(nice work on the shadows too) ), but it didn't go through. Are your PM's turned on?
Maybe someone has a nice kitten picture to happier-ize the vibe? Just a thought.
)
Even if I could use tricks to cut the rendering materials down a third for the near-same end result, or even further, that's still just not worth it to attempt with my amount of resources (one computer, low experience). I would probably trick it right back down to looking like mush again. ) But it is cool seeing people thinking that we have/had the capability to just wantonly produce such things as a square mile+ of Death Star surface from scratch for a shot. )) and I must say that I am very impressed! For this shot to go from purely a point on Ady's wish-list to this level of actualization through his efforts (especially with what we had to work with)... stunning! Even if some people don't agree with how the shot fits into the film (slows the pace, etc.), hopefully everyone will acknowledge and applaud the mental energy and drive and cahones it took to bring such a shot about from just about nothing to this level of immersibility. Not that most everybody isn't doing that already, but I'll add my voice too in that regard (at the risk of seeming a bit biased): Rockin' job, Ady, I say! I like it! You have good points of course; I'll just point out a few things that will probably just sound like excuses in the end, but it's what it is. ). Had I had the composite layers and more of the edit in my hands, maybe my "CG animator" eyes would have noticed these things you mentioned, like a better/more accurate blur length and the camera being too rock-solid -- or maybe my inexperience would have failed me, which I will honestly say is a possibilty. In fact, I picked the final mo-blur setting here, not Ady -- but it was a virtual shot in the dark for me as I was only going by playbacks in VirtualDub of the raw, uncomposited renders alone. Again, we were kind of hands-tied in a lot of ways putting this together. He's in the UK, I'm in California, I only have dial-up for e-communicating/sending... although I honestly think even just the CG side of this shot looks a bit better than a reasonable expectation for the how the end result could look given the resources and experience of the people who put it together for the kind of shot it is (or maybe not...?) -- and we reached a point where it seemed like a good "go" and we went for the final render to have a hope of getting this thing done. (There's more to the story, but this is already long.) Modeling the red Death Star mesh alone took me probably pushing a hundred hours; definitely wasn't just a LightWave primitive sphere with an eye poked onto it. I'm kind of a detail fiend, so I poured over the very few references I had, did my best to recreate everything I could make out from those (the three fuzzy rotating DS holograph shots from AOTC). Pretty rough! But I'm glad people seem to approve to the end result. (Note that I did only the "from-scratch 3D" portions of those shots for Revisited -- Ady of course did all the frame graphics, Aurebesh text, arrow-lines, compositing, etc.) ). The problem is that the projectors for these auditoriums run only native IMAX, horizontal-run prints, and as I can only afford a regular ol' 70mm print (which runs vertically through a projector) my pals and I are going to have to lie on our sides on the floor of the theatre to watch it correctly. But we still expect it to rock! ) ...though I don't know what that means as far as how long it will take for all the work that is left to get done. Again, great blurb! 
) Again, I haven't done this procedure yet, but it's on my to-do list. A pretty cool idea, wish I'd thought of it: burn a DVD with this test pattern then capture your DVD's player's output of this burned disk and see if it's wider or narrower or what. Neat! )