New Perspectives

I received this awesome book titled Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives just recently.  It's a collection of essays from different writers about the various themes and subjects of Kubrick's films. The pages are full of interesting behind the scenes making-of info, script revisions and other cool details. There's also some glorious full-page images from the films featured on the pages.

Through the years, I've grown to become a huge fan of the most notable Kubrick films (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clockwork Orange, Shining, Eyes Wide Shut etc). They're all crazy films but still very much compelling.

Rölli ja Kaikkien aikojen salaisuus

I had the chance to do some 3D modeling work for the just released Finnish film production called Rölli ja Kaikkien aikojen salaisuus. We started the post production work roughly a year ago and my duty was to create animated characters and some set extensions for the film. All in all I spent a few months working hands-on in the production. There's some pretty fun and entertaining moments in the film. Check out the promotional material below:

Siili Suhonen, one of the 3D animated characters

Divine Consultants update

Here's a brand new animated playblast from one of the scenes from the Divine Consultants short film:

And a breakdown of working with motion capture in Blender.
Note the realtime streaming of animation data in the viewport:

Achieving the NPR look

One of the goals of the Divine Consultants short film project has been to try and achieve a non-photorealistic look with our 3D assets. Something along the line of Telltale's Walking Dead, Wolf Among us, Borderlands and other stylized video games. A look inspired by realtime graphics that's pushed a little bit further with offline rendering and heavy compositing. Generally this means having line art in the character textures but also rendering some kind of cartoony outlines.

So far the most efficient way to do this is to use the normal pass; blurring the normal pass a slight amount and then comparing the difference to the original image generates lines where there's details. This black and white image can then be further adjusted and multiplied on top of the original image.

Here's how the passes look like:

Character's beauty pass

Normal pass

Generated outlines

NPR look development

Here's a brand new test shot for Divine Consultants. Testing out a more stylized and saturated NPR look with outlines. More about the development in a later post.. And don't mind the audio; it's just a guide for the voice overdubbing.

Shot development for Divine Consultants

I've been insanely busy working on all things related to Divine Consultants. Modeling, texturing assets, preparing scenes, doing simple animating and rendering frames + compositing them. The amount of work is just insane. But it's cool ...and even fun at times. Hah.

Here's a couple of new test shots that I made for the project:

Motion capture and retargeting the face

Here's my first proper test of using cleaned motion capture data and facial retargeting in Blender. Voice acting is still based on the on-set recording; the audio will be dubbed later.

Overall, I think the expressions work pretty nicely in sync. Rendered using Blender's native viewport.