Eilertsen & Granados Theater

[Almarma]

Hello,

Finally I finished my proyect for the Eilertsen & Granados Theater company in Stamsund, Norway. It's a small theater that this company want to rebuild and asked me to design it in 3D. It has been a pleasure to work on it and finally, after some problems with lighting and other things, I managed to give it a quite good ambient both inside and outside.

One thing that gave problems to me was that LightUp, when exporting the videos, automatically cut them into 1GB AVI files, and this makes some little jumps when putting them back together. Is it possible to enable bigger files? I'm using Mac OSX 10.6, a 64bits OS, so manage much bigger files is not a problem here.
I used SketchUp for design, LightUp for the rendering, some textures made by me from the original theater, and other textures from cgtextures.com. The music is composed and played by the owners of the theater company (they also have a music band called "Eilertsen Quintet"). I also used some components from SketchUp library (the stage and the two characters, the the table and the chairs, but the sofas are made by me). I hope you like it and I would like to hear some suggestions to improve my work. But I have to say that I'm totally impressed with LightUp. It has been a pleasure to work with it.




Sorry if my english is not perfect, I'm Spanish.

[AdamB]

[Almarma, I fixed a typo in the URL for the youtube embed to make it work ]

Excellent work.

The splitting up of AVI files to keep them small will go away when we bring in H.264 compression in LightUp. But I'll log a bug wrt the glitch between sections - its unclear how that might happen on the LightUp side - I'd certain look again at the software you used to glue them together and check it doesn't drop a frame..

This kind of project is the ideal use for the "LightUp Player" thats coming, in that your clients can navigate around your lit model with needing SketchUp+LightUp.

BTW Your English is infinitely better than my Spanish!

Adam

[Almarma]

Hello AdamB,

I'm really glad to hear your comments. And your news!! So, you are working on a H.264 compression? That would be awesome. And the LightUp player, sounds really interesting!! Are you talking about a desktop or web Player? I mean if it will be a software to be installed in the desktop or a web plugin to watch content online? I think the second idea could be extremely useful.

Abut splitting the videos, I have used iMovie, the default software in Mac. But I have found more information about the issue. Let me explain what I did:

-First, I recorded the sequences with LightUp and stored all "RAW" AVI files in a folder.

-Second, as iMovie cannot import uncompressed AVIs, I used Handbrake to convert them to MP4 format (with H264), trying to keep quality and the same resolution of the files, but I commit a mistake, selecting "high profile", as this activates a "Detelecine" feature, which I didn't need for this project. It changed the 30FPS videos to 24FPS videos.

-Third, I composed the final video in iMovie, and tried to export it in H264 format, but surprisingly, the results were gruesome!! I didn't understand why, so finally, I exported the final video uncompressed (36GB!!), and used Handbrake again to compress to MP4, and directly to Youtube. But there was another little mistake, as iMovie by default generates videos in PAL, so the framerate is set to 25FPS, and later, Handbrake changed it again to 24FPS.

So, the FPS were: 30->24->25->24. And I think this is the reason to see some little "jumping" of the video (I think it's called "judder" effect), but now it's too complicate to do everything again to solve it, and the problem is no so ugly. So I'll keep in mind for the next project.


Also, one last thing: I was using a Macbook with Snow Leopard and 2GB of RAM, and when rendering with LightUp, the system was almost frozen, and during some video recording there were some little pauses (with the umbrella rolling). Now, I've bought 4GB of RAM memory, and I can see a very noticeable different in rendering time, and in performance, and even the resulting videos are more fluid and natural. I think that, as with 2GB, the performance was not so fluid, the commands sent from the keyboard and mouse to LightUp, were not 100% fluid, and so the video generated, but now it's like a child's play. Really smooth and really funny to work with.

[joshkho]

Nice stuff, Almarma!

What was the rendering time like and how did you do your camera movements?
Were you using mouse/keyboard or spacenavigator or ..?

[Almarma]

Nice stuff, Almarma!

What was the rendering time like and how did you do your camera movements?
Were you using mouse/keyboard or spacenavigator or ..?

Thank you very much!! I'm very very glad. This is my first project.

The rendering time was about 40 minutes on a Macbook Unibody late 2008 (Core2Duo 2GHz). The biggest problem I had was the RAM memory. I had 2GB, and Sketchup, with the file opened, used more than 1GB, so the Mac was almost frozen after the rendering, and I needed to wait some minutes to get back the control.

I used the Macbook keyboard and a external mouse, as I felt the touchpad very uncomfortable to make precise movements. With the mouse it was quite easy, as I'm used to play first person shooters and it feels very similar.

Rendering details:
6cm resolution
Screen with AO enabled
Custom IBL Blend
distance: 1m
Multiplier: 0.2
Sun multiplier: 1

The skybox was not very good, but I decided to use it, because it's the real environment.

[joshkho]

Cool. Nice job with the camera work. It was quite smooth even with the really long continuous takes.
I have a spacenavigator and was working on a project where I tried to use it to do the camera work. it was hard to keep it consistent and I ended up using the mouse and keyboard too.

[Almarma]

Yes, but also helped a LU (LightUp) feature: you can set the camera speed, without rendering again. Just change the camera speed value in LU preferences, and record a new take. After it, change the speed again, and so on. One thing I also did is to try several times the movements before recording each sequence. Because sometimes, if you keep pressed the left click button and move the camera, the movement is smooth, but if you are moving the camera al release the left click button, it suddenly stops, without inertia, so you need to get used to it before recording, to avoid that "hard stops".

It's really funny, as you feel like filming a movie, looking for good frames, good camera positions, looking where to start and where to end, what to show and what not, etc. I really enjoyed it. It's a bit sad when you end it, hahaha.