I know I’ve been pretty quiet lately. I’m working on final compositing and animation corrections. Here’s a brief overview.

Touring Baikonur – Composite/Ink-Masking

I started by setting up the compositing file for the “Touring Baikonur” sequence. I originally thought I’d need to create a special case in my ABX extension to set up compositing files, but I found it was easy enough to use the regular camera file arrangement, edit it to work for compositing, and then copy and edit the node tree for each shot. This workflow was fast enough for my purposes, and avoided needing to take time out for software development.

I then revised the edit slightly in Kdenlive, resulting in a very slightly longer cut for the TB sequence, but which I think works a little better.

I was able to test using rotoscoped masks, and I corrected some long-outstanding inking errors.

Perhaps a more serious inking problem was that the ink drawing of the train wheels sometimes appeared through the train platform in the train arrival shots, due to the way objects are clipped for Freestyle processing. This has (mostly) been eliminated now.

Soyuz Rollout – Compositing

I didn’t have any real cause to alter the Soyuz Rollout sequence, except to apply the default compositing to it. However, I did decide to handle compositing the gopher shot in Blender, rather than leaving it to be combined in Kdenlive. This involved a bit more complex node tree.

The composited shot:

Aquarium Room Set – Troubleshooting

Both the Press Conference and Suiting Up sequences use the “Aquarium Room” / Building 254 Interior set — this is the quarantine isolation room with the big windows to the press gallery. For reasons I did not understand at the time, this set did not work with Blender 2.79, although it had worked in Blender 2.71.

I had been working around this by just using Blender 2.71 with it. However, that version is kind of flaky on my current AV Linux workstation (probably some library API version issue, I would assume — it affects the way it works with the video card), so I decided to get to the bottom of the problem. I was able to solve this over a day of troubleshooting work.

I found that Blender 2.79 would crash perhaps 10-20% of the time when rendering this set (or any shot that used it). Things got a lot easier when I found the “–debug” command line for Blender, which cause it to fail 100% of the time. It’s much easier to work with a repeatable problem!

The crash report seemed to indicate a problem preparing the mesh for rendering. I eventually tracked the trouble down to this ceiling texture:

This texture used geometry displacement, and apparently this hit a bug that caused an unsafe memory allocation during rendering. I eliminated this, replacing it with a purely color-based texture, which looks good enough. After that, I had no problems with the set, and finally, after years of avoiding it, I can re-render frames from the Press Conference in Blender 2.79.

Press Conference – Animation/Model Fixes

I had long suspected that Sergei’s lip-sync was just disabled, and indeed the animation was in the NLA editor, but not active. That’s fixed now, and Sergei’s face is animating properly now, including the lip-sync.

And I tweaked the US reporter’s character model to get rid of an interference problem with his right eyelid:

That’s been bugging for quite awhile, so it’s relief to fix it properly.

I also tweaked the animation ranges to get rid of a short animation gap that had caused me some problems. Since I have good equipment for rendering now, I’m just going to re-render this sequence today (and tomorrow, probably).

Next Steps

Several more animation issues I want to fix in the next two weeks:

• Replacement animation for Soyuz shots from Teaser Trailer to match current art style.
• Fixing animation in the Suiting Up sequence (which will be easier with the Aquarium Room set fixed!)
• Mission Control Room shots
• Improved animation in Soyuz interior shots from Launch / Soyuz Flight sequences
• Fixing the train wheel shot that I wasn’t quite able to finish in December (I was stuck on recreating the right positions for the reflected camels)
• Sound mixing / level correction
• Surround channel mixing for 5.1 soundtrack.

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