Hello friends, long time no post, I know…
Though, as you may have surmised from my activity at Instagram, I have entered the final stages of postproduction for Heroes of Bronze. Everything from compositing to music and SFX is being done right now. I am preparing for the final stretch of the creation of this shortfilm project. And let me tell you, I’m growing more excited and anxious everyday 😁
There are too many updates to mention them all since I last posted a news entry. It is safe to say though that I’ve advanced A LOT over the months. Over 70 percent of the shots are now rendered and every day, I am progressing further and further towards the final result. A lot of tweaking and improvement is still needed, but I am on it, one shot at a time.
Handling Overwhelm
One thing that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough is how to actually handle these last stages of these long, difficult productions. I’ll be the first one to admit feeling overwhelmed and sometimes even depressed when things don’t go the way I wanted.
Well, I figured out a single reliable recipe for me. If you feel like the project is too much for you to handle, just take it one small step at a time, forget the big picture for a while, and just fiddle with some settings of a single scene. Or polish up that one asset that you always wanted to improve. Improve some composition or jump into any little task that might push the production a tiny bit. And then another. And another. Slowly, the feeling of overwhelm will pass, and in no time, you’ll be able to work normally again. That’s what always worked for me.
Final Touches
One of the challenges for the final shots was adding blood and dirt to the battle scenes. That’s what I’ve been spending a lot of time on lately. In the end I created shader groups in Blender, that I can simply throw at my materials. Works like a charm - and if you’re interested, you can get these at my Patreon.
And here, a few shot pictures from the final film:
I will not spend too much time on this news post, rather, I really want to deliver the goods as soon as possible. So, let me just say this - in the next news post, I do believe I’ll be able to finally announce the release date of Heroes of Bronze shortfilm. Wish me luck. Or even better - enough energy 😁
Here is a short breakdown of a shot that I re-purposed for the final film. It needed a number of seemingly small changes, that however resulted into rerendering and recompositing the whole thing 😁 I have added blood, arrows stuck in shields, flipped the camera composition (in order to retain the line of action of the battle sequence), changed appearance and facial animation for some of the characters and improved a bit of the volumetric lighting… I really wanted to achieve the feeling like they just stopped in shock, gazing at the size of the enemy army.
New Youtube Videos
I’ve made a number of CGBoost video tutorials, so check them out, maybe you’ll find them useful.
Also, you can watch some of my latest videos, focused on new versions of Character Creator and iClone.
So, that’s it for today. Next time, I’ll be back with some of the final news about Heroes of Bronze short film.
Chairé!
Martin
