Firebird

[Vance G]

I'm a prog musician (I play in a couple of prog bands signed to small labels: https://mrrmusic.com/project/gekko-projekt/, https://bombergoggles.bandcamp.com/album/gyreland), and I'm working on a solo album.  One of the pieces on the solo album is a prog version of a section of Stravinsky's Firebird.  I'm working on a video to go along with it.  Here's 20 seconds of the work in progress.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/532926484" width="640" height="564" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[Vance G]

It looks like the iframe did not work.  Here's a link:

-Vance

[Michael Brennan]

Looking good Vance!
Can't wait to see it with music.

[ovni1]

Hopefully we will se the finished video!

[itsjustme]

Looks good, Vance!

[Vance G]

Thanks everyone!  I certainly will provide updates and let you see the final version.  On the one you've seen I've already fixed a couple of things (the camera path was a little off of where it should have been, the talisman slid in the drawer a bit, it needed to be tightened up by about a second).  When I get a few more seconds done, I'll post an update.

[Vance G]

Here's a test of the first 47 seconds or so, with a rough cut of the music, which is a prog rock version of the Berceuse (Lullaby) from Stravinsky's Firebird.

 

[Vance G]

Here's the first 59 seconds in a more finished state.  I lucked into doing it in the way that was the best for me.  I lit everything using the standard lighting that is in a new choreography and added a little global ambience, and everything rendered quickly.  Then, after I had the whole scene working the way I wanted it to, I turned down the standard lighting and added mood lighting (3 bulbs and some props).  When I did that, renders started taking about 5 times as long.  It made the whole process go a lot quicker to have the slow rendering happen only at the end.

 

[robcat2075]

Very trippy! I like the way the bird peels off the page.

Are you using NetRender?

[Vance G]

Yes, I'm using NetRender with a 3096 MHz i9 processor, so it is running 8 slaves.  The early versions of the choreography, when I wasn't doing anything expensive, rendered remarkably quickly, the first 20 seconds rendering in a couple of hours at 720x1280 with multi-pass!  This one, 59 seconds or 1770 frames at 1080x1920, set up for 16 passes with softening and motion blur (plus reflection and particles/hair) took 26 hours and 43 minutes.

As for the bird peeling off of the page, I created a pose for the bird, rendered it with alpha channel, and used the rendered image (composited with the old paper texture) as a decal on the book.  The bird in the same pose and the same size is below the page and moves upward, with the pose relaxing as it comes up.

The music is the Berceuse (lullaby) section of Stravinsky's Firebird (that's a portrait of Igor himself in the video), of which I did a prog rock version.

Thanks for any comments you might have!

-Vance

[robcat2075]

26 hours... not bad for something so long.

It's not like you have to pedal the computer while it's working 😀

A good step might be to render a few test frames to see if multi-pass ON or OFF gets you a faster render. The anti-aliasing is about the same for OFF and ON with 16 passes.

[Vance G]

Thanks for the tip!  I'll give it a shot next time.

-Vance