Weekend Update (Patreon)

So after a particularly aggressive bout of social distancing, Kaitlin and I finally hung out with some friends for a weekend. It felt great! Nate and Selena have been good friends for a while now (I've known Nate since 2008 or something??), and we've worked on a ton of stuff together (going back to Project London days).

First we had to play around with photoscans- slowly figuring things out!
Photoscan discoveries from the weekend:
1.) Shooting HD video is a great way to go about it. I think the photoscan software (RealityCapture at any rate) uses the previous/next frames as context to help figure out where the camera is, so having consistent movement helps give better results than just walking around taking random snapshots. Video is a great way to make sure you get then (only using every 4th frame or so). It's also a lot faster- just trickier to keep in focus.
2.) Nate's idea (most all of these are Nate's ideas, actually) to scan a small library of hands individually and just stick em on the end. Most full body scans end up with wonky hands, and it slows down the whole scan regardless. Being able to just kind of skim over them and stick on good hands later works great.
3.) Typically I do all my photoscans outdoors, because I feel like it has the most ambient lighting, but we shot these ones indoors (rain :/) then tried to fix it by sticking a digital area lamp under the finished photoscan model to even out the lighting, then baked that into a new texture, and you know what? It worked. Totally helped normalize the lighting.
4.) Smoothing out stuff with the sculpt tool works way better than it should and I should have been doing it all along.
5.) Also relying on the texture paint tool to clean up little glitches is a good maneuver.

Got the mechanics rigged up (Thanks again, Prospect Props!), still have to do the rest! I know I keep talking about uploading these guys, I just keep trying to figure out the best way to go about it, and it's been taking a while.

Next, so, you've probably seen the cyberpunkish set that's been sitting in the church for the past year. Truth be told we never actually filmed the scene we built it for in the first place, and with Covid and all that, I'm not sure when it'd ever actually happen, so yesterday we went nuts and turned it into bunch of different sets to maximize the usage before we tear it down. 

We did pretty good! 3 different sets in one day!  For all the setups I filmed them two ways: once in a normal "shooting a scene" way, and then again with a locked down camera so I could use them as a background texture element, if need be (I'll upload some of them at some point! They're pretty fun).

First was a random repair/adapter shop for the market scene.

Next was a little food stand type thing. We filmed a bunch at this one. I think I want to do something fun with it in post, but I'm not 100% sure what, yet (it'll be a bit harder to do digital extensions because of all the haze). 

A repurposed prop from a deleted scene from Prospect. It was a Space Caulking Gun, now it's an Unpleasant Goo Dispenser. I love it. They pressurized the prop so it actually squirted out goo, and it still worked even 2 years later. Those guys did so good. 

And finally a random apartment interior. I'm going to be adding a window frame/exterior outside the window, so hopefully it'll just feel like you're getting a random glimpse into someone's bedroom (you can't tell, but we actually built a bed in there that she's sitting on). 

Huge thanks to Nate for such a fun time, and Kaitlin and Selena for the acting!

Also- if you were ever wondering- this is definitely not the best way to get smooth shots :/

Anyways! I have a few random things to wrap up in the next day or so, then I'll be back in action! Sorry to everyone I still have to get back to; I let the messages stack up a bit in the past few days, here.