The intro's taking a little longer than I thought. A lot longer, actually, but it's my computer's fault. It seems to be taking its time on rendering the 3D portion of the intro - at about 1 hour and 15 minutes per frame. The 3D portion - since I don't think I've mentioned it yet - consists of this funky geometric ring thing (its actualy a pair of concentric tauruses cut in a spiral pattern, with rings woven between the two sets of bands, in alignment with the cross-section of the taurus) that I'm animating to spin about the center of its "hole" (to use a doughnut analogy), as well as changing the alignment of that axis to alter its orientation from about 45 degrees off of the horizontal to facing directly toward the viewer, at which point it becomes a circular "window" in which a quick video segment (I've already prepared the video frames, so they're ready to be composited in as soon as the 3D rendering is done) will be shown.
You may be wondering why I've gone and done something this crazy. One answer is that the particle-dissolve effect really didn't look all that great - so I came up with another concept in its place. The other answer is that I am crazy, and I'm (at least to some extent) doing this because I can. It will, however look really cool - and I am saying this on the basis of the frames that have rendered already, not just my imagination of what they're going to look like.
I am going to try, after the frame currently underway is done, rendering a copy of the model where I've specified a metallic texture for both the taurus-binding spirals and the rings held between them - because I have a feeling that part of the rediculous rendering time involved is due to the presence of translucent (and relective - but I at least turned off the refractive part) glass as the material for the cross-sectional rings. Because of those, the whole thing has to be raytraced, with a fairly long number of allowed collisions per ray - and raytracing takes a lot of CPU cycles, even by video standards.
The other thing I have already accounted for to speed up the rendering process is to make use of the redundancies in the ring's form by rendering only those steps in its rotation needed before I can loop back to an already-rendered frame. My framelist is on the other computer (the one that I'm listening to the fan noise of right now, as it's trying its best to not melt), but I've got it down to just over 20 frames that have to be raytraced, and the rest can be scaled, translated, and composited using much faster 2D methods.
The rest of the intro goes as follows:
A few raindrops come in from the top of a black screen and make some pretty silver waves (got this from the Princess Tutu intro - digital fansub source [no DVDs yet, to the best of my knowledge, though I hear there might be some on the way], but I've remastered those frames by hand to make them look sparkly and new for the new encoding).
As the last of the raindrop-ripples (I think there were four) fades out, some slightly wavy text (animated wavy, not static wavy) appears saying "The Instrumentality Project". This text, and all other intro text, is in the CAC Lasko font used for the video bumpers (I think Helen was the one who found it, not sure at the moment). This first title is also on three lines, with the word "Instrumentality" done up with some fancy outline-highlighting to make it stand out.
That text fades out, then some more text, also behind the same "water-surface" effect (I kept the amplitude low and the wavelength high, BTW, so the text is still perfectly easy to read) comes in with the word "featuring".
A similar visual pattern is used for each of our names, in alphabetical order, like so:
Soren Berg (sorry, I couldn't get my text-rendering app to handle the special Sweedish ø).
Kareef Huggins
....
Danial Steinberg
and (yes, there's a whole title devoted to the word "and")
Helen Ye
Then the text concludes with two more titles:
presents
Animasia (this text also has special-outline emphasis)
It's after this point that the 3D wheel/ring-thing comes into view, does its thing, and a bit of "fantasy" video is shown before the viewer "fies through the ring" (really just a cropping/resizing trick) and the first narrative fades into view.
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On a related note, all of this extra work on the intro (which is, after all, being animated with nothing but still images, shell scripts, a little Script-Fu [that's The GIMP's idea of a macro], and 20-somthing tediously raytraced frames of a POVRAY model) somewhat precludes any opportunity I might have had to refine the intermission (which had to be re-composited to reflect the unexpected change in the character chosen as the widescreen narrator) - so I'm just delivering a shorter version with no "thought bubbles" at all. Since the Intro is supposed to set the mood for the whole film, and the Intermission is something most people will either skip past or use as an opportunity to run to the restrooms or vending machines, I've decided that nailing the Intro is more important than trying to write a mini-comic into the Intermission.
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I'm still hoping to get the Fullscreen section out to you by tommorow night. If I don't find a way to speed up the rendering process, however, the sheer computational time required will be pushing that out to Wednesday. The good news is that the computer doing the rendering actually does have pretty good ventilation and cooling fans, so I'm not too worried about leaving it running full-speed for a day or two. I'll just open my window and put a towel under my door when the morning rolls around to give it some natural Rochester, NY refrigeration.
I might actually do that now - I'm somewhat surprized by how much heat two computers can throw off when you've kept both of them working almost full-time for an entire day.
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The end credits will be reusing the same 3D rendered frames. The image tiles are going to be displayed in the center of the ring - rotating with the "video" and "editor" images for each video being used as though they were two faces on a coin. This is only going to be faux 3D (I can get away with faking it where flat square things are concerned - just a couple of transformation tricks), so it will render in a matter of minutes, rather than hours. The text will appear on either side of the ring, with the "header" on the left side, and the "info" on the right like so:
Code: Select all
Editor: ***
** **
*** Editor's Name
Credits for things other than videos will have something else in the center of the ring. I actually didn't think of making those tiles until just now - but I assure you it will be something other than a semi-transparent portrait of Osaka's head.
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So there's a progress update, the story of why I might (possibly for more than the hundredth time) finish a day later than I thought I would, and a breif explanation of what I'm doing with the Intro and End Credits.
