Incident Part Two: Last Survivors
Project Notes
Note: many of the pictures on this page are links. Click to view.
January 2001
Incident Part Two was finished and "released" January 5th, 2000. That was almost exactly one year ago. Released with quotes because I still have not managed to make it downloadable. The site where part one is stored seems rather dead since nothing is happening to emails or uploads in there. After six months of emailing them I gave up and basically forgot about the whole thing. Now there are a couple of free HD space providers on the net. I guess I will have to try something like that.
December 1999
Time flies when you're not having any fun. Only a masochist could have fun with any 3DStudio. Despite of serious difficulties with the forementioned software, I have managed to model and render even the last bits of animation for part two.
I modified and re-rendered the "galaxy" sequence and it's a lot better now. No need for 3DStudio there, so at least that was easy. I had to drop motion blur from that because of rendering time limitations. But that's fine - n-frame average motion blur loses fast-moving objects anyway.
I also animated and rendered some more action in the storage room and in the hangar.
A shot where a shuttle leaves Morgan Le Fay's hangar turned out to be one of the most difficult shots in the entire animation. When 3DStudio decides to be difficult it really is. This time it decided that I can not save and load the scene. I had to make it and render it right away. Of course 3DStudio also decided to take it's time with the rendering. Something to do with raytraced shadows - no set of parameters would make it any faster though, so all I could do was to wait since I really could not turn the shadows off. On top of all this, either anti-aliasing or map filtering or both refused to function on a particular material - the cockpit cover - causing visible pixelation.
All this could have made me lose interest in the whole thing for a long time unless I had not been doing another scene at the same time. I was just trying to come with ideas for the look and feel of Morgan Le Fay's navigation room when I "had" to drop everything to play System Shock 2. SS2 uses Thief's 3D-engine which means that all texture maps come neatly packaged in a file called fam.crf, which is a winzip file. So if you thought the navigation room seems oddly familiar, the answer is yes, it's almost completely built out of System Shock's textures. Looking Glass please do not sue me. I still had to make the bump maps though. And a big minus goes to Looking Glass for using 8-bit textures with a global palette - shame on you!
This scene was a deviation from norm in that the geometry is very simple and the emphasis is on textures. This is what you are supposed to do with 3DStudio anyway. Materials were also quick to make because with this kind of textures you just slap them on and that's that. Usually hours of work goes into building materials out of component maps. So this scene was finished in a record time and the result is not bad.
So the big news is that everything is now rendered. This thing will be ready in no time.
January 1999
Well, I have been doing a lot of Character Studio animation lately. It's not easy work. The results are nice when you get it right ... of course I never do. Get it right, that is. Now I'm again in need of rendering time. Something like 100 hours of it. Considering I can't leave the computer on at nights because of the infernal noise, it's bit of a problem.
October 1998
Summer 1998 my ass! Well, at least I kept my promise - the summer is history and part 2 is not even close to being finished.
Plans haven't changed much. I have had a picture storyboard of the entire part 2 for more than a half a year now. 3DStudio MAX is now at version 2.0. MAX has become a pretty nifty piece of software. Now you've got lens effects and atmospheric effects straight out of the box. Liquids are still a bit tricky, though. Character Studio enables faultless joints on "organic objects", like humans.
Just like part 1, part 2 will include "outside" shots and "inside" shots. Outside shots are already finished for the most part and the raw animation data fills a large part of my hard drive space. I still don't have a single finished inside shot, though. Storage room model is finished, hangar is under construction and I haven't even started on the shuttle cockpit. Of the two characters I need one is nearly finished (although I'm having serious problems with Character Studio). Now that I have Character Studio and if I get it working the way I want, of course I should rework the Alien as well, but we'll see.
Autumn 1997
I now have a screenplay for part two after discarding another, much simpler screenplay completely and starting from scratch. I never write these things down ... that way it's easier to make changes. It may be that I have to discard this one as well if it proves to be too elaborate.
As always, my plans are insane. The amount of work involved in realizing this screenplay is mind-boggling. For starters, I would have to model a storage room, a shaft, couple of corridors, the navigation room, a hangar, an orbital station and several spaceships. And this is only the beginning since I'm going to need things that I cannot make with any of the available tools - like blood and explosions.
So far all I can promise is this: part two will not be ready until the summer of 1998.
Last updated 6.1.2001