After Time
What happens "After Time?" Who's there? What's left to do when everything has been done?
This short science fiction inspired piece uses computer animation to combine a number of modelling and motion techniques in a virtual studio environment that I've been working on. Originally an experiment, it quickly gained a life of its own evoking wonder, peace, and finality.
This is my first post to D.Tube, let me know what you think. I'll be glad to answer any questions you might have about it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it!
ivars
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I see in this video, your face, on the body of like the ninja from Metal Gear Solid. That flat earth moon thing place you stood on reminds me of the place where the Q, from Star Trek Next Generation, is from. The Q was a god like character who were like living after time or though all of time. It seems you are into martial arts. That is interesting. Did this video end with like a big bang or something?
The articulated body was constructed with MakeHuman software. I made a 3D scan of my head using a Kinect (from an old xbox) connected to a PC using special software I found a few years ago and cut just the shell of the front and pasted it onto the body using Blender. I used photogrammetry software (VisualSFM) to make a 3D model of my office/storage space (and a little bit of land around it) from around 100 photos taken from many angles walking all the way around it with my camera on a pole to get up and down angles. The holes are from areas that the photos didn't cover. The weird melting look was a result of the way the photogrammatical software put it all together and the flat earth island is because that's as far as the photos showed. There were no photos from underground so the ground had no depth, just a surface. I used MeshLab to clean up all of the models before importing them into Blender to put the final scene together. The galaxies are from a Hubble Deep Field image that I used as a texture to cover a very large sphere that surrounded everything and I made the stars and galaxies glow in Blender. The model of the building and island I placed at the center of the sphere with the character on the ground of the island.
I'm not particularly into martial arts but appreciate the discipline of those who practice it. Although I use the Kinect to do motion capture, this time I used a Tai Chi motion sequence from the Carnegie-Mellon University Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database to animate the character. I had to clean and modify the sequence using BVHacker to make it useable with the MakeHuman model imported into Blender first.
Finally I added some additional lighting and programmed the camera movements in Blender and rendered all of the frames of the video as image files. The entire film is just one long take with the camera moving in ways that could never be done outside the virtual Blender world. I used ffmpeg to turn the individual frames into a video sequence which I imported into Avid Studio, the video editor I was using at the time. (Avid no longer has that product but I think Corel bought it out and has their own version available for around $80 now and there are many free video editors out there that would work just as well.) There I adjusted colors and added some additional effects like the glows, lens flares, and a few other effects as well as titles and fades. Avid Studio has a nice music composition component that I used for the sound track as well as a few foley sound effects from my own library to add presence.
I did have the idea that at the end of time the only thing left to do was to connect it all back to the beginning so yes, that ending is kind of like a link back to a Big Bang. Whether it is a time loop or a new Big Bang (or something else entirely!) I'll leave up to you. Q probably wouldn't tell you either after making you experience it all first.
If you're interested I would recommend checking out the software I mentioned, especially Blender. Except for Avid Studio everything is free but will take some time to figure out and learn how to use but what you can do with it is incredible. Hope this helps!
Yeah, I had Blender and used it a few times and I use Inkscape. So, discipline is good. The Groundhog Day universe loop is interesting. I heard of Avid I think. I also use Open Shot Video Editor.