New short film "Dinner For Few"
NASSOS
Posts: 77
Hello,
Some of you guys might remember me from my short film “Human Nature” which was completed in carrara and had a pretty successful run in a number of festivals. You might wonder what has happen to me for the last two years since I was noticeably absent from these forums.
...Well with the help of Faba, we just finished another short film using carrara for rendering, modeling and special effects, Messiah for animation as well as a bit of Blender for everything else. I wrote, designed, produced and directed the film and Faba did most of the difficult technical work including the riggs for all the characters, fixed my models, did some effects and animated a big portion of the film including some amazing tiger scenes. For the rendering the film uses the digital carves toon shader plug in and some creative photoshop actions of my own to accomplish the unique line drawing effect. All elements were later composed in after effects.
The film is titled “Dinner for few” and you can visit it at www.Dinnerforfew.com
We do not have a video yet but there are plenty of information in the web site to look and see how we did some of the work.
Danas was kind enough to set up the web page for us so I need to publicly thank him for his contributions.
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Comments
Fantastic!
I look forward to seeing this in action. I really like the look you have for this. Good call working with faba and Danis!
Congrats and I hope it get's excellent acclaim!
Best wishes to you and your team,
Dartanbeck
Well done Nassos and friends! I have been wondering how you were getting on with this. Looking good.
OoOo great! I look forward to this as well. I want to dig into the website deeper tonight, but will be doing so tomorrow *sigh* :)
You mention you used Toon shader and then Messiah Studio for animation I will have to see how you used them in conjunction!
We animated in Messaih with messiah rigs created by Faba. Then exported the animation via the mdd plugin into Carrara sets. Used the toon shader Pro to render the line and the shadow pass. The color was Carrara flat glow renders. I used an action I created for photoshop to retouch automatically the toon shader line files to a thick and thin line and composted all elements in after effects.
Looking great! Framing of each shot is particularly good imho.
Here are some images of the line/cartoon outcome.
Yeah those! I love the look you've achieved, NASSOS! Just gorgeous!
thanks!
Here are some statistics:
The film has 141 shots and including the titles and credits runs for 9 minutes and 45 seconds. One shot is a graphics animation shot and has no 3d.
It has 4 sets, two of which are the rooms with some variations, one is under a table and the last one is the geography set with the sea, the cliff and the hotel.
There are 6 pigs in the film but two of them share the exact same model with a color difference. Eva rigged all of them in Messiah
There is one human which we called "the bucher". We had both a Messiah and a Carrara rig for this guy and two scenes were animated in Carrara.
There is a machine, a chain snake, various chains and a number of cats, kittens and a tiger. All "cats" had the same base model and were rigged in Messiah.
Everything was transferred in carrara in the mdd format from Messiah or Blender and all corrections were done using morph targets as needed. Most of the effects were done in carrara including the blood effects. Some cloth was carrara some was messiah and some was blender. The opening and closing oceans were blender but the rest were carrara. The rain is a post effect.
All rendering was done in Carrara using the toon Pro and the native renderer.
It took 2 years to complete.
Totally fantastic! I am still digesting the workflow and time, the outcome is great!
We put up a Facebook page if you guys want to follow and like.
https://www.facebook.com/DinnerForFew
great!! Also the project is very inspiring on what is the possibilities
I have been away for too long since I now realize you can't embed youtube videos anymore in these forums. If there is still a way please someone let me know how.
So here is a like to a short video showing the way the layers are composed in a typical scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7uGQSk1NZ4&feature=youtu.be
Nope. Can't embed youtube videos in this forum software.
I'm thinking the video is a statement about such things as EU imposed austerity measures? ;-)
Thank you. Its very helpful seeing a real world example of how something comes together.
I believe that the austerity comes from Youtube itself, I seldom arrive at reading a video completely, whereas at Dailymotion, never of problems…
Nice work Nassos !
Dudu, from EU.
Very impressive look, it reminds me of some favorite graphic novels.
Now, if you could do five minutes in two days, you could win the 48 Hour Film contests ... ;-)
This looks great.
I opened a thread the other day on Digital Carvers Guild's Toon! Pro, which is what I am assuming you are using and I researched a lot since then. I tried YaToon and Toon III (which I found out was the grandfather of Toon! Pro). Also, that Toon! Pro handles textures.
My question is, so you didn't have to mess with the textures so that Toon! Pro was able to render them just as well as the lines around the object itself?
All I am after is a toon effect that will not need hundreds of hours of postwork per frame for creating a graphic novel.
The animation was imported into carrara from Messiah via the mdd importer plug in. So the uv map was imported with the model obj file while the geometry was baked. Nevertheless some uv work was done in carrara to fix things or separate domains for more detail. In generally the elements, props or characters, had a number of render passes. The line pass, the color pass and the shadow pass. The line pass used the toon shader line effect, it also used textures painted in the glow channel in a black and white file. Please see the image attached so you can understand what I mean. The characters had different shading domains so there were a few uv maps and textures for each character. The toon shader output was then treated with a photoshop action of my design to achieve a more flared line look, what I call thick and thin line. The next pass was the color pass. This had only color textures or flat colors in the glow channel. IN compositing this went under the line layer. Last was the shadow layer. This layer in most times include in one pass all the elements weather they were characters or props. It uses the toon Pro shader and outputs a black and white layer which is later manipulated to a color tone in compositing.
The toon render is pretty fast, most frames took 15 seconds but the more you have the longer it takes. Longer I think was 2 minutes per frame at the 4x setting. The proprietary Photoshop action varied form 20 seconds to 3 minutes per frame.
Thanks for the detailed info. Looks like if I go with Toon! Pro I too will have to find a process to get to the desired output I am looking for.
You got it my friend! it is a world issue, not only EU but EU is definitely a player, a big player. Wait till you see the film and you will read a lot into it.
You got it my friend! it is a world issue, not only EU but EU is definitely a player, a big player. Wait till you see the film and you will read a lot into it.
No argument from me. I lost my nice paying job to a-holes on Wall Street and have been struggling ever since. Meanwhile they get billions of tax dollars to pay themselves fat bonuses and their mouthpieces in the congress won't even extend long term unemployment insurance to the victims of their avarice.
fantastic NASSOS! thanks for sharing both your work and the method, highly appreciate that.
I know nothing about photoshop actions, did it take long to figure that part out?
Photoshop actions is nothing more than recording a sequence of operations you want to do on a file and then you can apply them on another file automatically.
It saves you time from repeating the operations one after the other. Then you can apply the action into a batch process. So in my case I applied the thick & thin action to the toon shader line files and got the line layer automatically for each scene. The effect itself was easy to create the tricky thing was to make it so it works regardless the image it was processing. I mean each frame is different right? so the action had to make sure it was always starting from a white pixel and not a black.
thanks Nassos :)
congrats on your film too!
We just received back a test print for the upcoming poster. Check it out. For more info about the film please visit and like the facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/DinnerForFew
We need as many people as possible clicking there so the film starts to gain publicity.
This is a Carrera render film. Please follow the posts or visit http://www.dinnerforfew.com or http://www.facebook.com/DinnerForFew
for more details.
very awesome Nassos, really cool stuff you are producing. I see you imported from Messiah to Carrara for rendering. Did you animate your stuff in messiah then?
rich
Awsome!!! Looks great
Thanks,
Almost 95% of the animation was done in Messiah. For one character I had a rigged model done in carrara so some of the animation was done there. Some of the animated effects and waters were done in carrara too. All rendering was carrara with the toon plug in.
Nassos ,
This looks great and good luck with this.