POST 37: THE BASIC REBUILT CHURCH

   I actually still don't know exactly what colors and textures will work best for the walls and ceilings, and that will evolve with time as I add 3D architectural detail: columns, arches, pediments, altar, niches, pulpit, balcony, organ, etc...
  So I used the same fairly basic irregular red ochre texture and friezes top and bottom all around the church, and the same blue vaulted ceilings, except for the Altar wall which I want to be different to give a sense of orientation within the church:

     The first thing I want to do is add arches and flat columns. So I created patterns in Photoshop that will be bent using Ray Tracing in AE and fit to the inside curve of the arches adjusting x,y,z scales separately:

     The first try using column textures matching the walls doesn't please me because they blend into the wall too much, so I will design columns matching the arches geometric patterns instead:

  Also, if I use the green/red/purple/yellow color scheme, which I like, the blue ceiling will have to turn purple or go, and I will probably custom design slightly different ones to fit the nave, the transepts and the choir. The walls will be eventually redone too with more geometric patterns on the frieze and wainscot

Post 36: REBUILDING THE CHURCH

   I enlarged the transept to match the nave and found a better Labyrinth to use as a Rosace at the center.
    On that footprint, I rebuilt with simple red ochre weathered walls and a more muted friese around the bottom. I used the same blue ceiling image, but customized it to fit the nave, the transepts, and the choir.
    Fitting the octogonal tower was still difficult, and I found that the straight line cut in the ceiling was wrong. I ended up creating a mask by trial and error so the opening seen from the top matched an octagonal template. Once I had the mask for the nave, I copied it to the transept and choir vaults:

    I then had to erase the texture I used for each half of the tower until it fit:

     Next came the hardest part, the dome... I need 8 triangular slices which will be curved using Ray Tracing. Instead of a solid texture, I chose to try an image I had by Anderea del Castanio:

   It is incomplete and distorted, but with a little Copying, pasting and cloning, I got a nice perfectly triangular slice:

   It turns out that once put in place around the 8 sides of the tower and curved in AE,  there is a gap between the slices, and they are a bit too long:

   So I used the Edit>Transform>Warp in Photoshop to shorten it and curve the sides out progressively until they touch:

POST 35: LESSONS FROM THE CHURCH TEST

    I am not going to push the test any further and build a dome which will need to be redone. I have learned enough to get to building the final church.
   First, in order to fit the octogonal tower properly and get clean edges with the vaults, I have to make the Transept the same width as the Nave. The only way I found  to do it  was to erase/clone part of the images in 2D until they more or less fit together in 3D. I tried masking, but the intersection between the octogone and the half cylindrical vaults was a double curve and I couldn't make it work. But I figured out that if I made the widths the same, the cuts in the vaults images would be a simple V shape instead of an empirical odd curved V:

 and I should get a perfect fit with regular curved cuts in the half tower images(I made a half octagon using ray tracing with a 4 segments setting in the geometric Options:

Post 34: Building a Test Churh

   I always like the idea of the "den/lab" of our strange "mad scientist/inventor" being in an old abandoned church with decaying frescoed walls and a vaulted ceiling.
  Seeing Terry Gilliam's "Zero Theorem" a couple of months ago confirmed my choice, and oriented my search for images and textures. The high vaults and the large cross shaped space will allow interesting camera moves, and can provide very dramatic images, and wonderful multicolored abstract backgrounds for close ups.
   Since I am working in After Effects, and am limited to single curves, the shapes have to remain simple.
I will use the basic cross shape:

    I cannot make a spherical dome over the crossing, but can fit in an octagonal tower with a dome in eight single curved sections:

   I decided to build a large test church just to see how it worked, and how AE handled the rendering on my faster solid state machine. That will also allow me to try different colors and textures. I started with a 6000 x 10,000 pixels canvas, which I had to eventually enlarge to 8000 x 10,000. THAT IS BIG!
   I placed wide angle virtual cameras at the four end of the cross to see what I was doing in space.
   I built the walls in Phoshop mixing textures, frieses, fresco fragments, paintings, and architectural details, imported them in AE, and put them in place.
   I used Ray Tracing to vault the ceilings and adjusted them to fit the width of the nave and the narrower transept:

   Here are various camera views of the space:

     A view down the nave from the door looking at the altar:

     A view down the nave from the Altar:

       A view of the Transept toward the right:

         A View of the Transept toward the left:

      A bird's eye view from the dome:

 A view from the floor looking up to the dome:

    A view of down the Altar from the nave vault:

       A view down the Transept from floor level:

Post 33: Time does fly doing "grunt work"

   I cannot believe my last post is dated October 11. It has been more than two months spent mostly collecting images to build my virtual 3D Steampunk World... I have not worked on the Spaceship at all.
   I have gone out and photographed old buildings downtown Birmingham. I have been scouring the Internet for thousands of images of old weathered buildings, outside walls(brick, stucco, stone, metal), inside walls(plaster, painted, stucco, frescoes), architectural details(cornices, pediments, columns, etc...), storefronts, doors, windows, signs, floors, chimneys, streets, roads, churches, frescoes, graffiti, paintings, water towers, interior spaces. My purpose is not to use the images as they are, but to cut them up in different elements, straighten them up, and build a collection of 2D building Parts. 
  For example, facades:

  Side walls:

   Architectural details:

   Tileable floor textures:

 Old storefronts:

 Large and small wall textures:

  Tileable street textures:

  Church and Roman frescoes:

  Tileable decorative frieses:

Post 32: Thinking of the Storyboard

   I am starting to think in terms of a "semi photographic" storyboard. Several virtual cameras in AE will let us try all kinds of shots very easily. When we get further along, we will need to shoot a bunch of stills of the final characters in different positions and build a bank of images from which to do the Storyboard. Every shot should be designed and rehearsed virtually before we even start shooting video of action. The great thing is that most of the time, each character can be shot individually in front of the green screen, and composited with the background in AE.

    We can shoot through the door towards the front of the ship:

or do a wide shot from the opposite side:

      We can have cameras outside the Spaceship looking in trough the portholes:  

or showing the outside City Scape:

Post 31: Adding a Room

  I first built the partition with two heavy metal doors, a communications center using a turn of the Century Blickendorsfer, two speaker horns and an old microphone, and various props. The old tower clock mechanism is just a placeholder for some kind of mechanical geared contraption to be constructed at a later stage. Then I added walls following the shape of the hull, extended floor and ceiling, and put a door to the engine room. This is a view of the partition looking into the new room:

     Next is a view through the arched door showing the empty new room:

    I am thinking of making it the private Cabin for "The Magnate", sort of a cabinet of curiosities with a bed and a desk. 

Post 30: Ray Tracing Small Contribution to the 3D World

 By turning 3D Ray Tracing on, an extra geometry tool becomes available to bend a flat image. I used it right away to wrap the skyline around the Spaceship so it appears continuously trough all the windows of the control room as the camera pans left to right:

    I will try to use Ray Tracing next to build brass cylinders that will hopefully work better than those made by stacking 1000 rings.

Post 29: A 3D Airship Control Room Test

    The 2D Test Control Room I built a couple of weeks ago was not very big, and my original intention was to rebuild a larger one in 3D in order to be able to retain detail while doing close ups with the virtual camera. However, the rendering problems I encountered with the 3D oversize Spaceship in After Effects, which led to the $3000 computer upgrade, made me decide to pursue the test for a while and build a basic smaller 3D Control Room using the smaller elements already on hand. I just used basic flat panels following the shape of the hull at the front of the Airship and placed several flat figures in the 3D space:

   I am concerned with the position of the feet of the  live characters. They have to be on the same horizontal line, as anything below floor level(the green line) is cut off. The problem is particularly acute with the two characters fighting, and it will be much more noticeable with lights and shadows turned on:

  It may be best to avoid as much as possible shots showing the feet.

  I then played with a virtual camera doing a 60 degrees pan. I had to angle the flat figures about 20 degrees left and right to keep the perspective looking realistic:

  I rendered a 60 degrees pan left to right:

 and a dolly in going between two forward figures getting about as close up as possible to "The Leader" while retaining reasonable definition:

 Matching virtual and real camera moves is going to be difficult, and may not be necessary. We are not a Hollywood studio, and there is no way we can create a fully realistic mix of real and virtual, but I don't mind at all having a slightly cartoonish look, almost like an animated comic strip. The whole thing is fantasy anyway, and we have to somehow take advantage of our limitations to create a unique look.

Post 28: The Quest for Speed

  Well, I finally got all my hardware in today, and quickly got everything installed in the machine. Replacing the two bulky Radeon graphic cards by the single Nvidia K5000 allowed me not only to plug back in my old BlackMagic Intensity card (I had to remove it to fit the two Radeon when I went with 4 monitors), giving me back HDMI in and out. It also gave me access to my third PCI slot, and I immediately ordered a two ports eSATA Card, and an eSATA 4 bay enclosure to use the four 1TB hard drives I just took out of the MacPro as quick access storage.
   I made my four new 480GB SSD's into a Hardware Raid 0 Array, and installed Mountain Lion on it. 
   I had a bit of a hard time finding the right CUDA Driver for the new graphic card, and getting the different preferences set properly, but finally got it done. 
   I was going to use the SSD in the optical bay as the Cache for After Effects, but for some reason I do not understand, it does not appear in the choices.
  Early tests show the machine is definitely much faster, but I really expected more and am at the moment somewhat disappointed. I need to figure out the bottleneck.
   The Blackmagic Speed test shows Write speed about triple and Read Speed almost 4 times that of the old machine with two hard drives in a RAID 0:

   But it's barely twice what I was getting with the first single SSD in the optical bay. I was expecting a Raid 0 of 4 SSD's to give me close to 1000.
   I guess the CUDA acceleration doesn't show on the tests.

Post 27: Rendering Test

    Just as a test, I rendered a two seconds clip with the Airship turning across the screen and the virtual camera panning. It took about 3 hours to render.

Post 26: Trying to Build a Larger World

   Ideally, in order to be able to pan, do wide shots, dolly in and out, track, and zoom in, my  3D  Cityscape where the Airship is going to fly needs to be VERY BIG. The airship itself needs to be very big and in full 3D too, so I can do close shots of the protagonists on the deck. We are going to be shooting with a full HD 1080p virtual camera within that 3D space.
    I didn't know just how much I could push my maxed out mid 2010 Mac Pro, so I designed everything in a 10,000 pixels x 5000 pixels. That's BIG compared to the 1920 x 1080 stage I used for the Light Dreams Architectural Projection. The ship itself is 10,000 pixels long:

   Furthermore, as explained in a previous post, I attempted creating brass cylinders by stacking 1000 rings 3 pixels wide.
    All went well for a while, but then I started turning on shadows, and things slowed down to a crawl… I checked my Raid 0 two disks array speed with Blackmagic Speedtest, and  get 140 MB/s write and 120MB/s read.
    I have to do much better, and have been searching for a way to speed things up, other than buying a new $12,000 Mac Pro... As a first step, I ordered an OWC Mercury Electra 480GB SSD, which by the way is on sale right now for only $219(I paid $279 a few days ago!), and a multi mount to install it in one of the optical bays I am not using anyway.
   I will make it my boot drive, and see how much faster that makes the machine. I am expecting around 250MB/s, and really already know it won't be fast enough, so I am looking for a better way. I am thinking of replacing my 4 internal hard drives by the same OWC SSD's, and doing a raid 0 over the 4 SSD's. That might get me up to 900MB's for about $950...
  My 2010 Mac Pro only has 3G SATA 2 connections. But I just found this article that explains how to change them to 6G SATA 3, which would allow me to use 6G SSD's instead of the 3G's. According to the article, that could bring the speed up to 1600MB's… But they are almost twice as expensive, and it would require replacing my Raid card, and total up about $1400:
   An important bonus is that the new raid card has an external mini SAS 6G port, which could connect to one of these enclosures, where I could use the 4 original 1TB drives from the MacPro.