#alkathosk

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Blog updates coming up!

Blog updates.

I’m soon updating my blog to a new fusion of personal portfolio to a hub for projects and my endeavors with trueSpace and Alkathosk at “trinumedia” -  a basis for personal portfolio and projects - along with social compliments to my other projects I’m doing here in Colombia. You can soon find it at www.trinumedia.tumblr.com.

Trinum is latin for “three” and Media is what I want to work with, the 3 major areas of media - Linear Animation, Internet and Games (or a mix of) - or transmedia. If you want to follow me on twitter, you can at @alkathosk I’m really happy to start working on my own project finally, along side my current projects with a studio I’m working at. I hope this becomes something successful, entertaining and informative. This will mean I’ll be working harder, spending more time online and at work. But that makes me happy, and that is what it is all about.

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Finally managed to make a short little animation! I was pressed for time and I did it to try make my lady smile, but it worked! Was a fun little 5 hour project. Hope you like it! It was a good experiment to try use free software for the final result. I still have to work on his characterization, animation, and learn how to make him awesome. I am starting to think to use constant end value keyframes mixed with some bilinear and linear keyframs might bring up some nice fun animations. Due to TS being beta, the rig often swims around. I will have to find a way to avoid that, in animation techniques, or a new type of rig. But I have enough... for the time I had. I still need to learn how to move, hold, move, hold, and time the expressions right... I am still not there... so much to learn! I need some constructive critiques to give me some hints.

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One time keyframe layout. I am wondering how to save animations, and I did a little experiment. TS will not save rotation offset in clips, they won't work, so I will have to program jumps, runs, movement on the spot and then work the control parent to run it around and make it do things. The time is not set in this, the intermediate frames are not set, and there needs to be a lot of cleaning up. I am just doing this to relax, make a library of animations to work with. I have written down a large idea of libraries, and I'm still wondering how to make a modular animation clip library, but we will see. The idea is that the more dynamic the library, the faster it will be to pump out lots of animation and get lots of episodes fast.

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Shot 006

I have complete a rough animation for Shot 006. I am now running it through post processes and will soon add it to the sequence. I could do a better animation, but I wanted to get it done asap. I think I need to start working on other angles of the project, get things up in more frequent manner. I think I can have one more shot, a look away shot of what grabs his attention, then I will leave it at that. I will also work more on the folley or have my friend work on it tomorrow. Then I will work on strictly characterization animation and clip animation to store in a library, making future animations quicker. It's good to think ahead. I also need to sit down and think up some good stories, idea. I would love your input!

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Free Motion Blur

This tutorial takes focus on stopmotion image sequence or game-engine rendered image sequences and adds a motion blur in post-production, for FREE. The need for motionblur in a progressive-frame image sequences (in other words a video) helps the audience perceive the video's movement as something smooth and natural. Whether in a shootout, in a car chase, or just trying to reach for a falling plate before it hits the ground or looking at someone's face talk, our eyes naturally develop what we sometimes know to be something like tunnel vision, with a dynamic focus that increases frames per-second on the area most important meanwhile the rest is processed at a seemingly lower framerate, molding images into a non linear blur within our brain. Light information through time is stitched together dynamically with an average of 15 or 16 frames per second, but sometimes we can perceive up to 100 or more frames per second depending on the stimuli. Our brain does a lot of post production image processing almost realtime and dynamically! (It even removes your nose from your common eyesight when needed!) Further more, under stress, or adrenaline, or even viewing someone we don't like, our brains can compensate and increase the interpretation of light through time dynamically according to need. We do this to work better within 3D space and time. In order to simulate this in common media and with normal cinematography, the sense of movement is captured with high framerates from 24fps to 30fps to now the new 48fps or higher, for example games are typical for having very high frame rates also from 30fps to higher frame rates of 125fps. All this about frame rates is not including the shutter speed, the interlacing methods and other systems to simulate fluid motion to our eyes and thus deceive our brain. I recommend reading up on it, it's fascinating. But it is understood we perceive fluid motion post 20 frames per second. It is difficult to find the common belief that we cannot see higher frame rates than 30 fps, but due to our biological nature of how our eyes work and how our brain processes images and where technology pushes itself prove the latter otherwise. References: http://amo.net/NT/02-21-01FPS.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

But without further to do, we are sticking to 30 fps for typical HD media, from youtube to the television. But we still need to simulate this dynamic approach to our eye's visual post-processing. When we view 3D animation or stopmotion without motion blur, we often perceive it to be choppy, unnatural or artificial, which is true due to the density of frames flashed in front of our eyes. We need to do some of the work for our brain and create dynamic melding of our sequence of images, where something that moves quickly or where our surroundings change quickly become blurred. But to do this in stop motion or in a sequence of frames with no blur is difficult. A quick solution is onion skinning, but like the example below, it proves to be still quite jarring:

But understanding the concept, using frame blending, is a simple solution.. but it is not good enough for our taste. Sometimes our eyes see the jitter, and it will look to be of very low quality.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_blur http://www.examplesof.com/photography/motionblur.html

So we need to begin using MV tools with VirtualDub and Avisynth.

First things first, install the latest version of VirtualDubMod, then install the latest version Avisynth, they are all free.

Download MVtools2 and extract them to the Plugins folder within Avisynth. This is also free. I'll provide links below

Afterwards, you then need to open a text file editor of choice (notepad will do fine) and write the following code:

directshowsource("_______________.avi") super = MSuper(pel=4) backward_vectors = MAnalyse(super, isb = true, lambda=1750, truemotion=true) forward_vectors = MAnalyse(super, isb = false, lambda=1750, truemotion=true) MFlowBlur (super, backward_vectors, forward_vectors, blur=75, prec=1)

Write the filename you need within the text file and save the file as an *.avs file.

-----Beware, before continuing you may need to save your video in a YV12 or YUY2 codec as it may request it from VirtualDub before the filter. I encoded the prior video as a YUY lossless codec (free) without any problems to then run the script in VirtualDub. (link below) Generally it is best practice to use standard definitions with multiples of 16 pixels by 16 pixels and you won't have any problems.-----

Load the script in VirtualDub or VirtualDubMod and viola! Save the AVI as you'd like (I recommend the Largarith Lossless Codec - also free for low AVI file sizes and no loss in quality)

Convert to a high quality MP4 (h,264) file and upload to Youtube using FreeStudio free avi video converter.

The final result will look something like the following below:

Many thanks to Taylor Thurlow Reference Tutorial Reference: youtube.com/watch?v=hhCAINA8_Y4 *******DOWNLOADS:********* VirtualDubMod: Used for video compression and final rendering http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdubmod/files/ VirtualDub: Used for video compression and final rendering http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdub/ Avisynth: Used for motion blur options and scripts http://avisynth.org/ MVtools2: Motion blur toolkit http://avisynth.org.ru/mvtools/mvtools2.html CODECS Lossless Largarith - http://www.lags.leetcode.net/codec.html YUV lossless - http://www.yuvsoft.com/2d-technologies/lossless-video-codec/ Other: http://www.free-codecs.com/ACE_Mega_CoDecS_Pack_download.htm http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow/?source=dlp http://codecguide.com/download_kl.htm ----------------------------- WANT TO COLLABORATE? http://www.draisestruespaces.tumblr.com/Alkathosk/Project BLOG http://www.draisestruespaces.tumblr.com FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/Alkathosk TWITTER http://www.twitter.com/alkathosk GOOGLE+ http://www.gplus.to/Alkathosk

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Currently working because I can't sleep..

Working on animating a little more. Decided to change my video editing software to Blender, as it's non linear track system is very handy for video clips. I had a talk with my dad, who produces films and works with puppets told me you only need crossfade/to-from black/cut in the whole movie, sometimes something fancy for the effect, but that comes later. So.. I found some animating problems, as the rig corrupted when I tried to rotate and move a translation joint.. which can't be done. I have to learn how to use rotation set in IK controls and not in the dynamic pose tool.. Odd. Need to work on the voices and sound setup, no idea what I'm going to do there, but maybe with this mini pilot I can get some friends animated to join the team.

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Tentacles animation experiment doubling as a shot in the small short for Episode 1! I used two tracks for this one, and I'm finding out that it will generally only keyframe joints that have changed values within the skeleton, that is a relief. The software still has potential.

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This is the second shot I did this afternoon. I am still working on the workflow, and in moments like these I wish I had a better computer than my dualcore, thus HD and better quality. But here we go, 480p widescreen! I have yet to work on the sound, but I think I will do that later, want to join? I'm also thinking to document and create a tutorial on how to do this, not sure how I'm going to do it, but maybe a video and a pdf file with the included links and project files may come in handy, so people can be more a part of this, and have incentive to follow. I actually think this would be a great idea.......... == Esto es mi segundo toma que hice este tarde. Aun estoy trabajano en el flow de trabajo, y en momentos como esta quisiera tener un mejor compu que lo que tengo que es dual core. Si tenia uno mejor podiera hacer la animacion con una calidad mejor y en HD, pero alli vamos con 480p pantalla ancha! Aun tengo que hacer el sonido, pero creo que lo voy hacer mas tarde! Quieres unir? Tambien estoy pensando documentar y crear un tutorial en como hacer eso. No se como lo voy hacer, pero depronto con un video o un archivo pdf con link y archivos incluidos. Creo que podria salir como una herramienta util, para que la gente se involucra mas en eso, y tienen mas incentiva seguir el proyecto. Creo que es un gran idea.........