Movies are back online as long as it doesn't go past the 5 GB limit per day that I have. If you come to the site and it is shut down you will know why. I am allowed a ton of bandwidth now that I have switched web hosts so I will not get burned again with huge bandwidth bill. Whew.... Anyhoo-

Well here is is 2004 and a year later since I started with this project. Am I crazy or something?!? I actually thought I might be able to finish this before the holidays?!?. Whoops! What was I thinking? One of the problems is that I keep going back and fixing things that I see wrong or I that I just don't like. I am my worst critic and I want it just right. I have rendered a low quality ride-thru of part 3 (4 parts in all) to see how the animation and effects are looking. A few more fixes, add exit lobby camera animation and then it can go to final render. All is going well! Hope to have it wrapped up first or second quarter of 2004!

I hope... We shall see.

See teaser clip movie below.
Please note: The begining of this teaser shows clipped sections of the lobby. The real ride-thru you actually walk the entire line path to the atommobiles and enter the chair just as if you were there doing it yourself from your perspective. I just picked some clips here and there to show.

As I stated in the news section I have been busy rendering out the lobby and tweaking sound effects. This walkthru render alone took 3750 frames of animation that took about 2 months to render due to my pc hanging up during the rendering process. I sent the image sequence to After Effects to create a non-compressed AVI file for best quality. After transferring the final large 3.5GB AVI file to an MPEG2 (70MB) file format (for a quick DVD burn for testing) I noticed the lobby had more light inside than what I wanted. See images above. The final DVD render will be darker than the images shown here. The transfer between my monitor settings and DVD output changes the brightness of the final product so I will use filters to darken up the area to better match the actual lobby. I guess I have a really dark monitor.

I re-rendered the beginning of the walkthru to include the mirror that was on the back wall (see middle image). I also did a second pass render for the snow composite. Now that I am finally finished with the most time consuming area I can model the rest of the attraction. I am currently finishing up modeling the walls of ice scene, animating the chair and camera animation and creating great looking scrims for the "nothing is solid" section. The rest of the project should go very quickly since I have already built many of the projectors that were housed in the different rooms and the rendering won't hang if I don't render it with raytracing and a smaller polygon count.

I haven't been able to work on the ATIS Project much this month due to my PC being down due to a long over due office remodel. My old office was just trashed from carpet stains, filled with tons of junk, a crappy little desk and no room to move or to even lay down an instruction manual (I need to use one now and then for this project). Now that my wife and I are finally finished with that 3 week remodel I was able to get some hours in. I have a few pictures to show of the walls of ice scene but I won't post the movie tests due to the fact that I don't want to spoil it. The black line you are seeing below in the pictures is the atommobile handlebar (yes it is supposed to look like that). Oh, and the last image is an out of seat render test.

I also posted (below) a little animation test for the newly added Peoplemover/s that moves overhead in the lobby. I modeled the turquoise and red old style ( during the Monsanto years) Peoplemover.

Note: I have been getting requests for Quicktime files. Due to my lack of compression skills for Quicktime, my files are coming out to large of a file size to be useful to post on the site. Please let me know what other file type I can create (avi,mpeg,wmp???) so Mac users can open the movies up as well. Is an AVI okay? Please let me know what is preferred. Also let me know which certain movie files are on here that Mac cannot open so I can redo them if I can.

Thanks-

I can't take it anymore! Aaaaaaahhhhh!
My old machine rendering scene heavy projects (like the lobby) at 700 x 486 pixel took about 1 hour 30 minutes to render... PER FRAME!!! That means ONE SECOND of animation took well over 60 HOURS. Argh!

So with the help of a new credit card I was able to purchase a new PC that can take on this giant project. A new computer can really do you wonders. To those who are curious, it is a Pentium (multi-threading) 2.6 ghz with 1gig of ram with a (high end) ATI Fire GL X1 VIDEO CARD, two 80 gig hard drives and a Pioneer DVD W/RW / CD W/RW. This thing is a render monster. This new machine can now render the same scene with full raytrace lighting at about one frame for every four minute and with raytracing turned off it renders in 30 seconds a frame! Hardware-rendering (for particles like snow) renders in REALTIME! Nice!

Quick Raytracing / Hardware Rendering Definitions: Raytracing is where the computer calculates light and reflections and adds them to the rendered frame and it takes frames longer to render when activated during the render process. Hardware rendering is when your graphics card handles all of the rendering and not the software you are using to render particle effects like sparks, snow, smoke, fire etc.

Here are some almost finished lobby images with more details added like the tube atommobiles, Monsanto (text) power statement (see below) and diorama box contents. I still want to tweek the mighty microscope silver nose, add a peoplemover above and a loading dock helper-person. I also added the inside box diorama scenes. I didn't have any reference material at the time to so I just made it up from what I could remember. Today I received a DVD from a fellow fan that had footage of the inside of the boxes. I will try to go back replace them with a closer version of the diorama box.

To keep things interesting I decided to switch gears and work on the nucleus scene for fun. I had to post this as soon as I finished it because I am excited about how nice it came out. Here is a quick render of the Nucleus scene. Damn close to the way it originality looked I think. If you look hard enough, you can see I even added the long pole that held it up like in the original ride (you were able to see it on the actual ride if you looked hard for it). What do you think?

Things are still going nicely. I added a ton of Atommobile Chairs to the Lobby and addes some animation to a bunch items in the scene. See movie below. Remember to right click and "save target as" to view movies

This was another quick 3 sec. test (nothing is quick in rendering though) to see if:
Atommobile chairs are moving at the right speed.
Chair doors close correctly.
If the loading floor is moving at the right speed.
The light is blinking at the right speed.

If you look hard in this AVI movie you can see little snow flakes in the petri dish in the background.