It has been quite a few years since I have done any enveloping, and even then not in XSI - so I’m pleased with the results so far here

I can’t be posting the ol’ previs, don’t want to spoil that of course, but here are some stills. The timecodes are added in the editor, and the shot numbers are added in XSI with a wee script I wrote which gets the name of the Sequence/Shot etc. from a custom paramater (that is made/used) when saving the scene.

In some shots the lighting is such an important tool in the narative, we had to do a rough set up and render them out instead of just doing captures. Maybe we should do the final film like that, save some time

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Food from Simon Reeves on Vimeo.

Heres a shot with a focus pull showing some food in the restaurant scene.

For the focus pull, I wanted to test scaling on the defocus (as it looks cool)

After a fair few months break, though for us it has been longer than that - Short & Sweet is back on in Cafe 1001 in Shoreditch.
We originally found out about it a couple of years ago when Diversion was shown - and we went again last night and will continue to go hopefully (despite the beer choice )
As an example from last night, ‘Dix’ (10) by BIF was shown and met expectations for anyone who has seen any of their previous films, particularly ‘Raymond’.

Go to Short & Sweet’s website to read some more!

Here is an update on the restaurant scene, added some more pieces and have been adding textures, which seem to be mostly out of focus
I have a list of some more bits that need to be done, most noticeably, food. I’m going to leave the table cloths near last as I’ll need to test out how cloth is working with them when I have the characters in there.

720p Version here

Here is another shot of the same restaurant environement, as I say, its EXACTLY the same just a different angle - one of the cameras from the pre-vis in fact.

Also whilst I was there I did a quick camera move through the scene:

Download the video here

I have been getting back into it recently, mostly doing pre-vis but as this particular environment is fully pre-vis(ed), I know the cameras etc. I know what is needed to be made and will be in shot, so I fancied making a start on it.

So as well as modelling, (not texuring/uv’s yet) I have tested out some lighting too, as it’s very important in this kind of scene!

720p Version here

Tricky with this render to get the brightness near blacks to stay the same through rendering/comping/photoshop export for web it seems, but doesn’t really matter for now.

Its amazing how quickly 6 months can pass, suddenly makes one get back on the beast.
Cheers!

Hello there,

Thought I would make a post! It has been a while since the last one, but I have been working on the film recently, getting back into the swing of it mainly on unseen stuff though - so nothing exciting to show unfortunately, though I might just post some stills of pre-vis sets etc.

Also there was a problem with the gallery/image dump, so that has been fixed now hopefully as I’ve updated the wordpress version and whatnot.

Cheers! Hope some people still see this.

For the junction environment I’m just going to share a bit the lighting set up, the passes I’ve used and the way they composite together.
If you want some more information about the passes I use, why and how they are composited togther, check out my compositing guides on my site here: Part 01, Part 02.

As a start, here is the compositing tree in XSI’s FxTree.

In the top left you can see the beauty pass, then following down from it the different ID passes and the colour corrections using those mattes. Then on the right there is mostly the depth, the background and the ambient occlusion with varies grading.
In the (bottom) left area there is some extras like glows from the street lights and the sky.

On the next series of images the node which is shown in the image is highlighted on the tree. Click on any of them to view a larger version.

The first image is the beauty pass straight from the render. The dodgy pixels around the edge of the sky/buildings, is the alpha channel that has been un-premultiplied and gets that sorted back again in the ‘over’ node when the background is added.
There is no GI or final gather etc. in the renders. The beauty pass is made up of infinite fill lights, and additional rim or specular-only lights which only affect specific objects too add some highlight and shape to some of the objects.
For instance the barriers on the islands in the middle, the church at the back, the traffic lights, and the bits on the near right side - they all have some additional lights, some just spec, some diffuse as well.

The following are the ID passes (at the moment) that are used to grade certain areas of the image, mostly just on the beauty render, but they can potentially be used at any point in the tree.

And the depth pass, this one is aliased as it is used in the comp, but also I render a version with no AA, which may also be a different range of distance from black to white, and at a very high resolution for the depth of field if there is some.

Ambient Occlusion which is then tinted and graded slightly (changing of the levels)

Using a multiply node, the AO and the beauty pass come together.

This is the same depth path, with a change of levels, and graded/tinted to be used as haze/fog type stuff.

The haze added!

The background, which is from a photo I have taken, but also painted up a bit, the building on the left is only still there as you cannot see it

The passes is merged over the background, notice that the dodgy alpha edges have gone now and we don’t get any artefacts, dark alpha edges around the buildings because of this process.

Grading, grain, and some nice glowy bits brought in from other passes are added and we end up with the final image.

Not too in-depth but I hope it is interesting to see some of the passes and a few techniques.

Cheers!