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.