So it's come to this

I was hoping for a happy ending, really I was, but last week I sent a very stern letter to the producers, telling them that I'm turning this over to my lawyer at the end of the month, and sending a cease-and-desist letter to the park.

My contract calls for payments at four milestones, the third of which was more than passed by the first week in August. The final version was delivered almost two months ago. And I'm still waiting for payment on the last two milestones.

I HATE to get a lawyer involved, 'cuz he's just gonna take money that I can't really afford to spend.

I hope the sincere promise of serious action will be sufficient to get me paid before I have to resort to lawyers.

There's still time for a semi-happy ending.

Pay up, Sucker!

Well, the word is in. They've finally accepted the animation I submitted about three weeks ago. Time to pack up the files and move along.

Now, if I could only get paid!

Defying the laws of physics

I got back from vacation last week and got an email from my producer. The geologists had finally gotten some comments together on the final animation. (I had one week to build it; it took them three weeks to watch it and write up their thoughts.)

They want major changes to four scenes, but the glaciation is the funniest. Currently, it shows a single pulse of glaciers advancing and retreating. There are only six seconds alloted, so it looks like a wave crashing on a beach, more than glaciers - 2.5 seconds in, pause a second, 2.5 seconds out. But what can I do?

The comments, of course, complained that A) the glaciers move too fast and B) that I need to show two pulses of glaciers rather than one.

And I am allowed to expand the section to ten seconds. That translates to five seconds per pulse which, as the mathematically-minded among you have already figured out, is actually less time than I had before.

My task now is to make the glaciers look slower, in less time.

Right.

Uh-huh.

Faux 3D, Pt II

The final shot of the animation has been up in the air for the entire project. Every round of revisions that came in had a new version.

When time ran out, I'd built no geometry for a final, high-rez render of the Tetons. I did have a photo that one of the geologists liked very much: a sufficiently high-resolution photograph taken - I think - from the Space Shuttle, looking down on Jackson Hole and the Teton range.

I pulled it into Photoshop and prettied it up a bit, then brought it into After Effects. I wanted something more than a static shot to end on. I thought about doing a simple zoom out (or in) but that seemed boring too.

After Effects (AE) does have limited 3D capabilities, although it's all based on flat planes. With a shot from space, I figured I could get by without any real 3D geometry to the mountains, but I did want to do a real camera move, rather than a simple zoom.

I've recently watched some great AE tutorials by Andrew Kramer, and one of them was on creating a simple 3D scene in AE. Perfect. Thanks, Andrew.

I created a flat plane in AE and adjusted it to match the perspective of the photo as best I could. Next I projected the photo onto it, from the camera's perspective. Now, when I moved the camera in AE, the perspective of the scene shifted realistically. It's a subtle effect, but it's something the eye notices when it's not there.

I added another 3D plane, just above the landscape, and put some Fractal Noise clouds on it, to give a little parallax as the camera moves and reinforce the illusion.

The results were pretty good and, better yet, pretty fast.

After Effects to the rescue

With no time for long renders and fancy effects, I turned to Adobe After Effects to put together as much of this thing as I could in 2D.

Green Screen

The first place I applied After Effects (AE) was in adding some animated magma effects to some of my shots. I used a 'green screen' approach, coloring the 'magma' portions of the texture pure, blank green, then rendering out the sequence. The photo above shows a frame from a sequence where a 'plate' slides under North America, pushing up mountains.

I rendered the sequence and pulled the results into AE. In AE, I created an animated 2D texture to represent the magma - using fractal noise, Foam, and vector blur, if you want to know - then composited it into the sequence, keying out the green and replacing it with my magma. This was much quicker to render since my magma was only 2D rather than 3D.

Smash Zoom

One of the new shots added recently was the massive explosion of the Yellowstone caldera. This is a big, important shot, and it has to show a lot in just four seconds. Moreover, it's an explosion. I love blowing stuff up.

I decided to render a single, high resolution shot of the landscape seen from above. I added some subtle clouds in AE, to help hide defects in the texture, which I had no time to fine-tune.

I played around for a while with particle effects and whatnot in AE, but I couldn't come up with a convincing explosion that I liked. What I needed were some nice, real world shots of smoke and explosion. Unfortunately, I didn't have any. Searching desperately I found a single, low resolution MOV animation of a 'cloud chamber' - basically white liquid being pored into clear liquid, giving the appearance of a roiling white smoke cloud appearing. It was cool, but not exactly what I needed.

For starters, it's from the side, and my shot is from high above the earth - wrong perspective. It's also very small - 320x200 or so - and my final animation is for HDTV. But it's the only real-world video I've got on hand, so I work with it.

I pulled the video into AE. It occured to me that an exploding volcano shoots stuff out in every direction from the center. So I made about 9-10 copies of my video clip and arranged them like spokes on a wheel, but overlapping. This created something that looked a bit like a flower, or a cauliflower. I created a mask to hide the edges and add some asymmetry to my 'flower.' I also offset the various elements in time, so that they didn't look as symmetrical when played back.

Next I added an animated 'bulge' using AE's Spherize filter.

I used AE's Bend filter, animated, to bend the smoke plume as time progressed (hopefully) making it appear that the wind was blowing the smoke in one direction as the explosion progressed.

I added in some of the AE particle effects for smoke and fire I had experimented with earlier, to create the initial explosion and add some interest to the cloud.

I added a simple shadow effect under the cloud, and gradually pulled color from the scene as the cloud grows, to give a sense of ... I dunno, but it seemed appropriate.

Finally, because I've been watching too much Battlestar Gallactica, I added camera shake and an unnecessary smash zoom to really liven things up.

The final results, from start to finish, took me only about four hours, but it's probably my favorite sequence in the animation.

You can see a small version of it here.

OMG! Crush time!

I know I've been absent for a while, but the hammer has finally fallen and the long process is nearing its end. I got a phone call from the director a week ago which said, in effect, "They've noticed that it's behind schedule and we need it finished next week."

!!!

I'm sitting here, patiently waiting for answers to some of my pressing questions - how many glacial pulses do we need to see? Is there a magma pocket there? Or the vertical dykes straight enough? And, suddenly, I've got to do 6 weeks worth of modeling, rendering, and compositing in the next 6 days!

I haven't even built geography for several of the scenes, as they kept changing drastically every time we got a new round of comments in from the geologists. I'd built a couple of landscapes that weren't going to be used at all. It's not like tearing up a 5 minute sketch; there's a lot of work involved.

So I decided to sit tight and wait for final answers before committing any more time to scene building.

And now this! YARG!

Everything fancy I was planning just got thrown out the window. I've got several scenes to finish - and, in some cases, to start - in just a few days.

One of the new shots recently added is a sequence of the Tetons being uplifted, seen from slightly above.

As the Teton fault moves, two things happen. The left/west side of the fault goes up and left, and the right/east side of the fault drops down and pulls to the right.

After fumbling about for a while, I decided to approach the shot thusly:
I created a flat mesh in Lightwave.


Then I bent this mesh - the right side downward and the left side upward, roughly matching the movement of the land along the fault. It doesn't look like much at this point, I know.

I saved both of these objects. Lightwave allows me to 'morph' from one object to another, over time, so I can start with the flat landscape and morph it into the bent, broken landscape.

Next, I employed another of Lightwave's tricks: displacement mapping. A displacement map distorts the mesh based on the light/dark values in an image. White is high; black is low. I created a displacement map of the region by pulling down a ton of DEM files from the US Geological Service. A DEM file is a 3D survey map of a given region. I used an application called 3DEM to stitch all the tiny DEM files together and save them as a black-and-white image. Here it is:


For the final animation, I applied the morph, over time, to break the landscape, and also brought in the displacement map over time, to push the mesh into the proper shape.

This left me with a completely flat landscape at the beginning, which didn't work, so I created a second, semi-random displacement map. The random displacement map appears at the beginning, then fades out over time, while the 'true' displacement maps slowly fades in over time.

Here's a sequence of five frames from the animation. The finished shot runs 8 seconds, or 240 frames.

(click to enlarge)


Since the landscape changes drastically over time, I made use of a 'procedural' terrain, rather than an image map. A procedural map creates colors based on (sometimes) simple calculations. For example, if the land is relatively flat, make it green. If it is steeper, make it brown. If it is very steep, make it white.

Two Monitors

I took the scary plunge and bought a smaller, second monitor for my system: a 19" SyncMaster 920NW. I was worried about what a pain it would be to set things up, but it turned out to be just as easy as everybody said it would be.

Note: my QuadroFX 3450 does have dual digital video out.

I'm falling in love with the second monitor, although the SyncMaster looks pretty sad side-by-side with my Dell UltraSharp. I may have to do my eyes a favor and upgrade it.

Here's a screen grab from a shot in progress, displayed across both monitors.

More delays, a bit more work

Yes, it's been a while since I posted, and it's not because I've been so busy rendering. We are still fighting over issues which should have been resolved at the storyboard stage - if we had a storyboard.

And now, the geologists at the other end have said, oh, yes, we forgot the explosion of Yellowstone, two million years ago. Add that bit in, will you?

Yarg!

I have made some test renders of a few scenes. Here is a frame from a sequence of early continents folding:


And here's a frame from a sequence of lava squeezing into spreading cracks:

Getting organized

It's been my experience that, when taking on a big project, you can't possibly be organized enough. I am so far behind in this project, without having really gotten started, that I've decided I'd better get organized quick.

Or maybe it's just my way of putting off the real work - I dunno.

Anyway, I've put together a shot list in Excel so I can track which shots are where, at a glance. So far, most shots are nowhere.

Waiting

Well, I way way way behind schedule. Because of the lack of a real storyboard, it's been hard to get everyone to agree on what we'll be seeing in the final animation. And because the 'chain of communication and command' is so long and spread out, it takes forever to get anything done.

The director told me last week that they'd hired a new guy who could draw and was setting him to work on some storyboard sketches, but I still haven't seen them and, when I do get them, that'll mean I've finally got the storyboard - something that was supposed to happen a month ago.

The animatic - basically an animated storyboard - was due 3 weeks ago, and can't be done without a storyboard to animate.

So the clock ticks and the calendar turns and I'm starting to sweat more and more over the mid-July due date.


Argh!!

Approved!

Despite my dire predictions, our "storyboard" has been approved by the client, so it's on to the animatics.

Of course, with no storyboard, I can't really build a 'real' animatic just yet(an animatic is just a crudely animated storyboard).

But I did put together a quick pseudo-animatic today, in Photoshop, using crude sketches, rendered frames, a few book illustrations and some images ... ahem ... borrowed from the web.

I incorporated some of the changes suggested by our geologists and ignored others. (Everybody's a movie director!)

My first take clocked in at about 70 seconds, which is right in the 60-90 second zone I'm shooting for. I'm hoping the producer will like it and send me a check, but I'm not holding my breath.

Now it's on to building the models for the pre-viz stage.

Behind schedule

Well, I'm officially behind schedule now. The animatics were scheduled for the 11th and we don't even have storyboard approval yet.

This means, of course, that my getting paid is now behind schedule too; completion of the animatics is my next payment milestone.

And, without a real storyboard to work with, I'm not going to be able to do a standard animatic, anyway.

For those who don't know, an animatic is basically just a PowerPoint presentation of the storyboard, timed to match the final animation. Sometimes, there's a tiny bit of animation; a frame might enlarge to indicate a zoom, or slide from side to side to indicate a pan.

But since our storyboard is just a melange of borrowed photos and book illustrations - which don't really match the final animation very well - I don't think that's going to work, here.

So I'll have to build all the models and do low-rez render frames to create a storyboard, then make the animatic of that. Which puts me further behind schedule.

It's frustrating and, since I'm not doing the storyboard, there's really nothing I can do about it. More work for me for the same amount of money.

Yet more Storyboards

I contacted the producer and got back a raft of comments from our ultimate client. They are exactly what I was afraid of.

Whereas someone can look at a pencil drawing of mountains, with an arrow pointing up and understand that it's, you know, some mountains, if you show them a photo of the Tetons or Mt. Shasta with an arrow, they'll see the Tetons or Mt. Shasta.

So most of the comments are about problems with the photos used in the storyboard, which are from the wrong date or the wrong place. These were only intended as 'placeholders', to show where the real scene would go, but they took it the wrong way, as I'd expected they would. Now they're all concerned about the scientific accuracy - something that I'm taking some pride in.

*sigh*

Storyboards

I began working on some rough storyboards at the beginning of the project. Then the client told me that they'd be doing the storyboards on their end, which disappointed me a bit, as I like to do everything.

But then I thought, hey, at least they're doing something for their cut of the money. Besides, I'm having trouble coming up with good angles for some of the shots. I thought it'd be nice to get some input from a 'real artist.'

But it turns out that the storyboard artist has 'flaked out,' whatever that means. So, instead of nice professionally drawn storyboards, I got a PowerPoint-type presentation with a mixture of renders I'd already done, and slides from our resident geologist.

And they were pretty terrible.

So now it turns out I'm doing the storyboards after all, which is what I wanted in the first place. Still, somehow I feel annoyed by the whole thing.

Admittedly, annoyed is my natural state.

Thinking backwards.

I’ve come up with a solution to the vexing problem of polygon count. (I’m sure I’m not the first to do it, so I’m not making any claims of ownership.)

The problem is this: let’s say you’ve got a 2 mile by 2 mile landscape and, to get it looking right, it takes half a million polygons. Okay, that’s a lot, but you can handle it.

Now you want to zoom out to 4 miles by 4 miles. If you want to maintain the same resolution, you now need two million polys.

Now zoom out to 20 miles by 20. Now you need 200 million polygons! That’s crazy talk.

And yet, in the opening shot, I want to do just that kind of pull-back: from showing about 5 miles of landscape to showing the entire earth. How was I going to manage that without a bunch of hokey-looking fades and convenient cloud banks?

And that’s when it occurred to me to do the whole thing backwards.

I’m creating the landscape using a ‘displacement map.’ That’s a grayscale image where brightness corresponds to height. White is high; black is low.

The landscape object, itself, is just a flat mesh of square polygons. The Lightwave renderer distorts this mesh based on the displacement map.

So if I shrink the displacement map, the landscape features shrink, which looks exactly the same as the camera moving away. Likewise, if I rotate the displacement map, it looks like the camera’s spinning around. The actual landscape ‘object’, such as it is, never moves at all. Nor does the camera.

This picture may give you some idea of what I’m talking about. It’s part of a screen shot from LightWave 3D. That tilted, black and white rectangle, is the displacement map. The much smaller green rectangle is the actual landscape object. As I move the displacement map, the landscape rolls across the landscape object.



I even linked the ‘sun’ light and some clouds to the displacement map so that, as it moves, so do they.

I’ve done some tests zooming in and out by a factor of ten, with some clouds flying by, and they look pretty encouraging.

And the whole things uses the one high-resolution mesh.

You can see an early test here.

The Process

I finally got the entire Tetons region loaded into one giant DEM file. Hooray. The process is so arduous, I feel compelled to write it down, for the cathartic value if nothing else.

SECTION A:
Open Firefox
Go to http://seamless.usgs.gov/
Click to view and download data
Zoom in on your region
Under Downloads, under Elevations, de-select 1” NED and select 1/3” NED.
Click the multiple template download button.
Set the template type to 7.5 Minute CONOS

SECTION B:
Click to select one small square on the map
Wait 3 seconds for the map to update.
Click submit

A new download window appears.
Click Modify Data Request.

Scroll to the bottom of a list of about 150 data types to locate yours.
Change the file type to GeoTIFF.
Click submit.

Click Download.
A new download window appears.
Wait 10-20 seconds.
Save ZIP archive.
Close second download window.
Close the first download window.

SECTION C:
Open the ZIP archive.
Locate and extract the TIFF file.
Delete the ZIP archive.

Open 3Dem.
Choose Open File
Select GeoTIFF
Locate and load the TIFF file
Choose Save As ASCII DEM
Save as a new file.

In 3Dem, choose Open File
Select ASCII DEM
Open all DEM files saved so far
Check landscape for remaining holes.

Back to Firefox
On the main USGS map, Click Clear Selections
Locate the grid cell corresponding to one of the missing sections of landscape.
Return to section B. Repeat. Many Times.

Finally done? Not quite.

SECTION D:
Now load the entire, giant landscape into 3Dem.
Change the landscape colors to run from black to white.
Resize the landscape to sufficient size for my displacement map.
Save the landscape as a BMP file, the only lossless format I can comfortably work with.

Now, fire up Photoshop.
Open the BMP file.
Save it as a compressed TIFF.

Finally, I'm ready to load it into Lightwave and actually do some work.

The Usual

I spent all last night downloading USGS data for the Tetons and the surrounding region. It's a slow, nit-picky and laborious process but I'm happy to have access to the data.

I got 75 out of 80 'grids' downloaded successfully, but that left me with 5 'holes' in the landscape. I identified the missing cells, downloaded them, integrated them into the others, and 3DEM - the app I'm using to work with USGS DEM files - crashed.

So I went to bed. A typical day here, I'm afraid.

3DEM rocks, by the way. I'm sure it's my fault. I'll try again today.

New Texture Samples

I thought I'd give an example showing why I need such ridiculous texture sizes. Here's the first frame of animation with the old textures:


And here's the same frame, using the new textures.


Here's a full earth, rendered with the old textures. At this size, they look just fine. But when the camera comes low, they weren't cutting it.

Cheating on textures

I'm working on one of the opening shots of the animation right now, one that features the classic 'pull out into space shot.' You know the one, the camera starts in looking down on a landscape and then pulls rapidly back to view the planet from outer space, usually passing through some convenient cloud banks on the way, to hide the joins in the footage.

The joins are necessary because any textures of sufficient resolution for the close-up would be ridiculously huge if you expanded them to cover the entire planet.

The pull-back was really suffering from the low-resolution textures I was using so I found a terrifically huge photo composite of the earth's surface. In fact, it was so big I could barely open it in Photoshop and Lightwave just threw up its hands.

I made a 50% version - still 10,000 x 5,000 pixels and rendered some tests and it looks better but, dang, that's a big texture.

My plan now is to cheat. Since only half of the earth is ever seen illuminated in this shot, I'm creating a version of the map that only covers half the earth, then repeating it twice. So if you looked where India should be, you'd find North America, instead. But you can't see that side so I'm gonna go for it.

I've actually done the same thing with the primal earth; to increase the apparent resolution of the texture, I'm just using it twice.

As the camera passes behind the earth, I want the nightside city lights to be visible, then slowly change into glowing volcanoes as the camera comes around the other side, at which point we've gone back in time to primordial earth.

I wasted a lot of time trying to get the nighttime 'light' maps and the daytime texture maps to combine on a single earth before I gave up and decided to do it in post.

I rendered a pass of the earth, then a pass of the earth with no sunlight and the light map applied, then a final pass of the primal earth. All three shots used the same camera setup.

Finally, in After Effects I placed the night time pass over the daylight pass, in Lighten mode, so the lights only show where the daylight pass was in shadow.

I laid the primal earth pass on top of those two, again in lighten mode.

I clipped the daylight pass while the entire planet was in shadow, so it is hidden before daylight reappears at the end of the shot. And it was as painless as that.

Fix it in post, that's my new motto.

More planet renders

Another day of fussing about and I'm getting pretty close to something I'm happy with. Here's a render of present day earth. That's North America at the upper right.


And here is my latest version of primordial earth. I dunno - maybe it needs more volcanoes. Still, it's at least starting to look like a planet.


I used the same basic setup for both renders. In fact, I used the same models. I just changed the maps and the atmosphere color to change our present Earth into its more primal self.

A new Earth

I know after my last post half of you lost all faith in me. Mark, you said, you seem to be totally lacking in talent and ability. That's a horrible planet!

Yes, yes it was. But I struggle ever onward against my disabilities.

I spent a couple of hours trying to fake up some good maps in Photoshop, but got nowhere at all.

It finally occurred to my to use Vue. I'd like to get some good out of it. So I created a simple landscape in Vue 6, and clipped off the bottom, giving me something like a group of islands sitting in the sea:



I applied a mountain texture to it, rendered it and saved it out for use as a map in Lightwave. Rendered up in Lightwave, it's a definite improvement over yesterday's effort, but the mountains look about 5,000 miles tall. A lot of that comes from the shadows rendered in Vue, but the texture is just too big.


So it was back to Vue to re-render the landscape with all the textures scaled down and with the sun directly overhead, so the mountains didn't cast those ridiculous shadows. Here's my second attempt, with some rough shading of the black oceans and a few spots of color thrown in for good measure:


And here's the resulting Lightwave render. Better. Closer. But still no cigar.


A little further tweaking of the lights, clouds and cameras, and we're actually getting close. That needs work, but it's 100x better than my first try.

Primal Earth, ???

I bob and weave like a savvy prizefighter, trying to stay out of trouble, trying to find a place on this project where I can land a successful punch. But I'm blocked at every turn.

Vue is too slow. I won't have storyboards for weeks. I can't figure out how to make slices of the earth.

So I thought I'd turn to something fun that I know how to do - planet making. I'm pretty sure I'm going to need a primal Earth for this piece, so I decided to build one in LightWave. First I jumped up on the web to do a little research on what the Earth looked like 3.5 billion years ago. (That's when the client wants the animation to begin.) And it turns out ... there's almost no information out there.

Remember Pangaea? That single 'super continent' that existed way back in time, before continental drift had spead the continents out to where we see them today? Turns out, that was only about 250 million years ago. That's only about 1/16th the age of the Earth, and long after life arose. Heck, there were dinosaurs tromping around back then.

That's not so very old at all. What about the other 15/16ths of the Earth's life? What did it look like then? Beats me. I can find vague descriptions of what was happening then, but what did it look like? Were there clouds? What color? Were there oceans? What color? No handy photo guides for me.

Starting from scratch, then, I created the most horrible primordial earth ever. It really sucks. I must start over again today.

Taking a slice

I'm currently struggling with the best method to create cut-away section views of the earth (like this one) which retaining maximum flexibility. I can 'deform' a landscape easily to conform to the actual Tetons, but I can't come up with a good way to mate the deformed top with the 'sides' of the section without leaving any breaks or seems.

I might have to render them separately, and "fix it in post."

Theft

I saw a PBS show on the Everglades tonight, and they did something pretty cool. The used a subtle split-screen, with real video footage on the top and computer animation on the bottom, showing 'above ground' and 'below ground' at the same time, and tying the animation in with the real world footage.

I liked it. I think I'll steal it. :)

Delays, delays

I've about given up on Vue as a major player for this project. It's pretty, but it's just too damn slow. This project is in HDTV 720p resolution: 1280×720.

I figure that high resolution frames will take on the order of an hour (or more) per frame. That means 60 seconds of animation translates into 75 days of render time. I don't have that kind of time.

In other news, I'm still waiting on the producer to get all the information together so I can really get started. He was flying up to Salt Lake City on the 23rd, to meet with the government liaison and the project geologist, but that's now been pushed back to the 25th. It's only two days, but the start date keeps sliding backwards a bit at a time, and the delivery date, mid-July, doesn't move at all.

I hate waiting.

Render Times

I've complained (at length) about Vue's speed. I thought I'd post a concrete example. Vue exports scenes in Lightwave format, so I created a simple mountain, exported it to Lightwave, and rendered it in both programs from more or less the same position.

Vue: (1 minute, 20 seconds)
Now, I'll be the first to admit that the Vue render looks better. But ... a lot of that is in the texture mapping and those texture maps were generated in Vue for import into Lightwave.

There are also some flaws in the exported Lightwave model. Again, that model was generated by Vue.

But look at the render times. 80 seconds vs 2.2 seconds. Lightwave is 36 times faster. There's a lot of room to tweak and improve the render. Lighwave will certainly do that kind of work. I just brought this object in, threw in a background sky, and hit render, without adding many niceties. What's going on in the Vue renderer that makes it so slow?


Lightwave (2.2 seconds)


e-on has a version of Vue which integrates into Lightwave (or 3DS Max). I went with the stand-alone on the assumption that a stand-alone rendered would be faster than a program running under the hood of another program. Looks like I was wrong. I can 'sidegrade' to the integrated version, but that's another $400, money I'm reluctant to spend given how unhappy I am with this software.

Vue makes me so mad!

Vue continues to drive me NUTS. It is piggishly slow on my P4 2.8GHz machine with 1.5GB of RAM and Radeon 9800 video card. But that's not the worst of it. Oh no.

Vue allows you to place all kinds of plants and trees and rocks and houses and what have you in your scenes. Click on the TREE button and you'll see all the species of trees show in this screen shot. And that seems great, but ... it turns out you don't actually have all those trees, or most of those trees, or even half of those trees. Only the top two rows of trees are actually accessible; click on anything below that and you're taken to the 'online store' where you get the opportunity to buy that species of tree.

What the fuck is that about? This is outrageous! The 'for sale' trees aren't even visually identifiable. You have to click on them before Vue tells you that you can't have them.

Some categories are worse; some don't have any accessible items at all, just row after row of objects for sale. I have no objection to offering additional online content, but the way e-on is doing it in Vue is unmitigated horse shit! And the actual selection of objects actually included with the software is insultingly small.

Glad I got that off my chest. I'll end with a pretty picture of a maple, one of the few trees Vue actually ships with. Enjoy!

First Light!

My first render with Vue 6. It ain't much, but it's something.

I'm still feeling my way around in the program. To try and make the process a little easier on myself, I ordered training DVDs from Safe Harbor, but they STILL HAVEN'T SHIPPED THEM TO ME!!! ARGH!!!!!

So it looks like it's a slog through the ol' manual for me. :(

Today I received a new book, Windows into the Earth, co-written by Bob Smith (yeah, I know) who is the consulting geologist on this project. The book tells "The geologic story of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks," so it's a perfect resource for me. Plus, it's filled with those little sciency illustrations of rock layers and whatnot which I plan to steal from liberally use for inspiration for my animations.

Renders with a Vue

After a lot of research, I settled on Vue 6 Infinite as what seemed like the best 3D software for such a landscape-intensive project.

The software arrived today and I quickly loaded it up and got to playing ... I mean, learning.

And now I'm really scared, because this puppy is sloooooooooooowww. I've been doing most of my 3D work in Lightwave 3D and its render times are an order of magnitude or better than Vue's. Even moving objects around in a relatively simple environment gets all laggy on my venerable 2.8GHz P4 machine. Fortunately, I'm getting a new workstation soon, which should help a lot.

Granted, Lightwave doesn't have nearly so many features for this kind of project - trees, grass, USGS import, what have you - but I'm pretty disappointed with the program's performance so far. I'll have to figure something out or I'm going to be in big trouble when it comes to final render time.

Fortunately, I should be getting a new workstation in for the project in the next week or two. Hopefully, that'll help out a bit.

The Tetons Project

I am embarking on my biggest 3D project in quite some time, an animated history of the geology of the Grand Teton National Park.

I've always enjoyed reading 'behind the scenes' journals about a range of projects. I thought it was time I tried one myself.

It will give me a place to vent my frustration at the 1,000 things that will try to thwart me in the next few months and, hopefully, end in a proud success and lots of pretty pictures.

I'll attempt to post regularly, but I'm terrible at that kind of thing so no promises!