2016 Professional Marble Association International Invitational  - OFFICIAL VIDEO
Channel: pef dispenser
Date: 2016-09-05

It's been a long and grueling racing season leading up to today's event. Filmed live at the famous BnL stadium on the shores of Lake Michigan, the play-by-play comes from local morning zoo DJs Phil and Re-Phil (yes, they are like the ladies from Invisibilia, you can barely tell them apart).

Let's enjoy the action!


For more, see
     https://pefmusic.bandcamp.com
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Marble Machine
6/21 - 9/5

Two and a half months from inspiration to the final movie:
22,950 frames at ~1-3 minutes rendering time per frame (excluding insets).

Uncompressed AVI: 59 GB (70 minutes to compile the 'final' composite [both times])

I saw a couple "marble machine" videos and the gears started turning. Yep, gears. I wanted to use gears and inclines and levers and . . . one thing led to another. Each obstacle I added meant one to two thousand more frames added to my movie.

Once I had my obstacles set, I had to bake the physics. Early on I wasted a lot of time running marbles through as I added each obstacle, but realized it didn't matter. It is like taking polls in an election: only one really counts. So I had everything lined up, and baked the marbles' physics, which took 2+ hours. Each time.

The marbles seemed to find every opening to go off course (except the two I put in the Pins, and never had to follow up on). I finally got six to the finish line, with some exciting action to boot. But somehow, I lost that bake. After a few more bakes with fewer than four finishers, I started thinking I would take four or five if nothing else. A couple tries later, I had my six finishers. (The days spent baking seemed interminable, until rendering began, and I learned what 'interminable' really meant).

My mission was complete at this point. All I had to do was tweak the models for on-camera work, and start rendering. Early tests showed some flaws. Noise, for instance: I forgot to change the noise 'seed' for each frame, and got some unpleasant results. And once I saw what the noise was really doing, the new effect was not at all pleasant either. I had re-rendered the opening ~600 frames multiple times, but now I was closer to 1,500 frames in and going back to frame one.

Well, frame two actually. After having baked the physics, I noticed that going from frame one to frame two, the marbles in lanes one and six switched places. Why? Could not figure it out, and did not want to break something else while trying. 

I ended up completely re-doing the lighting, and spent time trying to bake the walls' texture, before dropping them altogether. They added 2.5-3 minutes to each render - for a total per frame closer to five minutes rather than two. I should also note that I dramatically increased the sample rate for rendering.

For an animation, I have used as few as 50-80 samples to get render times measured in seconds. To this point I had been using 100 samples with render times a little over a minute each. To combat the noise I increased samples up to 333 per pixel, and that's when the walls fell (so to speak).

All these changes made the lighting less, well, good, but that's life. I was making changes as the rendering progressed, and dealing with the fallout later. For example, I changed the sky color from blue because I noticed (as I sample-rendered ahead) that the shadows were really too blue. So the sky changes color (and then changes back for the finale)? Have you noticed there aren't any walls? But somehow the doors are still there? 

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Some numbers:

Blend and Asset Files: 1,453 files, 11 folders, 5.37 GB (developed over the course of 2.5 months)

Audacity: 11,641 files, 112 folders, 12.6 GB (Really? In two days? For 12-3/4 minutes of sound?)

Render Files (7/20 - 9/5): 70,157 files, 57 folders, 28.1 GB
 Main sequence (sans insets): 20,884 files, 28 folders, 17.6 GB

Intermediate video tests (JPEG AVI): 27 files, 4.98 GB (what didn't get trashed)

These numbers are conservative as I overwrote or deleted gigabytes worth of work, when both modeling and rendering. I kept thinking I'd put up a test video to show the progress, but . . . never did.

After late July, I wouldn't exactly say I was rendering 24/7, but some weeks, it was near enough as to make no difference.

And its the project that never ends. I finished my last 'main sequence' render on 8/27, and felt no relief because I then went into sound and titles. I had had many ideas over the weeks of rendering, and now could test what might actually work. The one minute credit sequence took 4-5 days alone.

Finally, I assembled all the pieces: frames, titles, audio track, and voila, a movie is born.

Well, not quite yet: I still have to publish it, and that is the real test of artistic courage. On top of the million things I changed, there are a million more things I would change in this production (most notably and ironically, the lack of any Foley effects). But as my old pappy used to say, it's time to shit or get off the pot.