Blender Feature Film - Cold Dark Mirror - Jan 2014 update

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about my film project Cold Dark Mirror, but I’ve been furiously busy working away on building sets, characters and animating shots over the holidays and into the new year.


This shot is 40 seconds long and is the latest shot, it’s still rendering right now on my render box. Just under two mins per frame… looks like it’ll be at it for a while.


I used the Array Modifier to create the spiral staircase for this shot.


You can use an animated character mesh for particle instances. Feature request for the developers: I’d love for there to be a way to offset the animation frames randomly on a per particle basis, right now all the character clones move at the exact same time. (Oddly enough this works great for the ‘spooky’ feel I’m going for in this shot)

Filming is now halfway done by my reckoning, I’m at the 35 minute mark of the final 70 min total. Lots of shots left to do still, but I’ve only been animating since May 2013.

Check out the teaser trailer if you haven’t already:

and check out my production blog for periodic updates as well.

This looks good.
Question: Are you doing everything by yourself?

You can always use my TimeOffset addon to create an effect like the one you are after. It works by (instance) copying and placing similar animated “object groups” (or one single object) parented to an empty for easy object group control/placement; after setup itll allow you to set animation frame offsets on the animation curves per group and also randomization of this offset is possible. So it doesnt work with particles at all, but it very well might be what you need.

Everything except the voice acting, which was one of the first steps in the whole process once I had the script locked down

I looked into the TimeOffset plugin at one point. The problem that I had is that if you take an animated character mesh which is driven by an armature, put it into a group (call it “Master”) then create an empty, set the duplication to group, (with “Master” that you just created as the group it will instance…) the minute you move your empty from 0,0,0 the whole mesh goes wonky just the same way as if you move the original mesh while the armature modifier is active… we’re talking H.P. Lovecraft level of freakyness here (and a bug/feature :wink: that I intend to use as an effect at some point… :wink:

Everything looks beautiful, Good work.

I haven’t done this with Blender, but other apps in the past, but I think this issue could be corrected if the entire armature is parented to a root bone that has no transform/rotational/scale (t/r/s) applied to it, nor any animation, and is located at the origin. That way, all animated bones have t/r/s data within the local space of the root (stationary) bone which would be at the top of the armature hierarchy.

The root bone would then be parented to the empty and duped. All the animation, since it is “contained” within the armature below the root, would then (hopefully) be translated correctly when instanced with offsets.

I can’t test this now, but maybe someone could do a quick test and verify that this is a viable solution.

I’ll have to try that… for this shot though I’ll just put up with it the way it is, now that all 40 seconds at 2 min per frame… twice because it’s in stereo 3D… have rendered :wink: