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Limoges - The Market Place

24

By Jacob Nielsen.

Jacob writes:

My first post here... just finished a visualization of a movement from Mussorgsky's "Pictures of an Exhibition" This is intended for live projection with a symphony orchestra. It was first performed two weeks ago with Copenhagen Philharmonics. The sync is maintained with a speed adjustment patch in Troikatronix' Isadora.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

24 Comments

  1. I agree. Nice but, in the beginning the record player goes in the wrong direction, but in the end it goes the correct way.

  2. Very nicely done!  A few suggestions:
      1) use motion blur to anti-alias motion artifacts.  Especially the spinning pool balls.
      2) use filter to remove speckling artifacts and/or run Cycles render for more iterations (looks like Cycles artifacts to me).

    I love the dual roles of the ball grabbers spiders !!!

  3. Yes - I should have mentioned that I used Cycles - and of course the Game Engine. I would have loved to just leave the render for at least the double amount of time... but unfortunately there was a deadline. I managed with 1.30 minutes  each frame. I didn't know how to add motion blur in cycles at that time. However I just read a tutorial how to do it - just do a vector pass on your image sequence in Blender Internal. I already applied some blur to smoothen out the noise - but the fireflies can't be killed!

    • Kirill Poltavets on

      Hello, Jacob!
      Nice movie!
      Althougth, let me make some crits&advices:
      1st (the most noticeable) - "crabs" are too "ticking" in short movements (I think this can be improved... made with curves, smoother)
      2nd - the green cable looks too obviously like "only diffuse shader". It can be a bit reflecting - this will give it a "live view" (like a real phone cable). It's very noticeable because balls are running through it so it's close to a camera.
      DoF - in some frames is a bit stronger than necessary (or maybe lasts too much). 1000 passes - it's an overkill for a small production :)
      I advice you to use DoF + Motion Blur through Compositor (using parallel scene with BI, no raytracing, MB = Vector Blur). It's working good. And 300 passes + Neatlmage processing is more than enough. I don't see any crisp corners here so NI noise removal will be unnoticeable and frames will be looking very clean.
      I used this processing for a freelance job, my customer is hypercritical and he was satisfied :) I would like to show this but the project is still WIP (rendering a lot of similar parts).
      A trick with NI was to take the main material (metallic car paint), make a "noise shot" with a big plane, feed it to NI as a noise sample shot to analyse. If you want, I can process your frames through NI. For free of course.

  4. I'm from Limoges and I do know its market place... But I don't see the connection (I may be too down to earth).
    Anyway, a video is always a huge piece of work to do. Well done !

  5. @bobo That's interesting! Well Mussorgskij had his inspiration from his friend Victor Hartmann's drawings - each of the pictures in the "Pictures of an Exhibiton" is a musical interpretation on Hartmanns work - my interpretation is "2nd generation" and is solely based on Mussorgskijs colourfull music. Many of the original drawings by Hartmann have been lost - including "The Marketplace" - thus it's not of big interest to me to pay too much attention to the original drawings. 

    •  Simply bump it with a dense wood texture (the "rings" flavor, obviously) and set a harsh rim light from the rear or the side to get the classical vinyl/shellac look. Add a tiny bit of noise to the texture and don't make the record perfectly flat to get some animation onto the specularity, I'd suggest.

      Nice shot, btw: funny ideas, good timing, and I'll bet, the musicians will love it to perform Mussorgsky the blender way ;)

  6. Loved it, Jacob, and I'm just sorry I can't see it in its intended environment.  I'm not particularly concerned about the cable nor the Cycles artifacts.  The issue of the wrong rotation direction is a small one and I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it.  It's easy to fix in any case.

    A possible start for the grooves could be to create them by bump mapping.  Photograph a small 78 RPM disc and create a high contrast bump map from the grooves.  You can often find suitable children's toy records at flea markets and junk shops.  Experiment in that direction and see how you go.

    I certainly wouldn't attempt to model the grooves.  You may even find that texture mapping would work, but you'd have no control of the lighting that way.

    Finally, personally I would add a little more text to the label.  At the moment it looks a little unlikely, but that's just my personal taste.

  7. Really amazing! I'm surprised there's so much criticism, I can see it's mostly justified, but this piece stands head and shoulders above most Blender animations featured here, so I think it deserves a great deal of praise too. And I'm not easy to please. I love the syncing of the action with the music. Generally very entertaining. The little "errors" others complained about are easy to fix, so thumbs up!

  8. Wow!

    Brilliant! I love how technical issues didn't get in your way. After all this is the art of motion pictures.

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