Re: Project Super
I believe so, yes. My criticism of it still stands, though.
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I believe so, yes. My criticism of it still stands, though.
Well, we weren't making Dark Knight or Precious or anything that deep. Besides, it was that or radiation exposure from aliens. And it was actually solar-irradiated crystals embedded in space rocks that altered a person's DNA and gave them superpowers. And as I recalled, the majority liked the idea of superhumans battling robots. So yeah, cliche and campy. The epicness were in the battles and the visuals, less on the story. We did do some complex character development, though.
The problem was that the script had too many characters being covered and only a small number of them were brought together to fight the supervillain and some of them didn't even belong in the final battle. They were there because the character's animator was a major contributor. That may have alienated some of the smaller contributors of the project because their characters got left out. For me, I would rather see the concept resurrected and the characters and ideas we developed for Super scrapped for parts.
/me still likes the superheroes vs robots idea.
I liked the idea, I thought it was cliché, which was enjoyable, seeing as how we used a major part of a visuals Heroes-style. At least in the intros for the characters.For the rest of, some characters didn't have any visual effect for the power (Like Animation, Technopathy stuff like that) and we relied more on the animation to create a good effect. I do believe we were going to CGI a lot of it, like the robots for example.
Now I can't talk for the most of the project mid-way, because Nathan didn't like my ideas. But before that, I know there were lots of back and forth on the story and character development.
-Lil'jj
I'd love to do superheroes vs robots still, but with more emphasis on story.
Another thing about Super was that we were approaching it like The Day Brickfilms.com Crashed and not like the first successful Brickfilm.com Community Project Cleaning Time: The Janitorial Contingency.
From a full CGI point of view, if we approached it as a superhero (singular superhero) flick, collaborators just have to agree on a minifig design, develop a script and everything and each person animates a scene from the script. Set design, lighting, etc. can be taken care of by a cinematographer and everyone shares rendering time. That would speed up the process.
Another thing about Super was that we were approaching it like The Day Brickfilms.com Crashed and not like the first successful Brickfilm.com Community Project Cleaning Time: The Janitorial Contingency.
From a full CGI point of view, if we approached it as a superhero (singular superhero) flick, collaborators just have to agree on a minifig design, develop a script and everything and each person animates a scene from the script. Set design, lighting, etc. can be taken care of by a cinematographer and everyone shares rendering time. That would speed up the process.
As true as that is the consistency would be low. Even if we all shared the same model files, I may render jerkier movement than you. You might have smoother movement but with a wider range.
As true as that is the consistency would be low. Even if we all shared the same model files, I may render jerkier movement than you. You might have smoother movement but with a wider range.
Wait, what? You can't really render jerkier movements unless you're placing keyframe one after another.
If someone rotates an arm 90 degrees for a duration 1 second, it's going to rotate the same way on anyone's animation program. Obviously there would a continuity manager that makes sure people are rendering at the same frame rate. Remember, we would essentially be using the same project files. We would be checking each other's lighting and material settings before final renderings are done.
You couldn't possibly render it jerkier than another. Maybe stiffer and robotic if you don't use some form of bezier tweening but all that is available to anyone.
Last edited by Lechnology (August 11, 2010 (11:20pm))
CGI eliminates all that but brings up its own can of worms, especially when it comes to bricks. There's no doubt conflicts in rigging, animation software, and animation skill and technique. Some of us have Carrara, but most use Blender. Some animate rigid-body minifigs (like me), others make them bendable (like James W and Littlebrick).
Well, I may be getting Autodesk Maya and 3DS Max soon...
If someone rotates an arm 90 degrees for a duration 1 second, it's going to rotate the same way on anyone's animation program.
Yes it is all precisely calculated. As true as that is, what if we have different styles?
As in, we both render walk cycles. For mine I like the arms to swing at a maximum of 30 degrees. You prefer 40 degrees. Maybe BertL prefers 35. I don't mean inconsistency with the rendering itself, I mean inconsistency between the actions of the animator.
Yes it is all precisely calculated. As true as that is, what if we have different styles?
As in, we both render walk cycles. For mine I like the arms to swing at a maximum of 30 degrees. You prefer 40 degrees. Maybe BertL prefers 35. I don't mean inconsistency with the rendering itself, I mean inconsistency between the actions of the animator.
Well that's assuming there's no communication between animators or that no one is sharing the same walk cycle sequence files. And besides, what amount of viewers is going to spend time pointing out the variations in arm swinging degrees? I think the real inconsistency will come from the pacing.
But it's not going to be half-ass like "You do this scene, you do this scene, I'll do this scene. Send it to the editor after you're done." It's going to be thorough and as professional as a group of unpaid hobbyist can be, like "You all have the walk cycle for this character, set up your scenes and import the sequence wherever it is needed, render a low-res for the director to approve before adding the scenery and/or lighting for further director approval and consistency check."
Well also, each person walks differently, so if we all had minorly (I know it isn't a word) different walk cycle, it would be fine.
No, I wanted did not want to use that word!
Lechnology wrote:If someone rotates an arm 90 degrees for a duration 1 second, it's going to rotate the same way on anyone's animation program.
Yes it is all precisely calculated. As true as that is, what if we have different styles?
Fib, I've already addressed this. This is what animation directors are for; to make sure all the animation is consistent. As long as we have an animation director on this project, we should be fine.
CGI eliminates all that but brings up its own can of worms, especially when it comes to bricks. There's no doubt conflicts in rigging, animation software, and animation skill and technique. Some of us have Carrara, but most use Blender. Some animate rigid-body minifigs (like me), others make them bendable (like James W and Littlebrick).
Add me to that list - I have a fully-rigged bendy minifig done in 3DS Max sitting on my hard drive (as well as a rigged Fenris Wolf, an almost-finished Nidhogg Dragon, a LEGO Dalek and half a TARDIS set). Still trying to figure out lip-sync at the moment.
From a full CGI point of view, if we approached it as a superhero (singular superhero) flick, collaborators just have to agree on a minifig design, develop a script and everything and each person animates a scene from the script. Set design, lighting, etc. can be taken care of by a cinematographer and everyone shares rendering time. That would speed up the process.
Perhaps a conveyor belt system would be better: a team works solely on the sets and models, and once they're done with one set, they send it to the animation team who then gets to work whilst the building team works on the next set. It would certainly beat waiting until the sets are all done before animating.
PS: Superheroes fighting giant robots is always awesome (look at just about every comic ever made). The only thing more awesome is giant monsters fighting giant robots.
Perhaps a conveyor belt system would be better: a team works solely on the sets and models, and once they're done with one set, they send it to the animation team who then gets to work whilst the building team works on the next set. It would certainly beat waiting until the sets are all done before animating.
In ideal circumstances where everyone had a top of the line computer (Fast CPUs and GPUs in the double digits) or a render farm, an "assembly line" system would work, but in practice and from my experience, it's not ideal.
Your animation programs usually runs best with minimal mesh models. For us, our sets can be made up of thousands of brick parts converted in thousands of meshes, that can potentially crash your program or you'll experience a lot of lag. Of course, you can hide the models while you animate, but I still experience lag, of course that's coming from using Anim8or and Carrara. Not sure how Blender handles hidden meshes.
Hypothetically speaking (and from what I gather from watching Bonus Features on many of the current and past decades of CGI-injected films):
Given a completed script and storyboard, you'd have your animators and set builders working simultaneously but separately and the director and cinematographer works with both groups to bring their work together.
This is what I did with Mythical Bailout. All the background buildings (which were huge) were added in after all minifig animations were completed.
The animators set up the characters and animate them in a very basic scenery. Primitive meshes (cubes, spheres, planes, etc.) will be used in place of buildings, tries and robots).
The set builders work on the buildings, set interiors, etc. all separate from the animators.
The animation director and cinematographers give instructions on blocking, camera angles and lights for both the animators and set builders. Rendering animation with primitive shapes will speed up rendering time so they can get feedback more quickly. Meanwhile, set builders can upload ldraw files that can be viewed for feedback via LeoCAD, LDView or whatever model viewing program you got.
The cinematographer works with both groups to get the right lights for the set (background and foreground). Once the animation, camera angle, and lighting are approved and the sets are approved, the animation and the set of a scene are brought together (leaving the primitive stand-in set behind) into one project for test rendering and tweaking (to avoid lag, tweaking on the animation should be done in the primitive set, not with the thousand-mesh set). After all problems are addressed and fixed, the scenes can be rendered at full quality. And that can be done by multiple users on multiple computers. An free international render farm so to speak.
There is one consistency issue I'm concerned about: material/shaders. Combining footages rendered from multiple animation software, each having different material/shader settings, lighting options and unique rigs that aren't transferable to other animation software (I can't get figure out how to get Carrara's skeleton rigs exported to Blender). I feel my shaders are close to realistic plastic bricks and the rest involve beveling edges and lighting the scene the right way to get a realistic render but compare it to a Blender or 3DS Max's realistic rendering and there may be variations. It's something to address prior to final rendering.
I'm still amazed at how much stuff I can miss in 3 days.
This looks like a great project. I'm very interested in a CGI community project, thought, as Lech already pointed out, there are some complications that you don't have in a regular collaboration animation project.
In ideal circumstances where everyone had a top of the line computer (Fast CPUs and GPUs in the double digits) or a render farm, an "assembly line" system would work, but in practice and from my experience, it's not ideal.
Your animation programs usually runs best with minimal mesh models. For us, our sets can be made up of thousands of brick parts converted in thousands of meshes, that can potentially crash your program or you'll experience a lot of lag. Of course, you can hide the models while you animate, but I still experience lag, of course that's coming from using Anim8or and Carrara.
There's a simple solution to that - cheat like hell. I've developed a system whereby I construct the model in LDraw, then upon importing it into Max I gut it completely, taking out the diagonal lines left by the imported mesh, removing sections that aren't going to be visible anyway (for instance, there's no need for studs to be left in if they're under another brick piece) and in some cases merging bricks together. It's time-consuming, but I can more than half my polygon counts this way and most of the time you wouldn't know I'd ripped out half of the geometry.
Materials are a problem though - not least because the material systems aren't consistent across programs. I still can't figure Blender's material system.
Materials are a problem though - not least because the material systems aren't consistent across programs. I still can't figure Blender's material system.
Really? Materials is one of the easiest parts of Blender.
Also, you'd think that since most (not all, I know there's some Carrara and 3ds Max users out there) use Blender for 3D work on this site, the same exact material settings could be used from that. The colors would be easy to get right though. Only the shaders would be the hard part.
This CGI speak is far beyond me.
But I would still like to reprise my role as a writer (I swear I'll be more professional than last time...)
And, if you want a really over-the-top villain 
-MRB
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