Chaos Complete

It's been well over a week since my last update. While I haven't sat around and done nothing, the map is still not finished and some of the other elements are taking their time as well. Because I got frustrated and bored with the project I ended up starting a little side project but more on that near the bottom of this entry. Another somewhat unpleasant thing happened as well. My RAID controller and with that some of my RAID configurations is biting the dust. It has died and then miraculously reanimated itself on multiple occasions now, which all in all has made me very wary of the integrity and safety of the data on my R-0 configuration. Now is not the time to complain about that though.

Same as last time I've added more geometry to the maps and have tweaked the particle look and behavior slightly. A couple of the biggest changes however are the viewing distances, geometric clarity and fixing the world axis. Over the course of generating the city I had not realized that I had in fact flipped North and South around while keeping East and West intact. This had made it somewhat hard to gauge the height levels of the buildings, this sadly is still an issue and I'll more then likely have to re-tinker the height levels once more.

I have yet to venture back into tracking the comp but this is something that will come about in a few days. Jeroen Wolf suggested that I should try The Foundry's Cameratracker AE plugin instead of doing the tracking externally. Having used a trail version of the plugin when it first came out I can't say I'm too optimistic. I will however give the newer version a go whenever I do shoot new proper shots.

I have touched on how I'm generating the map prior but I felt like I should elaborate on it a little. As stated before the maps are generated using 3 separate particle grids, each with their own density and resolution. All 3 of these maps are then displaced separately with their own depth map to accommodate the wide range of height and complexity in the geometry. 

The depth maps themselves are alpha maps, something similar to what you would use as a track matte. Essentially white equals opacity and black equals transparency. In layman terms this means that what ever is white becomes viewable and what ever is black becomes see through or invisible. On the left here you see the complete current map with all the height levels mixed through each other.

Using that map would however be tedious and unpractical unless I were to sacrifice a lot of detail. As the range from the lowest to the highest building as well as things like streets would depend on a single white to black range. Instead I split the range into three levels. Each with their own level of displacement. Making something that is a 100% opacity on the green level only 40% on the blue one. In geometrical terms these maps and individual displacements amount to roughly the following representations in height displacement relative to the map.

• Green - Low [~1/4 floors]
• Blue - Medium [~5/20 floors]
• Red - High [~15/60 floors]

At this current point I estimate the total mask count on the masks to be around 2500 in total. And as you can probably imagine, having to adjust opacity levels for each and every single one of those as well is quiet tedious. As such I started a small side project with no real goal other then for my own amusement. For a few days running I'd find myself playing and recording my game sessions for about a hour at a time. I've been getting back into Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as of late, which I'm sure has something to do with Battlefield 3 being on the horizon. It wasn't much more then recording some cool stuff and showing it off to some of my friends. 

After getting immensely fed up with my holographic project I decided to just toss some of the recordings onto a Premiere timeline. After messing around for a little bit with some of the kills that I had made and listening to some music on the side I came up with the idea of doing a small mini montage. A day prior I had found the following old Halo 2 montage from mid 2005, I'm sure that was a motivator of sorts.

The new short montage however would be a lot more mature then my immature endeavors of 6 years ago. I went for a dub-step track which isn't all that original, not a single fuck was given however. I wanted to try my hand on doing very specific motion sync without relying too much on composting. Motion sync is something I've always tried to do in all my projects, but most sources need to be forced a lot to work. I decided to keep to relative basic movements for now. As for instance the sweeping of the camera and the pulling of the trigger. As of yet I have little to show for it aside from the following 7 second clip. But I think it would be nice to at least finish the 1 minute audio cut that I've made for it at this time.

Now we return to the main project at hand though. I have a few things that I have partially worked out but I'm not comfortable sharing yet. Specifically I'm talking about some of the UI elements and systems. I have a few sketches sitting here for rough concepts so that is definitely something that's being worked on as well. Along with that I'm also starting to push my normal drawing a little bit. While I've been slacking in that department I'm very much aware that I'll need to be hooking up my tablet asap again for doing for example humans/creatures and environments.

Something I am however comfortable with sharing is the following flowchart depicting how the current project is setup. On the left you see the final composition node, moving to the right you see it spread out and list what is it is comprised of and what each layer is doing. It is a relatively simple composition to setup it simply takes a lot of work in the third level of the comp, being the tedious depth maps.

As a final piece I've also rendered out a latest pass of how the city looks right now as well as a animated look at what the color coded depth map looks like. I really do hope that I'll finish populating the city before the end of the weekend as I'll more then likely be dragged away from my workstation.

I'll end up adding a lot more to these posts in the coming days/weeks. For now I'm calling it a day.