Hey all, I thought I’d start a work in progress thread of the animated short film I am making. I’ll write more soon, but for now, let’s just straight into some images. These are all individual frames taken from a selection of shots recently rendered as ‘raw lighting’ renders, as in, they have not been comped yet, or have any sort of colour correction or LUT applied. The background is a 16k digital HDRI I made in Terragen and will also under go improvements for the final look.
Thanks!
Glad to see a wip thread of your short! This looks really promising, can’t wait to see more. I visit the website from time to time but there was not a lot of news. Happy to see that it’s still on the rails !
Thanks, I can’t wait to show and write more about it! Ironically, the lack of updates on the website is because I am spending every available minute working on the film itself, instead of doing things like this, showing the progress of it.
Btw, for the main robot character (named Grunt), every chain link and hydraulic is properly rigged and works as expected. Even those rubber pipes connecting the upper arm to the lower arm are cloth sims to get them moving and swaying in the wind while not having them collide with the geo.
Interesting material indeed. Will follow this topic with pleasure.
I see some fireflies here and there. Interesting to know, how you’re going to deal with that. Will you remove them in post or will you leave them to dance?
Yeah there are some fireflies when viewing individual frames. They will attempted to be removed in post (I have access to some very talented compositors), though, when seen in motion, it’s not too noticeable even as it currently is. The trade off in this is that I have to render roughly 11000 frames all at an acceptable level of quality while still being able to finish the darn thing 
Showing a hint of the antagonist, Captain Corliss ‘The Red Snake’ Vail, captain of The Black Cloud, using her hand cannon that moves around on spider-like legs. Most surfaces were created in Substance Painter. Well technically, I created a bunch of tileable textures in substance on a square polygon, did further adjustments in Nuke, then combined them using dirt and edge masks from Substance.
Texture and shader development of Captain Corliss ‘The Red Snake’ Vail’s head. Textures painted by Jennifer Kim (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-kim-4a35a131/), super talented artist who has worked on The Avengers, Pacific Rim and The Mummy.
Corliss will have hair and a hat, she’s not going to stay bald
The status of this task is an almost finaled state, just a few tiny updates to go, then on to the next task…
Here is the latest incarnation of the folder structure I am using for my short film, Cyan Eyed. A lot of these folders are automatically generated from Maxscript tools I have developed.
All up, I’ve written about 6000 lines of Maxscript for this film alone, which includes major tools such as a ‘Scene Build’ tool (part of my ‘Shot Tools’ UI shown below, lot’s more features in the rollouts that are collapsed) that automatically builds a scene from latest versions of assets, loads in the latest textures and shaders, brings in the latest lighting and camera, and then imports the latest animation data.
I have also written my own render layers tool (‘Cerl’: Cyan Eyed Render Layers) for Max that I’m considering of releasing publicly…still thinking about this one (UI shown below). I’ve implemented the powerful wild card system from Houdini for selecting objects. For example:
geo_* ^*cars* *_damaged
Selects all objects starting with ‘geo_’, then subtracts from the selection all objects with ‘cars’ in them, then appends all objects ending with ‘_damaged’. I can also add and subtract layers and selection sets in the same line by using different symbols. I can even access an external file list in a text file if I want to reuse a list that has hundreds of objects. For example:
&town ^%trees #C:\objList.txt
Selects all of the objects in the layer ‘town’, then deselects all objects in the selection set ‘trees’, then appends all objects listed in the text file ‘C:\objList.txt’.
All of this interacts with my folder system that basically manages itself through my Maxscript tools, I rarely have to create any of these folders manually. There are two main folder structures that I mainly work in, Assets and Sequences. I have included screenshots and descriptions below.
Final hair groom of Corliss (the antagonist) by Andrew Krivulya ([https://forum.corona-renderer.com/ index.php?action=profile;u=25325 ](https://forum.corona-renderer.com/ index.php?action=profile;u=25325 )), looks cool, huh? Also final head textures.
Some geometry issues on the neck are being fixed.
This is so nice! Do you get a timeframe for the finished short?
I plan to try to finish this film by the middle of February. I’ve been working on it since late 2014 >_<
Ryan, you make an awesome cinematic and I glad to be a part of it =) Can’t wait to see the final =)
Btw, please fix my Family name - Krivulya
Oops, fixed!
These are great ! So all the story will take place on this flying ship ?
Yup, most of the film takes place on the deck and in the hold of a skyship, the Black Cloud, captained by the feared pirate Corliss Vail.
Yeah =) Thank you =)
Btw, you did awesome shots =) Can’t wait to see the Prisoner render with a hair. And ofcourse the full cinematic =)
Wow! Looks nice =)
