“Digital Movie Making“, the book we have written with Tony Mullen has already got out of the print, we don’t have it yet in our hands but you can see a couple previews at Wiley Publisher’s website and also at Amazon. In both sites there are in display different parts of the book so it is a nice chance to have a look at it if you’re thinking about buying it

I needed to add some english subtitles to all my spanish recorded voices, so my english speaking friends could get something of the story. At this point I had all my sound editing stuff for the 2D animatic done in Cinelerra which was really nice and easy to do. So, how to add subtitles there ?

I’ll show you a trick I’ve learned from Jason van Gumster in Cinelerra mailing list (yeah, we’re old pals !)

One of Cinelerra most exciting features is the ability to keyframe everything. So what we do here is the following:

First we select the whole movie strip (I have one image list with all frames rendered) and from the Resources window we drag a Video Effect called Title and drop it on the selected strip. This adds an effect subtrack, right below the original track.

Now we can type the needed text choosing location, font size, colour, etc. We can also add motion effects like scrolling text and all but that’s another story. But what happens when we want the text to change along the timeline ? Shall we add another Title effect ? Nop.

We have to activate the “Key” mode, (the little key icon on the toolbar) first. Then we just scrub to the desired point for our “new” text, and enter the Title effect settings again. Here we delete previous text and type some new text. As we do this, we’ll see a “key” icon is drawn over the effect strip. Now if we move in the timeline again we’ll see the text changing where the key was inserted !

And that’s it. We can go adding keyframes for the text this way and write all our subtitles, we can change size, font and colour even, motion, and many details in each keyframe.

Isn’t that great ?

Modeling and texturing all objects visible in a 3D scene is not something REALLY needed. A great time-saver technique often underrated is to create a matte painting and then map it onto simple 3D objects from the camera (Camera Mapping).

By creating simple objects as containers for our painting, we can create a 3D set that looks exactly as out original painting from certain angles and still have a sense of depth. In this video you could see how we separate in layers each element of the matte painting and then we convert those into textures we applied to simple objects like planes or low poly geometry.

Only thing we need to do, is to select an object and unwrap it from the camera view using the “Project from View” option. Such UV map we will use it to map a texture that would be the part of the matte painting that corresponds with the uwrapped object.

To make things more comfortable we have already separated the matte painting elements using layer alpha masks in Gimp, and saving these alpha masked layers into different PNG files with transparency. If needed we can later keep on painting these textures to include details that might have been occluded when we unwrapped the mesh.

All materials we used in our scene should be set to Shadeless as we don’t want to change how the image texture looks (it is supposed to be a Matte after all)

In the last part of the video, it is shown how we animated the influence of a procedural Cloud texture in the material that is added to the image textures, in order to create a lighting effect.

Hope it helps !

One of the things I enjoy the most is matte painting. Mattes are a huge time saving allowing us to skip modeling and texturing job, specially in shots like this, where the characters just pass by with no interaction with the environment.

The technique we use to create this paintings is start with a rough 3D scene to get some idea of shadows and volume and then paint over that in layers using a combination of photographic references and plain painting.

When the painting is done, we decompose it into textures and camera map them onto low-poly geometry to create an interesting “3D painting” look… but that we’ll leave it for later

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These are two frames of the work in progress of the Maesltrom shot. Our brave explorers are faced to this monster of nature in the strangest regions of the South Pole waters (where there are no records of maelstroms to my knowledge by the way )

Maelstrom shot

The “Eleanore” is just a low poly version we use for animation and while setting up the Cloth simulation and general timing-framing of the shot. All waves and whirlpool were done using Displace modifiers.

Virginia’s Facial Rig from Mercator Project on Vimeo.

After trying several approaches to get a face both expressive and easy to animate I decided to go back to Basis, this is setting up shapekeys for the face. Shapekey creation has no secrets, it takes some time to get the hang of it, and the one thing you have to be very careful about is not to forgive the additive nature of their combination.

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