Angular Velocity - A KSP Animation

[YargJay9991]

On 12/31/2015 at 10:57 AM, Chickenkeeper said:

Thanks for the offer, but while there will be some subtitled dialogue I'm going to be using some pitch-bent radio transmissions for the voices for now.

 

No probs man! Best to stick with your plans,  I guess it wouldn't be kerbal without the scrambled voices!

Good luck! Looking forward to the finished product!

Happy Flying

YargJay9991

[Chickenkeeper]

Quick update; the first of the four sequences is finished and rendering and the second is in progress. I had to do a little bit of experimenting with the first few shots to get some kinks with the rendering and compositing workflow ironed out, but after some tweaks to my alpha channels it seems to be all good now. I'll post a little teaser when I have enough completed shots, and maybe a couple of images too. Overall I would say it's at about 30% so far

[Gojira1000]

Looking forward to this

[Guest]

On January 6, 2016 at 2:32 PM, Chickenkeeper said:

Finally finished the texturing, any more changes (grunge, burn marks etc.) will now be done on-the-fly as and when they're needed

Now on to the animation!

That, sir, is beautiful.

Edited April 27, 2016 by Guest
Snip pictures so I don't clutter the thread. :)

[Chickenkeeper]

35 minutes ago, CliftonM said:

That, sir, is beautiful.

Thanks, I'm always learning with projects like this so all feedback/constructive criticism is appreciated

[Fl0oo]

Awesome man! Maybe you can make a mod-part from this!  

[Chickenkeeper]

Here's a little beauty shot I rendered while working on a tricky camera movement, to let you all know the animation's still progressing nicely:

This image came straight from the renderer, so it's neither colour graded or colour corrected, but I think it's quite pretty in its own way

[Guest]

On January 23, 2016 at 4:40 PM, Chickenkeeper said:

Here's a little beauty shot I rendered while working on a tricky camera movement, to let you all know the animation's still progressing nicely:

This image came straight from the renderer, so it's neither colour graded or colour corrected, but I think it's quite pretty in its own way

Nice.

Edited April 27, 2016 by Guest
Snip picture so it doesn't clutter the thread

[Chickenkeeper]

Another little teaser image to help tide you over:

As with all images thus far it's not totally representative of the final aesthetic and quality, but I think it still looks pretty cool

(That Kerbin is also totally 3D, clouds and all. No photo-background cheating here )

[Chickenkeeper]

A bit more work on Kerbins clouds:

I think I've got them pretty much where I want them now, I would like to do more tweaks to the procedural maps but I need to keep them relatively simple to save on render time. Also the colour grading is only temporary, the final shots will probably look quite different to this.

[esinohio]

These are looking just wonderful! I'm loving the atmosphere effect you've come up with in this one.  That atmosphere is something I am struggling with in Blender when doing more basic procedural planets!!  Your atmosphere really sells the procedural textures on the planet below.   The colors for the oceans and tidal selves pictured in the previous post are just great as well.  The colors really give the effect of a natural coast line.  Eagerly awaiting more!!!

[Chickenkeeper]

3 hours ago, esinohio said:

I'm loving the atmosphere effect you've come up with in this one.  That atmosphere is something I am struggling with in Blender when doing more basic procedural planets!!  Your atmosphere really sells the procedural textures on the planet below.   The colors for the oceans and tidal selves pictured in the previous post are just great as well.  The colors really give the effect of a natural coast line.

Thanks . For things like the atmosphere it's best to leverage the power of render passes and post-processing to get the aesthetic you're after, rather than trying to get a perfect image straight out of the renderer. For mine I use both a volumetric(-ish) and a geometry 'layer', their colors controlled by a series of radial and linear gradients, rendered into their own separate passes and combined with the other passes in post, with the help of the terrain's alpha channel. (The specifics are secret for now but I hope this gives you some ideas ).

Also the colors at the cost lines of the terrain was actually a side effect of using a green-ish transparent absorption color in the ocean shader, which causes the terrain under the ocean to become tinted with depth

[Chickenkeeper]

I also made a heat shader for the spacecraft (with adjustable intensity) for the parts that might need to 'feel the burn':

The solar panels look a bit off in the second image, but then again they would be long gone before any part of the spacecraft got that hot

[sDaZe]

oooo this looks interesting 

[SpaceplaneAddict]

Tell me again why you haven't earned millions of dollars for this professional-grade beauty?!

[Chickenkeeper]

15 hours ago, SpaceplaneAddict said:

Tell me again why you haven't earned millions of dollars for this professional-grade beauty?!

Haha, that would be nice but I still have a lot to learn

[Chickenkeeper]

Quick update, I'm getting close to the end of the animation and rendering stage now, and in preparation for comp, correction and grading I've been practicing a bit on bits of shots and frames that I have laying around. Here's a recent experiment with light flares:

As previously mentioned it's just an experiment, so the final shot will probably look very different. But it's been a while so I thought I'd give you all something to look at for the time being 

[Guest]

While that looks super awesome, i'm worried that with the custom rocket it wont feel like KSP anymore.

I'm super Jealy of your texturing skilz though! Can you make a tutorial?

[Chickenkeeper]

7 hours ago, Sprocket Creations said:

While that looks super awesome, i'm worried that with the custom rocket it wont feel like KSP anymore.

I'm super Jealy of your texturing skilz though! Can you make a tutorial?

I thought about that too when I started. I wanted to go for a quite realistic aesthetic, but unfortunately many of the existing KSP parts don't seem to translate well to that because they have quite cartoon-ish designs and proportions, and very painterly textures and shaders (for example none of the parts use reflection maps; only some specular highlights, with the exception of a few mod parts). In addition to that the ship had to be designed in a very particular way to make some of the shots work, and it didn't look too great with KSPs default parts. But after trying out this realistic look I think I've worked out a better aesthetic to go for in future projects, which consists of quite steam/diesel-punk part designs (lots of rust, metal patches, tape, old plumbing, like it's all made with weathered bits from a scrapyard) and slightly more painterly textures than the ones I'm using at the moment. That is basically what I think KSPs parts should look like, because at the moment I think many of the parts look too clean and 'high-tech' for the character of the Kerbals. That being said I think the models I'm using for this project will work just fine for now 

As for the texturing, thanks but I won't be doing any tutorials. If you want to learn about texturing there are already many resources online that will do a much better job at teaching you than I could 

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Chickenkeeper said:

I thought about that too when I started. I wanted to go for a quite realistic aesthetic, but unfortunately many of the existing KSP parts don't seem to translate well to that because they have quite cartoon-ish designs and proportions, and very painterly textures and shaders (for example none of the parts use reflection maps; only some specular highlights, with the exception of a few mod parts). In addition to that the ship had to be designed in a very particular way to make some of the shots work, and it didn't look too great with KSPs default parts. But after trying out this realistic look I think I've worked out a better aesthetic to go for in future projects, which consists of quite steam/diesel-punk part designs (lots of rust, metal patches, tape, old plumbing, like it's all made with weathered bits from a scrapyard) and slightly more painterly textures than the ones I'm using at the moment. That is basically what I think KSPs parts should look like, because at the moment I think many of the parts look too clean and 'high-tech' for the character of the Kerbals. That being said I think the models I'm using for this project will work just fine for now 

Well, you clearly know what your doing, and if you say its better, it probably actually is better! 

4 hours ago, Chickenkeeper said:

As for the texturing, thanks but I won't be doing any tutorials. If you want to learn about texturing there are already many resources online that will do a much better job at teaching you than I could 

Cool! I'll have a poke around to see what i can find!

[Chickenkeeper]

As I'm finishing up the final shots I before I finish putting this thing together I thought I'd post another couple of development renders. Here's a little ocean render, including a bonus spacecraft shader test:

Also a test of the parachute during the final couple of seconds of deployment:

Neither of these images are representative of actual shots in the animation at all, they're just development renders. I'll probably put up a couple of teaser images from the final shots once I've finished with the compositing so you have an idea of what the animation will look like when it's finished 

P.S: I also finally came up with a final title for the animation, which is 'Angular Velocity', so I'm getting rid of the terrible old working title of 'Kerpollo 13'

Edited April 26, 2016 by Chickenkeeper
Forgot to add last sentence

[Guest]

23 hours ago, Chickenkeeper said:

P.S: I also finally came up with a final title for the animation, which is 'Angular Velocity', so I'm getting rid of the terrible old working title of 'Kerpollo 13'

I like that.  

[Chickenkeeper]

It's finished and up! Here's the link to the video, and I'll get the first post updated asap

 

[HazelPine]

Are you sure you're not some CGI expert or something? This looks way too cool! Can't imagine how long it took for it all to come together in such an amazing way! Congrats!

[Bloojay]

that was orgasmic