IGNIIITIION Instagib News

 

 

 

IGNIIITION 2, or IGNIIITIION INSTAGIB is now officially part of the 'coming soon' roster on the blog. Production has progressed nicely over the past weeks, which made me feel comfortable enough to share some intel about this project and to officially announce it. What is soon? Well, I am set on a late 2021 release as I hope to wrap up production in the next two weeks or so.

I had a fairly consistent schedule over the past few weeks. During the early morning hours I edit the demos, set up the capture parameters and create the capturelists. During the late afternoon, evenings and nights I render everything. I've been doing this for the past couple of weeks now. I even installed remote desktop software to check up on the computer when I'm at home to make sure that everything renders out smoothly and fix problems on the go in order to save time. Sometimes I don't want to check up on the renders, sometimes I'm excessively refreshing the capture folders. Kinda depends on the mood. 

Every time MME finishes up new renders I must check how they look like out of curiosity. Of course I know to some extent what the shot is going to look like, but some parameters like camera FOV and depth of field are not visible in the mod, so that way it always remains a nice suprise to see the end result. 

The sequel to IGNIIITION is going to look a lot different compared to the first film. A lot of small, but important design changes were made after the first film was released last april. It will go over them briefly as an exhaustive explanation would probably take all day to read. First of all, all footage is rendered at 1080p again instead of 4K DCI resolution. This was done purely out of limitations and was not necessarily an aesthetic choice. I think I will eventually upscale the 1080p master to 4K with Topaz Video AI. 4K DCI rendering was only possible in mme whenever depth of field maps were rendered simultaneously using the depthmap approach. However, I found out the hard way that depth focus and radius could not be changed at all when using the depth of field maps. Whatever I tried, the depthmap would remain at the same spot and would use the same depth of field parameters. So, in a sense, I found out the main limitations of utilizing depthmaps in my work. 

This is why I shifted towards the second depth of field approach, which imprints the depth of field directly into the shot, instead of rendering the shot plus a depth of field mask. Because this is way more resource intensive (and also more time consuming depending on the mme_dofframes parameter), mme refused to render on any resolution beyond 1080p because the mod could not utilize more memory. To me, downscaling the resolution was no problem as the quality of the shots proved to be more consistent and cinematic in my opinion. In addition, the depth of field could now be fully animated; a first for my Quake III projects. This is why I have decided to use the second DoF approach for this project. Secondly, I finally managed to utilize the 'camera FOV' option after an extensive testing period this summer. Together with my friends at the MovieMaking discord, I managed to find ways to make camera fov/zoom animations in the mme project files in order to change the standard cg_fov 140 look that I have been going for quite some time. I am convinced that these new approaches will highly enhance the cinematic look and feel of IGNIIITIION Instagib and I can't wait to see how it will turn out within the end product.

Now don't worry. Depth of field maps will remain to be a vital part of my future work. I am working on an idea for a third DEPTHMAP movie, called DEPTHMAP DEFRAGMENTED (but that is for somewhere in 2022-2023-2024) that utilizes a new randomized and combined approach to original footage and depthmap use. But that is for the future. My mind is first set on finishing IGNIIITION. I have not forgotten about Experience as well. At the moment I have been suffering from technical difficulties for quite some time, so I have not been able to do a whole lot on it. Once production of IGNIIITIION has finished, I hope to be able to reset my windows computer and reinstall the game; hopefully squashing out the last problems that have been bugging me for some time as i need to capture some additional footage for the film. The film remains in offline post-production and hopefully will be moving to online post-production once the last pieces of footage and music are locked into place. There is no official releasedate yet on the horizon, but I will share this information in good time.

Now I'll be back on my way to MME, rendering some more demo's. Until soon.