Mark Hennessy-Barrett

Of all things, I cannot find the comp-atop scene with the countermissiles launching from Nike’s upper rails, or the missiles that are smashed apart by same.   They’ve got to be something – aside from that, I’m *really* rather happy with this update.   Thanks to RiK for lending me lots of CPU power for brute-forcing this, rather than having to spend the time I spent setting up that CFD air-blowout on breaking the first scene apart. Video under the fold…

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Showreel Honorverse, Showreel, Space

See, this is when it gets fun. I’ve got a nice fat hopper full of things to render now, buffed and polished so if they’re not actually making me happy, at least I’m not actively embarrassed by ‘em.

The first set of Honorverse shots are rendering on my dear old mate RiK’s Mac Pro – still apparently the cheapest way to get eight Xeon cores in one place, must get myself one of those – so I can stop messing about with trying to optimise it and worry about other things, such as the “Big Ship Gets a Steaming Great Hole Blown in It” shot.

Comme ça.

Still having a fiddle with my CFD solver, and I wish the darn author would re-license my replacement dongle… but I’m tolerably happy with the fiddling today.  Might conclude that shot with the “down low” angle rather than the “up high” – seeing a honking great spaceship (with a steaming great hole blown in it) hanging over one’s head does seem a touch more dramatic.  Wouldn’t you say?   Anyway – now I’ve got RiK’s Big Mac (arf) grinding away on one shot, Lady Macbeth (the big rig) on this one, leaving me free to muck around tuning up a Vue render on Dauntless (the nice laptop I got in New Hampshire for not an awful lot of money).

Nine days and a wake-up ’til I fly, and I’d say it could be a lot worse.   Yay!

Showreel Honorverse, Showreel

Funny story.  A repeat client comes along and says “We really like your work, and we’d really like you to make a 3D version of this person, from his bust.”   “That’s fine,” say I “if you can take photos of the bust from front and both sides with it on a turntable, using a locked-off camera then we should be golden”.   While it’s true that I don’t do a huge amount of character animation, it’s also true that a shape’s a shape.   So you’d think.    So duly I get 23 photos with different zoom settings and centration for each and every one.   I love my job, but a sense of humour really does help!   So anyway, in the course of trawling through my old projects, I came across these.

A minor twang on the jaw s’patches – easy bit of retopologisation there – and the Fiber Factory IV settings don’t seem to have translated perfectly to FibreFX.  The skin texture really needs a bit of work.  But to get a little bit of human-work into the reel, it’d probably do for a mid-ground character. Besides, in a high-tech industry, it’s good to show your human side.

The really funny thing was that whilst all concerned were agreed that I’d made a reasonable facsimile of the bust itself, the gent in question was always thought to look like a photo taken 20 years earlier when he was equipped with a truly magnificent moustache.   Therefore, this bit of work was never used.  He might make a good pub landlord or something…. I’ll see where I can slot him in.

Flicking back and forth between these two images, I recall all the many places where drawing gridlines between the essential pieces of anatomy did me no good at all, as the camera height, position, range to object and zoom factor varied every single time.   *sighs*   Still, if this was easy, anyone could do it.  Right?

Showreel Humans, Showreel

This is about the most mechanically complex book re-creation I’ve ever done.   The original folio was a wreck - Robert Hooke’s notebooks from his time as Secretary of The Royal Society.  The folio itself lay forgotten somewhere for goodness knows how many years, getting chewed by mice and such, generally being treated in ways that make librarians go white and need a lie-down.

For the Turning the Pages install at the R.S., this was rendered on a plain surface, and with very bland lighting – fair play, it’s the book that’s important but as my demo reel’s not going to be high enough res for the text to be legible, having it in a tolerably appropriate surrounding seems to make sense.  The environs aren’t finished, obviously, and I’d like to get some more interesting surfaces in there – some glassware, perhaps, or bring the Bunsen burner more into shot and light it.   I shall continue to ponder the matter.

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Here’s a double-res still, with Monte Carlo radiosity enabled (incidentally showing that the wood textures I’ve got to hand are a bit low-res, but they hold up for the animation size).

I mention the Monte Carlo bit because the animation uses only raytrace lights. Interpolated MC and FG rad flicker quite unpleasantly during animations, and I can’t use an animated radiosity cache because the Endormorph-driven book-pages generate an unusuable superabundance of sample-points. I continue to flirt with the notion of rendering it in FPrime with MC switched on – but that would mean having to comp in anything with fancy nodal textures in atop it. We shall see where the process takes me.

I’m going to leave this as a standalone section in my showreel for two reasons:

• The book’s interest is in it’s mechanical complexity, unlike the gilded bling of the other books I’ve done.
• This book heralds the dawn of Science. Almost all the other books were religious in nature.

Because of these huge visual and thematic differences, I think it’s worth having two separate enteries in a demo reel.  Though if I end up thinking “Too long, too boring – and too many books” I’ll be very hard-pressed to decide which to junk.   Yeah, the Sherbourne Missal and such are beautiful – but this thing is just so cool.  There’s more I want to do with this piece – I’ll probably add another page to this website for completed clips, aside from the main blog part.

Showreel Add new tag, Books, Photorealism, Showreel

Update #4 – Honorverse the Online Game

I should point out that these showreel updates are me going completely off-canon, by the way. The ships as represented in the original trailer are how they’re described in the books, to the best of my understanding, and that I’m wandering completely off-piste now just for my own pixelly pleasure. These ceased to be Honorverse ships the moment I did that, and are in no way, shape or form endorsed by Baen, Tor, David Weber or Nimitz the Treecat. So there, too.

Well… hum. This sequence was a pain the butt to render the first time ’round – the Impeller wedges have to be the way they are to look even remotely canonical, but that means they’ve gotta have refraction and transparency tracing enabled. I’ve turned my ray recursion down to 8, which is the minimum I can get away with without black spots occouring, and I’m not using any fancy lights – but the concussion waves and splodey hypervoxels just plain take time to render. This frame was 30 mins 40-odd seconds on my quad-core 3GHz XP64 rig. Click the pic, for some reason WordPress is messing with the aspect ratio.

Yes, half an hour for a 720×405 frame. Bums. I’ll try replacing the HVs with alphaed image sequences, ’cause I think there’s a lot of very unnecessary math happenning in there. Losing the shock-rings drops the frame time to 19 minutes. I like using HVs, as they have pleasing visual qualities (though in this frame four of ‘em are at intensities that drown all the detail), but the frame time may Cause Issues.

This frame? 1 min 58s. So that’s a ludicrous discrepancy.

Either way, it’s gotten a bit late so I’ll leave the camera work for the morning when I’m feeling a bit fresher. Hey, I did animate a particle accelerator today, too.

*update*

Six mins 30 without the HVs. Guess they’re for the chop – no idea why they’re being so *SLOW*, they’re usually Ever So Quick these days.

Showreel Add new tag, Honorverse, Showreel, Space

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Update #3: Mail On Sunday Pub Quiz.

As the Honorverse stuff’s still percolating (and, in honesty, I’ve been a bit lazy over the repetative HV tuning) here’s a short clip that’s part of the intro of a recent Mail on Sunday Pub Quiz DVD that they gave away.

From the otherworldly to the humble comforts of a pint at the local on a Sunday.  I love my job.

Published work, Showreel Architecture, Photorealism, Pubs

Update #2 – Honorverse, the Online Game. Just a quickie, as I’ve taken a short break from copying, pasting, tweaking curves and repeating to armour the hammerheads at the ends of the ship.

Much better. Happy now. Back to copy-and-paste-and-retime… All things being equal, this intro sequence should be rendered by morning, which will please me greatly.

Showreel Honorverse, Showreel, Space

Update #1 – Honorverse, the Online Game. The brief for this was to create very pristine, very white starships based on David Weber Novels. Lots of fun, I got to blow holes in spaceships (which is something very dear to my heart), and was just about the most fun I had in 2007 at all. Here are two stills from the intro:

At the time, I’d argued for lots of visible hull panelling and nurnies, because let’s face it Galactica set the bar for meganurnies per cubic metre and I wanted to be like the cool kids. But no, the Honorverse ships had their outer armour laid on with nanotech, and so was to be smooth and clean. Very very clean. And white. Very white. Also, the client wanted fairly realistic missile explosions: a thermonuclear explosion driving laser beams. Bomb-pumped lasers, to use the terms. Here’s the existing trailer animation in low res (16.5Mb) and High Def (50Mb). Of course, now that it’s Showreel O’Clock I get to go back and whale on things until they make me happy, so I’ve spent some of the day adding just a soupçon of panelling and stuff

*edit*  Let’s try embedding, shall we?

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YouTube Direkt

Youtube’s got it in semi-high-def natively, which is nicer to look at.  But I really, really like being able to directly embed video in my website.

Yep. I feel OK about today’s work, given that I’d done one set of panels that just didn’t fit the rest of the design, had to toss ‘em out and start over. It’s nowhere near as nurnietastic as The Big G, but it’s all mine and that makes it special. Yesterday I was playing with explosions and got a Hypervoxel doing just about what I wanted it to do: Just the one bomb for now. (3 Mb) So that was the week so far. Now that I’m happier with the appearance of the vessels and the explosions, I can knuckle down and replace the other 58 explosions with those HVs. And set all their motion curves. All eight motions curves. 58 times. Oh, and I know Military Stuff gets painted uniform colours, but tomorrow I’m *SO* re-texturing those guns! Well, if I minded lots of repetative work, I should’ve done something not-animation, shouldn’t I?

‘Til tomorrow, Internet. Meat!

Published work, Showreel Honorverse, Showreel, Space