So, this blog has been pretty quiet for a couple of months. Hydralab has been busy with a number of other projects (which we hope to put up soon), and also with developing our pipeline tools.
At the same time, for the last 6 months, we’ve been working with the Danish Film Institute, through their New Danish Screen initiative, and spending some more time with the script. The focus of the story has sharpened considerably, and we’re now entering our second development phase, where I hope to test out some of my ideas.
We’ve also stepped back to rethink the production process. I’ll post more on this later, but our new process puts a considerable emphasis on a robust previs, with a skeleton crew, before any production begins.

Above is a recent motion control clip of one of our city sets (shot on our loco rig).  There’s a bit of compositing on the movie above, and we have a test running with 15 CG characters in the scene to see how much animation we need to put in for the scene to read believably.  If we get around to lighting that scene before production starts, I’ll put it up here.

Below are some more of the reference plates from the shoot, as well as shots from other city sets in progress.  The stand-in figures are built by the talented Hanna Habermann who will be joining the project again in January for the rest of the shoot.

We’re now recruiting for the positions listed above.  These are on-site positions, although I’ll also consider remote work, if the experience is at a high level.

In addition to the above, we’re trying to gather interns for the layout and scene setup work.  Potentially, there is also some shot work, and on-set assisting, depending on your skill set, or how the work goes during production.

The work will happen at our studios, which are located within the Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark.  The school has a vibrant community of students and professionals, and attracts talented people from around the world.  It’s an inspiring creative environment.

The production runs from February to August, although we’ll be looking for interns to start as early as January.  The other positions run from two to three months.

Mail us at the address above (in the second postcard image).

These are some of the images of one of our 1:24 scale city streets.  There are also some images of props, courtesy of Moddler, that we’ll be receiving in the near future and incorporating into the sets.  These sets are, as most things on the project, in process, and we’re currently adding more text (signs, placards) and color to bring more life to the environments.

One of the problems we’ve discovered is that one can never have enough studio space – the shooting space has turned into a labyrinth of metal rails (for the motion control), computers, sets, lights, flags, bounce cards, and our monolithic fill dome (which we’ll use to try to hit the roughly 7:1 key/fill ratio we want for our outdoor environments).

Below are some more city shots, and some of the bedroom (which we’ve started shooting), and of the studio. There’s also a forced perspective shot – from the kitchen to the street, where we set a 1:24 street outside the 1:12 kitchen.

So, we’ve more or less finished the first version of our file browser – a custom Qt/PyQt interface written for the project primarily by Mikkel Jans.  Above is the version view component of the browser.  The browser is the start to managing our pipeline data processes – publishing, versioning (I’ll get into that below), launching files, and connecting (at the moment through socket interfaces) with our pipeline applications.

Versioning:

We’ve chosen to use Mercurial, a distributed version control system, for our file versioning.  A user might typically save, say, a Maya file dozens of times during a day, but she’ll commit a new revision only a handful of those dozen times.  Each commit requires a comment which describes pertinent information about that commit, and the user is able to revert to any commit in the history, or restore a commit as a separate file to a local folder.  Branching is also possible, which means that it’s relatively simple to ‘try out’ ideas in your work files.  In a typical programming environment, you might then merge that branch with your main branch, but it’s a bit more difficult with Maya or Shake files to merge through a text editor (so we’re not addressing that aspect yet).

We’ve also written a standard view into our browser which displays the revision history on a selected file, with a visual graph that displays the DAG (directed acyclic graph) of the file history.

What this means is that we don’t add user names or version increments in our naming convention – each file’s history is saved in a mercurial repository, along with comments, usernames, and other tags that we include in the changesets.  Since mercurial saves only file differences, and compresses that file history into a binary format, the entire mercurial repository for a file, including dozens of commits, is usually considerably less than the size of the actual file (at least for most of our work files which are saved in ascii formats).

Mercurial forms one of the components of our pipeline.  It allows us to easily roll-back assets, keep track of asset relationships (dev -> publish), monitor user activity on work files, and have an overview of the different iterations a file goes through.  It’s relatively lightweight, cross-platform, and integrates well with our primarily Python based setup.

So, part of our recent work has been developing trees for the film.  Below, you can also see some of the grass tests, using fake fur, and a base of different colors.  The “trees” are actually bushes donated by our local cemetary (by a very friendly and helpful group of caretakers), which were on their way out to the trash.  We’ve stripped them, reshaped them, and added bulk with various spice leaves (ground parsley, coriander, and other green/yellow dried spices).  Bente (who you’ll notice standing in the pictures) has systematically developed a process for detailing the many trees that we see in the film.

Also pictured are Charlène Barré (responsible for a number of the props), and Sian Puckett (our new Spanish intern).

These are some of the recent miniatures props we’ve been building in our in house workshop, led by Bente Laurenz Jacobsen, and with Charlène Barré, Karen Rohde Johansson and Israel Hernandez.  These stills are just progress shots taken during our dailies – which means there’s significant noise and shallow depth of field in most of the shots.

So, John Vegher, founder of Moddler (among other things), has generously offered to rapid prototype the props for our 1:24 scale outdoor sets.  Above is our first prop, a bench which we modeled in Maya, detailed in ZBrush and then sent on to Moddler.  Below is a turntable of the ZBrush model.

The idea is to ship the props over here and paint them before they integrate into the sets.  We have about a month left before the outdoor shoot, so we’ll be spending some time putting all of the parts together.

Clearly from the pictures, the results are fantastic.  This process saves us a tremendous amount of time building the props at the small scale, and also, having to re-build versions of the props in 3D in order to match to.  More photos below.

MAKING OF:

At the top is a version of the test with some color/texture, and simple shaders.  I’m also posting a “Making-of” so people can follow some of the integration process.  These are both roughs – there are comp, animation, and render errors, but are nonetheless interesting for us.

While I think the test got the crew used to the general pipeline/workflow, aesthestically we’re still a bit off.  At the moment, this hits closer to something from Monster House, or Polar Express.  I’d like to move more towards stop-motion, and we hope to get in some animation studies over the next few weeks, spending time with some shots from the fantastic Madame Tutli-Putli.

At the moment, the textures are mostly without detail (both in the diffuse and specular), so we’ll be working to increase some of the sophistication.  We might also spend some time with the shaders, although I’m not yet convinced we need anything more than a blinn, some fresnel, and hi-detail textures.

We’ve now got our own motion control rig set up.  It’s based off of the last rig, which we shipped down to Studio SOI, who are using it for some exciting projects.  The test above is from a demonstration we gave to the Danish Film Institute earlier today.  There is a bit of subtle shaking in the shot, which comes from us handling the rig while the move was in progress.

Below are some recent tests of the trees Bente Laurenz Jacobsen (who is pictured below) is building for the project.  We discovered that ambient daylight is difficult to recreate indoors, so we built a large rig (like a flash umbrella), that we will be stretching cloth over and hanging above the sets for the day shots.  The shots below represent both the indoor light tests, and some outdoor shots.  The environment around the workshop provides an interesting backdrop to the shots.

There are also some shots with Nancy Munford and Karin Ørum who came up for a weekend in February to finish work on the street sets.

The stairs on the house were some of the last items that got painted – hence they’re still foam in the pictures.