Friday, October 15, 2010

All's quiet on the Martian front

I'm in the process of rendering the last two shots that need to be spat outta Vue: a Martian sunrise, and the penultimate shot of the giant canyons. Both are pretty heavy-duty and going to take about a week or two to finish.

Meanwhile, I'm off to the US for a couple of weeks, so will leave the computer to it - there's not much I can do while it's chewing through the renders anyway, so don't be surprised - or concerned -if the site goes quiet for a bit - - Last Flight is still flying! ;-)

Incidentally, I will be taking a helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon while I'm in the States, which I imagine is about as close as I'll ever get to a view like the one that' I'm rendering at the moment... Not that I'm complaining; Mars is only my second favourite planet; Earth is still number one with a bullet!

3 comments:

random.user said...

I'm curious how those long Vue renders turned out! And of course, what kind of grand canyon shots you could get, are you going to grade them to try to make them match mars? And if you were trying to get the shuttle launch for intro video for your movie, do you know that the NASA videos are all public domain and can be used with out copyright? So I think you can use any NASA videos, I know some links. If you need one, leave a comment here and this random user will return with links. Anyway, goodluck!

Anonymous said...

Hey Random, my last two renders are still crawling along... I'll post a couple of pics when they're done.

And yeah, I've already matched one Grand Canyon shot into a matt painting and it actually saved a shot I was having trouble with. Looks good!

The shuttle launch meanwhile was just for my benefit, and I didn't have any intention of using any footage I got in the film. However I'm curious - the links you have - is there HD footage available too?

random.user said...

me again (and not so random haa) ... well regarding video... nasa has a huge wonderful archive: http://nix.nasa.gov/ be sure to click "multimedia type: video" drop down box under your keywords. Regretfully, they need to upgrade their archiving, no HD I could find (DONT! click the thumbnails, that leads to smallest version, click the text links and find the biggest, which is usually well less than HD) there are HD videos at Nasa though, such as http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/HDGalleryCollection_archive_1.html (for example, currently you can scroll down and click on 1080i link under "Discovery Launches to the International Space Station" good video btw, you can watch the launch you missed lol) ... most any NASA videos can be used if you dont use their logo, and dont imply endorsement... however you can NOT use videos with identifiable people, as they have "identity rights" which is a whole other can of worms... anyway, enjoy!