Highlights
Finished compositing the “TB” / “Touring Baikonur” sequence at the beginning of this month, then moved on to the “SR” / “Soyuz Rollout” sequence.
I investigated the problems with the “Aquarium Room” set that is used for both the PC-PressConference and SU-SuitingUp sequences, and found that a particular material using surface displacement was causing the crashes in Blender 2.79, despite having worked in Blender 2.71. This was used for the ceiling tiles in the shot, and wasn’t especially important to the set, so I simply changed it to a simpler material that didn’t us this effect.
After that, I could work on the PC sequence in Blender 2.79, which helped a lot. I found the animation problem for Sergei — indeed, I simply had an action strip disabled.
The reporter’s eyelid was more of a problem. This seems to be trouble with weighting the mesh to the armature bones. I worked on it, but did not quite get it to work properly.
I re-rendered the PC sequence on the PowerEdge R720 server, and then set up the compositing.
I set up color patch masks in the paint layer during compositing to correct the eyelid problem. In a way, I like having this there, because it demonstrates how this sort of problem can be fixed in compositing. Even though, it’s likely that I could track down the weight-paint problem if I really wanted to.
I then moved on to reconstructing the shot I now call “SF-1-C”, which has been a shot reused from the 2012 teaser trailer. It shows Georgiana reacting to sunlight shining into the spacecraft by turning away, when she then notices the Earth’s limb through her porthole. The style of modeling and animation has changed drastically since that shot was made, and the original now looks very out of place. Indeed, just about every asset in the shot has been remade since then.
So instead, I created a completely new shot with current assets to replace it.
Lighting was particularly challenging, and I went through a lot of iterations before I found something that I think works well.
I also corrected the files and re-rendered shots LA-5-A and LA-5-B, which are also in the Soyuz — the teddy bear’s texture images had been missing.
At the end of the month, I started looking into the problems with the SU-SuitingUp sequence, but I didn’t get very far (yet).
After testing that we have good line-of-sight on their tower last month, we got our new internet service set up. This is a substantial improvement over the previous ADSL service (12mbps down, 0.5 mbps up), now at a nominal 30 mbps down / 5 mbps up. This raises new possibilities — theoretically I can do livestreams with this, though I have no immediate plans for it.
I didn’t record any video logs in March.
Production Timelapse
A lot of production work this month!
March 2025 was a heavy production month, as I attempted to make a April 12th deadline (sorry, that didn’t work out). Many small fixes to the Touring Baikonur, Press Conference, and Soyuz Rollout scenes. Also constructed a new replacement shot “SF-1-A” for the Soyuz Flight scene and started on the Suiting Up scene (work continued on that into May).
Chapter/Intertitles:
00:10 Assembly & Compositing of TB-TouringBaikonur
03:11 Assembly & Compositing of SR-SoyuzRollout
07:41 PC-PressConference Compositing Test
07:56 Troubleshooting Bldg 254 “Aquarium Room” Set (Random Crashes)
09:17 Learned to Use –debug Option. Now the crashes are predictable.
10:46 PC-PressConference Compositing Setup
11:46 Press Gallery Extras Test Render (for Illustrations)
12:00 PC-PressConference Compositing & Mask Rotoscoping
12:18 US Reporter Model Corrections
15:08 PC-PressConference (Re)Rendering
16:42 SF-1-A Updated Replacement of Vignette Shot
17:20 PC-PressConference Slug Rendering & Merge
18:33 PC-PressConferencing Compositing
28:00 SF-1-A Replacement Shot Reprise
28:36 S1E01 Whole Episode Assembly & Review
31:44 SF-1-A Lighting Configuration
34:13 SF-1-A Ride Animation (Oscillation of Couch & Character)
35:17 Fixing Bone Weighting in Georgiana’s Headset & Eyelids
37:40 Soyuz Window Fixes (Correcting transparency for portholes).
39:19 Troubleshooting SU-SuitingUp
Music Tracks:
00:00 Collision Spherique
05:15 Voix dans les Nuages
09:15 Angel Live
13:05 Afterlife
19:22 Discovery
25:46 Fatness
32:12 Fly Away
Music Credits:
Prince – “Collision Spherique”, “Voix dans les Nuages”, “Angel Live”
from Collision Spherique – Jamendo #65441 / CC By-SA 3.0
Pretonika (Singles) – “Afterlife”, “Discovery”, “Fatness”, “Fly Away”
Jamendo #36746, #35572, #35130, #34609 / CC By-SA 3.0
