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Year
3
Mount Waverley, 2000-01
Even though my pace had accelerated rapidly now
that I had the whole day at my disposal, completion in time for
Siggraph,
let alone Christmas, was looking unlikely. As compensation I
would just
have to
make the film even
better. Despite
the lack of a deadline and a history of abandoning personal
projects, the commitment I had now made to this project meant that
there was no doubt in my
mind that it would be finished, and I cemented the fact by announcing
it to anyone within earshot. With my reputation now firmly on
the
line
it
was no longer a question of if
it would be finished, but when.
A
conclusion to the story of Stinky finally presented itself, and that
inadvertently provided a beginning. My first cut of the animatic was
around two and a half minutes long, and having felt that I was now
comfortably past
the point of no return it was time to get some feedback.
Fortunately the
feedback was positive, and I was able to press on unhindered by
any self doubt.
Now
that the film was
taking shape, more ideas spewed forth, and I was determined to put as
many of them in as I could. I made it my (somewhat futile)
agenda to find out, just
this once, whether a compromise-free result was within the
realms of
possibility.
I
also decided that, in order to maximise impact, I would buck the current trend
of
revealing
all the highlights and major plot points of a film before
it's even released, and would instead keep any information about the
film away from the internet
until it was completely completed.
After
an unscheduled relocation to Mount Waverley, I continued work on the
exterior environment that was to provide the setting for the beginning
of
the film. The
sky, created with a combination of painted backdrops
and Lightwave's Hypervoxels (volumetric particles) resulted in weeks
of testing, as the Hypervoxels always
behaved unpredictably, and
the only way to preview the results was to
endure ten or twenty minute low resolution render
tests.
Rather than animating thousands of individual leaves by hand, I turned to Lightwave's soft body dynamics system to generate the motion for the trees, which amounted to further weeks of waiting for the motion to be calculated. The time in between was spent tweaking the wind and material properties, and trying to convince a dynamics system which inherently wants to behave like jelly, not to.
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