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Nightfall


It will take several videos for me to show what I've done here effectively. It was one in a long list of goals to unify and automate the weather in the Save Point engine build, and I finally got that set up and working. What this means going forward is that skies and weather, time of day, etc, no longer have to be rebuilt from scratch for every scene. This also provides stylistic continuity, which is important. The new system unifies all control of time, sky, and weather into a simple control panel with about 300 sliders, and can track things like constellations so that they are accurate to any geolocation point chosen. So, as I'll demonstrate later, I can have a scene that occurs in Cairo, and the camera pans up to the night sky, and the constellations there will be identical to what one would see at that time of night in Cairo.

Most important, skies and weather are fully automated now. I can dial in a look, or just leave it on autopilot and film.
 
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It looks great. The ability to controll the sky, the clouds, the stars, sunlight sweeping across these already beautiful landscapes, will add a lot to the style, the, as you say, continuity, and the variety of moods you want to set. Also, the accurate planetarium-like capability sounds really cool. I have an app, on my phone, that, when I hold it towards the sky, shows and names everything. This kind of technological stuff is, to me, like magic. :)
 
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Continuity is a big issue for us, because something of this size requires a lot of different design assets coming from all different kinds of artists. It's a high priority to find meta solutions for combining 1000's of unique assets into something that looks on screen like it was designed by a single mind. How it's lit, framed, the aspect ratio, the cinematography beats, etc, all contribute towards the goal of presenting a unified front. In conventional films, everything is bespoke, but we don't have the budget for it, so it's a unique challenge to create a seamless exterior from what internally, is a patchwork.

When you look at earlier videos in comparison, the stuff from 6 or 8 months ago, they don't feel nearly as put together as these current scenes do.

Honestly, it was all theory a year back, and I didn't know if I was going to be able to pull it off, but I feel like this is really starting to work on a level that can eventually be effective. The final step, if I can pull it off, will be the AI stylistic overlayer. Once that's implemented on top of the deepfake characters, I should have something globally unique. There will be a lot of people using one technique or another, but the magic will happen once a series of things align perfectly, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of it's parts.

Anyway, the next video "Flood" is a lot more impressive, and It's about half done now.
 
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a simple control panel with about 300 sliders

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Or you could just buy an iPhone 13 pro and it'll do all that for you with a single touch of a button! Apparently. :rolleyes:

It's great that you're finally seeing things coalesce into a working model, and congratulations on that. I would think that the biggest risk of making things too simple (with or without 300 sliders) is that some content creators will get carried away with the power of the software and forget to apply a decent measure of quality control. You wouldn't want SavePoint to become known for its naff OTT CGI visuals (kinda like MS WordArt came to be the fool's-gold standard in crappy logo design).
 
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Or you could just buy an iPhone 13 pro and it'll do all that for you with a single touch of a button! Apparently. :rolleyes:

It's great that you're finally seeing things coalesce into a working model, and congratulations on that. I would think that the biggest risk of making things too simple (with or without 300 sliders) is that some content creators will get carried away with the power of the software and forget to apply a decent measure of quality control. You wouldn't want SavePoint to become known for its naff OTT CGI visuals (kinda like MS WordArt came to be the fool's-gold standard in crappy logo design).
Yeah, these are the things I think about.

I've got multiple solutions in the works for these issues.

As far as everybody using it, and it turning into a circus of low effort garbage, I think that problem has solved itself. That solution created a bunch of other problems, but long story short, as Save Point progressed over time, it became sophisticated to a level that would probably make it inaccessible to casual users. It's easier to get useful results than ever before, but the learning curve would unfortunately be beyond a lot of people. If you were serious about becoming a professional film director, and were being stopped from doing that by a lack of funds, this would work. The best way I could describe it is that we're running a simulation of a movie studio. Regardless of how easy we make it, you'd still need to know how to direct for the product to be any good. That's not really a casual skill. I mean you need to have the same skills as a real life DP when using this, and more. I literally set up simulated Arri lights in these scenes, adjust the barn doors, etc. The only difference is that I can copy paste them, or quickly wire a global temperature control for all lights. (not for this particular video, but for all the indoor ones, or shots with characters)
 
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I think the visuals were highly synonymous with the music, and that balance made this genuinely magical.
 
I think the visuals were highly synonymous with the music, and that balance made this genuinely magical.
Thanks, I got excited about developing this one when I got the idea to use the aurora borealis over cloud layer, giving the muted palette hints of bright color in just the right ratio. I thought it was an interesting way to get that 60/30/10 color ratio procedurally.
 
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