The dog featured in Finnish newspaper

Here's something spotted in today's Helsingin Sanomat:

The 3D animated dog made at Talvi stands nice and centered in this brand new print advertisement. Feels incredibly satisfying to see piece of my own work featured in such a noticeable place.

Motion capture tests at Lume

Yesterday we had the chance to do some initial motion capture tests at media center Lume with our character models and placeholder sets. All the three main actors were there testing out their characters. It was also a huge learning opportunity for myself since I haven't been involved in motion capture shootings before. Was pretty cool to see everything in motion.

Overall it went relatively smoothly and we got some nice results even though we were faced with some minor technical difficulties (as always). The biggest hurdle is getting the characters made in Blender to MotionBuilder and back to Blender with their armatures and weights intact. So far the workflow seems to be working nicely.

Here's a 'best of' clip I made from the material:



The render quality is just from the viewport preview so nothing fancy yet. I think the movement works pretty nicely already and the handheld camera gives it a very realistic documentary style feel.

More to come.

Hellish city look developmnet

I've been busy working on the BA thesis animated film project for the past weeks. Character and set development with the team is undergoing nicely at a rapid pace at the moment. Lot's of cool stuff under the wraps.

Here's a new version of the sunrise shot. It now has textured assets and overall better compositing work:

The look of the base of the tower has evolved from this test quite a bit. It is now lifted higher from the ground plane and the spiraling forms of buildings covering it are more pronounced. Foreground still heavily work in progress.

Here's a closeup look at the vertical slums: