Well things are really happening!  A few days ago Andrew and I launched the first full length trailer for Elysium.  Its over two minutes long, and contains a ton of fully realized visual effect shots.  Check it out at:

http://elysiumthefilm.com

I basically hammered most of the vfx shots out in a week, working 12-16 hours for a about a week.  It was brutal, but worth it.  I learned a LOT about my workflow, what works and what doesn’t!  All of the initial 3D animation was done in Blender 2.49, and I decided to switch almost completely over to a build of Blender 2.5.  Since I wanted to use raytraced shadows, the speed improvements of 2.5’s raytracer were amazing.  Switching from 2.49 to 2.5 was no simple task, and often I had to reset the in and out points of my ships flying along a curve.  Simple things like this weren’t a problem, but I ran into one huge glitch–a big bug in the particle system.

Basically whenever you have an object that has a particle system on it AND has keyframed scale, location, or rotation, things go WRONG.  The calculation of a shockwave, for example, calculates fine the first time, but whenever the animation loops the simulation disregards the scaling of the shockwave circle, and particles shoot out from the center.  It is very odd, and very frustrating.  I had to basically kill any particle systems with animated objects and use the particle systems with static objects.  I made it work for the trailer, but hopefully this bug gets fixed soon.  I posted a bug report on Blender’s bug tracker, so I’m hoping.

I’m taking a short break from working on Elysium VFX, I want to use some of the shots from the trailer to add to my demo reel, and get that posted on here soon.  My senior thesis is starting to move forward, and I have some shoots that I need to supervise and plan for too.

When I get my demo reel finished, which should be up relatively soon, It will have some breakdowns of shots from the trailer, so keep an eye out for it!

-mark