WE ARE MOVING!

Hi guys! It's been a while... But things are moving and so are we. You will find future updates from me and my other collaborative projects on My ArtStation Page. ... I'll also be updating WIP images on ArtStation as I find the medium is friendly towards progressive posting of content and, most of all, keeping in touch with you, our audience. So FOLLOW me on ArtStation, get yourself strapped in.. Cause we're about to go for a ride. :)

REVERSION wins Best Technical Quality at ANIMAHENASYON 2012

REVERSION was given the award for Best in Technical Quality at the just concluded ANIMAHENASYON 2012 Animation Festival.

We are very thankful to the Animation Council of the Philippines for recognizing the hardwork and artistry that our team put into this short film and for including us in this special event which was graced by notable persons from the global stage.

REVERSION Wins 2012 Suzanne Award for Best Designed Short Film

REVERSION was given the Suzanne Award at the 2012 Suzanne Awards for Best Designed Short.

We thank the Blender Foundation for giving us this award.  In particular we thank Ton Roosendaal, whose Blender total production software made the film possible.

Watch the 2012 Suzanne Awards Video

REVERSION Feature: The Render Guide

For our last VFX document we will be taking a look at a set of Blender features and scene-building methodologies which I think a lot of people take forgranted.  Or if you are like we were before 2010, too intimidated to really look into.

This is the document covering the topic of scene layering and the use of Blender's render layer management system to manage render times separately per element through the use of built-in masks.  There was a time we considered emulating how some early CG films were done with separate specular, diffuse, and shadow passes.  But as testing progressed, it didn't seem to make sense on this current production to do that.  However, what did make a lot of sense strategically was to render in layers that allowed us to make changes very late in the process without affecting parts of scenes that didn't need changing.

This meant that re-renders and detail-fixes were highly managed.  But this approach was also important in ensuring each layer (and by that logic, each effect) could be rendered in its own time, manipulated, enhanced and associated nodes and calculations could be done before all layers were merged per shot for best results.

This Layered Images approach, while it sounds simple enough, is actually integral to many of the Visual Effects on-screen in REVERSION.  Early on, there is a pretty convincing "mirror reflection" effect that was attained by using layers cleverly inverted and placed within other surfaces, preventing us from having to use time consuming Ray Mirror calculations.

Here is the final VFX Document: "The Render Guide"

REVERSION Feature: Principles of Set Lighting

Today, we will be releasing the second VFX document "Principles of Set Lighting".
For me, though, the alternate title could very well be: "Principles of Scene Coloring".

For REVERSION, we wanted the images to appear "serious" but we knew we didn't want them to be photo-real.  This is partially by choice, but also partially due to the fact that we knew our limited resources wouldn't allow us to attain full photo-realism.

To that end, we took our inspiration more from how light and shadow is treated in traditional animation where they are literally "just colors" and how Stage plays use colored lamps to create atmosphere in spite of the limitations of sets on a stage.  We took note of these and then leveraged two strengths of using CG animation: 1) limitless scale for detail 2) limitless color control.

We called this approach: "Starting with the Art instead of Reality".

The document will show you research and implementation to do this type of lighting.  I do not think every film can use this technique.  But it was definitely a good technique for REVERSION.  It also reduced our reliance on time-consuming features like Ray-Tracing.

What is not mentioned I think in this document is that we also relied on a lot of "Color Scripts".  Painted images that help baseline the look of each scene.  This allows the Art to have precedence over Reality.

Here is the second VFX document: "Principles of Set Lighting"