Animation And Graphics

Rendering Bake3d

Bake3d the basics of baking the lights into textures
The baking of lights into textures is being used in games industry mostly, but is more and more used among other users too. Its a good way of putting the lights and shadows into a game or a scene. In the following tutorial Ill show you how to bake the light into textures with the Bake3d plugin which is part of the Vray renderer.
So, enough talking and lets start. First Ill show you the basic features of Bake3d.

I made a small scene as you can see on picture c1 where Ill show you automatic mapping feature of Bake3d. Its not the best method though. I collapsed the objects into one piece and deleted the bottom faces so it doesnt take more place in Unwrap than neccessary.

Next I applied a checker map on the object so we can see the details and if the mapping is correct.

Now we can go to Bake3d. Go to Utilities and click More. Choose Bake3d from the list.

You can see the Bake3d rollout which I divided into two pictures (a and b). First the A part. There is Map Channel in the UV Generator rollout. Its set to 1 by default and we can leave it as it is. Click the Generate tex coords button and the object will get mapped. You can see relatively good mapping but its not optimal. There are some errors and the mapping isnt regular so I advise using UVW Unwrap and UVW Map to tweak the mapping.
Now continue to the B part.
Theres another map channel and Map type in the Lightmap baking rollout. Complete material will bake the light and the checker map but well use Diffuse lighting only which will bake the light only. Map resolution sets the size of the texture. The bigger the better but it also takes longer time to render. In Output file you can set the path for the result.
If you check the Auto-apply material then the resulting map will be automatically applied to the object. The other buttons are meant for assigning or removing rendered textures to and from the objects.

Now lets try how it works. Open the Render dialog by pressing the F10 key and choose Vray as your renderer (Bake3d wont work without it). Set the parameters as seen on the picture. Also add a light to your scene. I used an omni with settings shown on the picture.

Go to Bake3d again and set the parameters in the Lightmap baking rollout as you see on the picture. Then click the Render Lightmaps button to bake the lighting into the texture.

The result should be similar to this depending on the placement of your light. You can see the lightmap on the picture too.

Final words: 1. 1. Remember that the bigger texture means better detail but longer render time.
2. If you have larger scene, don�t try to get all objects into one map. Divide them into more maps but keep the same detail.
3. If you have more objects, you can select them all and render. Bake3d will continue to next map when it finishes the first.
4. Try to fill the whole square in UVW Unwrap. Every pixel counts :).
5. Also try to keep the same distance between stripes in Unwrap. At least 5 pixels.
There is a blur in the rendered texture so there must be onough space for it or it would mix the maps and could make undesireable result.

Introduction:

A short film by Robert Kuczera In a time when dragons threatened mankind, there was only one man who fought against them all. His name is Tarragon and riding on his brave battle horse Black Bull he is on his way to work.

But things don't always turn out as they should... one day ...mhh...

Dragonslayer is a 3D animated fantasy short film of 8 min. length. The Project was completed during a period of 24 months. It took about 9 months of preproduction, 12 months of production and 3 months of postproduction.

Job

Many people have jobs they don't like, but they do not even try to change their situation. Maybe its just because they do not know what else to do. Often it takes an unexpected, outstanding event which gives someone the chance to change.

Life-task

But not someones job is the only thing that counts. It's about your goals of life, your very own and individual life-task which is important. It's different to everyone. Some people take care of external people, others raise children.

Our character

The main character, the dragon slayer, faces a situation in which he has to decide either to fulfill his job or follow his heart. He leaves his old life and routine job behind him and moves on to his dream job. He becomes a forger. He also takes responsibility for what he did, killing a mother dragon, and raises a couple of baby dragons.What will he tell the baby dragons when they get older? Where do they come from, where is their real mother?

Inspiration

The film is based on a basic idea from Michael Sieber, a workmate at filmschool. Although i think that similar stories exist. I can see some parallels to the movie Leon for example.

Inspiration of the characters

The characters are designed by Michael Sieber and Klaus Morschh?user. In my eyes the hero looks a bit like the gladiators from Asterix and Obelix. The dragon looks a bit like the dragon from Shrek.

What I hope people will take along from the movie, Think about your life, about your job. Do you make the right decisions? Or is it just the easiest way to go?

Development of the story

There were a lot of different versions of the story. I learned, that it takes a long time to get a good result. At the end it took us about 9 months to find the final story. Even during production we change and added things to the story. So I think finding a good story is one of the most difficult parts in making a good movie.

There are 5 different versions of the story fixed in treatments and screenplays.

Storyboard

We only made one Storyboard for the last version of the movie. We should have done storyboards for every version. They are fast to make and changes can be applied very easily. Next time I know better.

Animatic

There are 5 different versions of the animatic. Four 3D Animatics and one life action animatic.

Every time we finished one Screenplay, we thought "this is the story". We passed the storyboard and got straight to the animatic.

But after watching the animatic we realized that this was not the final version of the movie.

The good thing about the animatic was that you get a very good feeling for the story. Whereas it is much more difficult to judge the story by just watching the storyboard.

It was a lot of work making the animatics over and over again, but your well-advised putting a lot of energy in the storyboard and the animatic at the beginning of a production, otherwise you will waste a lot of time when you find out somethings wrong with the story.

What I learned from this, next time I will definitely start with a storyboard and get assistance from an experienced person fot the shot break-up.

Storyboard

Animatic Team

In the beginning I worked together with a screen writer, a production designer and a dramaturgic advisor.

Screen writer

The first version of the story was developed without the help of a screen writer. This was no good idea, because of my inexperience in developing a story this process was very time consuming. This changed immediately after I started to work with the screnn writer Philip Koblmiller. He exactly knew how to structure the story. Which saved us a lot of time. Apart from that it helped focusing on the actual story.

Dramaturgic advisor - Storyboarder

I worked on the storyboard together with Gerd Schneider. He is an experienced story boarder with dramaturgic skills. Which was very helpful for the project.

Production Designer

In order to get the best results I was working with two character designers. Michael Sieber who did the designs for the hero and the horse as well as for the environment and Klaus Morschh?user who took care of the designs of the baby dragons.

Taragon

Taragon is an experienced Dragen slayer, about 40 years old and kills dragons for money. No one knows how it started. Was it greed or hatered? Nobody knows why. But one thing is for sure, he is just doing his job. He never considered the idea of changing something in his life. He never thought about what consiquences it might have, him killing a dragon, maybe a dragon mother.Lonely and without fullfilment in his beeing he is riding from one commission to the next.For some Taragon is a hero, a shining hero who is saving them from all evil. But for him its all nothing but tedious work.

Bullie

Bullie is an old fighting horse, who knows a lot about life and how to behave. Most of the time he knows much more than our hero. But Taragon has to find out by himself.

Otis

Otis the baby dragon, hasnt seen much bad things in life yet. That is the reason why he isn`t afraid of Taragon. Even as Otis sits besides his dead mother, he doesnt realize what is going on.

Mother Dragon

The mother dragon may look terrifying, but in her heart she's just a care taking mother who looks after her children. How ever, people are afraid of dragons, they don't realise that the mother dragon only wants to protect her children like anyone of us would do.

The Blacksmith

The Blacksmith is pleased with his life. He has a fulfilling job and a son he loves. He knows about the importance of the dragon slayer and his job he is doing for the community.

The Blacksmith's son

The Blacksmith's son admires Taragon. For him he is a hero, who lives an adventures and brave life. But the one he looks up to the most is his father.

Character Designs

Taragon - First designs by Michael Siebe