Beauty Approximations

OK, if I would amputate both my arm tomorrow and loose all my 3d skilz I would feel pretty fine with it as "What goes up" is now in a state of release. See the whole thing here. Maby I will fix some things but to be honest that will only be for my eyes. Tonight we live like it was pre peak oil! Beers on me!

Update with coal shoveler and some small comp edits. Rest of the 3d shit this week then some 2d polishing next week It's a bit stressfull with my proffesional project sharing deadline but last week I made a calander mistake and thought I only had one week left when I actually had two, so I worked both Saturday and Sunday and now I'm in pretty good shape for finishing up for real.

Now with credits and title screen. Now I will go over to just polish what's allready in there which is normally a faster process.

In it's full length , just missing some animation now but Camillo; use this as a final. Btw, using computers without a functioning right hand is fucked, I'm sure I or my company could get a support for it.

Quick test for title screen

Final transition. Now I just need to add a transition from the last frame to my world map image and Bob's your uncle.

Plane falling apart test.

Quick A to B of the morph effect after the implementing the stuff from the weekend. It seems like this is moving towards the look of a usual image blending tool, where you build up patches by tracing lines in two images and then moving the patches towards each other while at the same time blending the source image. The offen used facial morph effect is a good example of this. Though this is made in a rather different way I was hoping this would carry more of a cool unique liquid feel to it. I can still improve it by generating a better blending mask from the simulation. Certain areas can blend faster depending on maby position, colour or velocity but the best 2d morph tools produce results with similar coolness so I make this as clean and quick as possible. I may still do something with it for the final scene.

Did a version w the end frame , sorry about the codec, it's proper shit. And a quick mesh test to maby mix in as a inbetween state.

First test of an element that should help the transition from graph->world map. Someone mentioned impressionism, which is good as I've been pushing in that direction. Will do some tweaking to this, I believe there's a big potential of variations of this and I might use it more subtly in the fade out in the end scene

FINALLY getting some results on the plane dissintegration, ended up doing it rather manually instead of using smart automated stuff from work.

Camera shows left half then pan over to the right. FIN. I wrote something really long about finishing projects and the inner purpose that carry me through, I cut it short instead. It's not for the fun of it.

Generall update. Fixing glitches and added some love to the ending. Things left to do before first final. -some kind off explanatorial for the "peak oil" concept -better framing for guys dealing oil/money, -scrap glow on dollar sign -fix transition between city/planechrash -show cabin in airplane -animate guy that being shot at in airplane -coal for coaler -lighting for plane wreck -at least two more animated windmill guys -plane brakeing Not a lot really. If they keep letting me sit and wank around at work I'll be done next week.

A general update (94MB) , fixing transition glitches and minor stuff. Small step for me, big step for the film I guess. Going back to old files and pushing render is allways a scary thing as I tend to redo the whole segment. I guess that some kinda professionality has been forced upon me as I find my files very manageable and organized. Strange. It's like coming home and wondering who's cleaned your room. Thx to the the progress this week I'm probably getting a working version the nearest weeks. Found this old thing though, I think it had a realistic and sharp quality that I've been walking away from. Maby I should reserve some time to build that in.

Worked on the BG element for the shopping segment.

Animated a couple dudes, the process is going faster then I've could have hoped for, though I've skipped the last polisihing step for them all as I expect to get some comments from my coworkers who do character animation proffesionally. Still missing the dissintegration part but here's a good preview of the last scene (the last guys are putting up windturbines which they then hold onto). Also updated the full preview (70 MB). A brief time estimation says I've got a first full feathered final film in ~5 weeks.

Added an outline stroke for the shatterpieces to display the cracking.

Created a procedure for braking up the plane body. The cylinders represent the windmills and is copied up on a set of arbitrary chosen points, the object then is divided into shards around those points leaving one platform for every point. I'm thinking of adding some secondary stuff to this but I think I want to animate the shards first

Animated the shooting guy in the airplane. Will do for now.

Please bare with me for a while, things are just too much to contain right now and I need to spread the load. (I may wrap this up as an article, hence some repetitions from last rant). The oil prices could act as a storyteller of modern history. Much conspiracy, war and drama unravels around it so when plotting the price development for last hundred years it's no surprise it's looks more of the readings from a Richter meter in San Fransisco then a clean schoolbook example of demand/supply. However, the oil market has since long left the cloud of confusion whipped up by the Iraq occupation and is forced to look at other explanations to last years development. Logistic problems, lack of investment and of course manipulation from the undemocratic states (read "non marketized economies") in OPEC has been pointed out by analysts as sources. All leading to the same conclusion, we've faced a temporary glitch that's just an idle phase before the invisible hand arrive...