Rebels – 3D / Post production / VFX
Sonic Picnic – Audio studio
the1stfloor – 3D animator / Motion graphics / Realtime
