Nodre - animation

[Neilg]

link-o: http://www.visualisationone.com/nordre.avi


Heres an old one. Spent 4 weeks on this, couple of people jumped on for a few days.
300+ unique buildings, 6,500 half-million poly proxies, pflow, camera matching etc. The full animation was done as seperate shots for another company to edit in to their 20 minute odd film - this is just an internal edit of the better CG shots from it I did 2 weeks ago.

If anyone knows norwegian, I apologise I just edited together what looked good with no regard for what they're actually saying.




Used standard cameras, sun/sky, irradiance map and brute force. Full vray motion blur on every shot (god damn I love it) DMC AA.

[DanielBrew]

Wow, what can I say... I think the water/seabed combo is one of the most realistic I've seen.

Dan

[gfa2]

Having the people reflect in the water would have been super sweet, but it looks awesome nonetheless.

[mcvltd]

Can anyone point me in the direction of an H264 codec? Dying to see this anim!

[dlparisi]

Really nice, superb. Especially for four weeks.

[RErender]

Bah, I can't play it either, the shots above look great though, nice work.

[rivoli]

Really nice, superb. Especially for four weeks.

yep, totally. that amount of work almost all alone, impressive. really great piece of work.

btw, had no problem watching it with vlc, it usually plays them all.

[Shimakaze]

Wow! Amazing! Just how long did that take to render??

Man that joke about the thermos was lame!
-what's the tall stuff over there? You're not thinking of putting a skyscraper on Bildøy?

-Noooo, the buildings can't be more then four to five stories. So you thought my thermos one of them skyscrapers!

-I thought it was the new lighthouse

[Guest]

totally insane.... i really loved it. The lighting is spot on and integration of everything is topnotch..... any insights into the project are welcome offcoarse.....

looking forward to your next project.

greets,

Niels

[Shimakaze]

Wow! Amazing! Just how long did that take to render??

Man that joke about the thermos was lame!
-what's the tall stuff over there? You're not thinking of putting a skyscraper on Bildøy?

-Noooo, the buildings can't be more then four to five stories. So you thought my thermos one of them skyscrapers!

-I thought it was the new lighthouse



*edit: where'd this double post come from?? Just not my day today.

[Neilg]

Wow! Amazing! Just how long did that take to render??

Man that joke about the thermos was lame!

Haha, good work on the translation!

Some of the bigger shots were hitting an hour a frame but it probably averaged about 40minutes by the end, at 1280x720 with motion blur on. Although the tracked shots were done at 1920x1080, just to give some breathing room and it was rendering pretty quick anyway (somehow).

gfa2 - Did do some tests into that, but it wasn't working very well and I didnt have time to play around much. Next time!

Dan - thanks! The terrain was poly modeled as one piece with 3d CAD linework used as a guide/reference, I just pulled the under water bits down bit by bit to get it to look natural combined with the fog on the water. Water took a bit of tweaking to get right, but theres nothing special about it.


Thanks for the comments!

[gfa2]

btw, had no problem watching it with vlc, it usually plays them all.

yeah, vlc worked for me too. Never heard of that player before.

Back to the video at hand. Wow! The stills don't do it justice, gotta see the animation to appreciate it. Very nice job!

[Timmeh]

Fantastic animation!

What camera tracking software did you use? Boujou?



Ps. SMplayer can play most codecs also.


Cheers,

Tim

[Neilg]

Thanks

Yeah, this was all done with boujou. Fantastic piece of software when it works, but when it doesnt you're near-fucked.

When we first started i'd done plenty of tracking before (~ 3/4 times, hah) but it just couldnt give us an accurate solution, in the render there was quite a lot of sliding around the corners which drove me mad. Not knowing the lens that was used on the camera apart from 'a really really wide and distorted one' meant re-doing some of the tracking shots 4/5 times until it was close enough.

A lesson learnt for next time though...

[biglolly]

This is superb, regardless of the duration.

Tracking looks good to me. We use syntheyes - cheap and I really like it. Boujou is too expensive.

I've always wondered how the "animated building of buildings" is done, if you get me. Is it just done manually?

I'd imagine that if it were done manually, then having your models built in max would be the easier way of doing it, becuase maniuplating max created geometry is easier. When our guys model a building in CAD it's more difficult to maniuplate the model after becuase of how it brings stuff on to single layers e.t.c. and you have to stick an edit mesh on top of it. I find it a bit messy.

I like how you've treated your footage here - can you shed any light on that process? Looks film-like which I always find nice. I'd guess a number of render passes and composited in maybe After Effects?