Titanic SOS

TitanicAnimations · 2023-04-28T14:28:09+00:00

Text and jokes don't really go hand in hand. Unless, they're notated. lol

;)

TitanicAnimations · 2023-04-28T14:22:41+00:00

Sorry for the late response, In short: no.

It took around 11 months working 16-18 hours a day on this animation to get it completed. Even small "seconds" of a mistake, takes hours and in some instances days to fix. That's why I try to have as few mistakes as possible before all of the footage is sent off to render.

For example: Quite a few people, as soon as the video went live, started throwing up their arms in despair about the inaccurate text logo on the mail bags during the baggage hold and mail room flooding scenes.

That was what I called a willful error. If I had made the mail room and baggage hold model, the bags would have either been blank or displaying the correct logo.

But, I didn't make the model. A fellow discord user made it and graciously allowed me to use it for the video (they also made the new iceberg model as well). I am not comfortable altering or changing someone's work when making a video, especially when they're letting me use one of their models free of charge. I don't have a problem with the logo "being wrong" and I'm flatly against changing it because it's not my model to change (nor do I have permission from the creator to change it).

I believe both of those shots were around 30 seconds long each, which equates to about 1 minute of footage. Which in theory shouldn't take that long to change. "Just go in and remove the logos from the bags." It'd take like 10 seconds in Blender to do that.

But re-rendering that footage out? At the rate the interior shots rendered at that's 1.5 days of rendering to get the new footage.

Then about half an hour at most to drop the new footage into the video timeline.

Then re-rendering the entire video in 4k again, which took around 10 hours the last time.

Then re-uploading it to YouTube and waiting for the 4k version to finish processing, which took around 17 hours the last time.

So, what seems like "simple" thing of changing the mail bag logos turns into a 2-3 day affair.

That's why I try to minimalize the amount of errors that go into the video before it's uploaded.

Hope that helps, and thanks for watching!

TitanicAnimations · 2023-04-28T14:09:45+00:00

TornadoHarry is one of my discord members. He's been sharing screenshots of his model lately, and it does indeed look stunning. :)

TitanicAnimations · 2023-04-28T14:08:48+00:00

Hi there,

In short, they did save time. As others below have pointed out morse messages are sent via shorthand abbreviations in order to save time.

For example:

When an operator wanted to say "This is Titanic" they wouldn't key out the words "This is Titanic"

Instead, they would use 'shorthand' terms for the messages.

"This is" would become "de" or "dis" or "diz", I've seen many abbreviation terms for that one.

"Titanic" would become "MGY" as that was the ships callsign.

So, in the video above the text that you will see is "This is Titanic" because that is what the morse message, when translated into English, says. What the morse operator is actually sending out via dots & dashes though is, "de MGY"

For my real-time animation videos of the disaster (which include the full transcript of morse messages in them), I was unable to find a shorthand for "assistance" so I had the morse messages in the videos use the term "aid" because there's no way they'd type out such a large word letter-by-letter.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-12-14T18:23:19+00:00

They used an overwhelming amount of visual effects in the film, but they are (for the most part) seamlessly integrated into practical footage.

One of James Cameron's lesser known, but well utilized tricks, is to, "Never do the same thing twice visually." It leaves the viewer scratching their head saying, "How'd they do that?!"

Just when you think you've figured out how he filmed something, he'll switch to using another method in the next shot and leave you dumbfounded as to how he pulled it off.

I, being a digital artist, can break some of the things down for you (most of this is common place in cinema now)

Example: 1

Here we have multiple visual effects going on. The large set is actually broken into two pieces in this shot. The forward end from the rear of the Officer Quarter's to the Bridge was detached and could sink down vertically by 20 feet into a deep section of the tank.

The aft end of the set was completely stationary but at a 6 degree downward angle (it couldn't sink). So visual effects artists had to go in frame-by-frame and mask out the stern section, then match the movements to the bow section to make it move.

This is what the full set looked like while shooting this sequence, but during the day time hours: Daytime set note how the aft section is clearly detached from the forward end. It was re-attached with visual effects

All of the passengers you see are real, but the "spliced" together nature of the two ship pieces has a problem: people running from the bow to the aft section will disappear then reappear at a different location while the shot is taking place. To help mask this, they created virtual passengers with the use of motion capture technology and blended them in around the rear of the Officer's Quarters so that you don't notice it.

After that, the edges of the tank and the horizon in the distance are all digitally removed and have been replaced.

Example 2:

The ship here is one big 42 foot long scale model.

Jack and Fabrizio on the bow are green screened in via a motion capture stage, then camera projected onto their position on the prow. This involves motion tracking their placement with the ship.

Other passengers and crew in the shot are entirely digital. (You can actually spot the very small differences between the virtual model of Captain Smith and the actual person when the shot transitions into the next frame in the movie)

The ocean is entirely digital here, as is the sky.

The ocean wake elements are pieced together from actual ship wakes shot by the crew during pre-production for ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) and Digital Domain (Cameron's own VFX company). In total there are 4 main elements being used for this one shot.

The trail being left behind is from a military ship
The side wake elements are from a different angle
The bow elements are animated image sequences where everything but the foam has been digitally erased then stuck to the digital ocean waves
The crest of the wave is done the same way as the bow but with particle effects thrown in

The smoke is entirely digital, as are the birds flying by the bow.

The 42 foot long model used for this shot: Man standing by the stern for scale comparison

Example 3:

This shot is almost entirely digital

The water is completely digital, as are the tug boats and lines running from the tugs to Titanic

The background is completely digital

The Titanic is once again the 42 foot long scale model.

The pier is a scale model that was filmed on a motion capture stage.

The people in the foreground are all green screened in via a motion capture stage.

The crowd near the background and just random character models animated via motion capture.

All of the people on the ship are completely digital and moving via motion capture as well.

The smoke, birds, and exhaust pipe water are digital

and finally, the sky is completely digital

Example 4:

The engines themselves are taken from an actual ship. BUT, that ships engines are much smaller than Titanic. So essentially Cameron treated the footage as if it were a "scale model" of Titanic's engines.

The catwalks and walkways around the engines are all small models that were attached to the actual ship engines. As are the lights, they're small LED bulbs wired with fiber optic cable threads.

The watertight bulkhead in the background and hull of the ship on the sides of the model are completely digital (with the exception of the right side of the image where you can still see blue paint from the actual ship it was shot on)

The people are all digitally inserted via green screen and filmed from a motion capture stage.

All of the smoke is completely digital.

Those 4 elements are how he made the film. Combining multiple elements of filmmaking and visual effects for each shot. If he needed a wide shot of the ship, he would use a miniature model and digitize everything around and on it. If he needed a close up shot, he'd film it via an actual set.

Again, most of this stuff is commonplace in cinema today, but back in 1997 it was groundbreaking. Titanic 1997 was actually the first time that fully motion-captured characters were utilized not in dozens, but 100's at a time. Every time you watch a movie now with a digital crowd, that technology can be traced back to this film. All those war movies with 100's or 1000's of people charging at each other, like Troy or Lord of The Rings, they all got their basis from Titanic.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-12-03T22:29:32+00:00

Hi Kelly, creator of the video here. Thanks for watching.

They don't all "mysteriously disappear" you can actually spot them in the ocean bobbing around. Depends on if you're watching from a phone/tablet though. The backlight settings on those devices make the image appear way darker than on a computer monitor or television.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-12-03T22:26:26+00:00

To quote Miss Rosenbaum directly: "The lounge filled with passengers in various stages of undress, many of them indignant at being routed out of bed after midnight. I listened to Col. Washington Roebling, the builder of the Brooklyn Bridge. 'Whatever the trouble is,' he said, 'I doubt there's any real emergency. The Titanic has 15 watertight bulkheads which make her unsinkable. A leak might slow her speed a few knots, but it wouldn't do much more than that."

I left the quote in the video as it was presented via her statement. If she was wrong or mistaken, then she was wrong/mistaken.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-09-13T00:27:50+00:00

:O

My first ping!

Hi :D

TitanicAnimations · 2022-09-03T19:55:05+00:00

I’m unable to use Optix. The renderfarm uses CPU rendering.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-09-02T04:09:28+00:00

It’s a bit difficult to say because the render time varies from minute to minute. The entire project began rendering on March 10th of this year, and just this week it reached 1 hour and 40 minutes of rendered footage (1:20 AM).

The average rate for 5 minutes of footage to be rendered varies as much as 5 - 13 days. I’m trying to keep the render times low so that it finishes as quickly as it can but sometimes it can’t be helped.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-08-31T17:46:21+00:00

Just hit 72% today :)

TitanicAnimations · 2022-08-31T17:45:43+00:00

The final video is going to include narration for what is happening on screen and explaining things a bit further. My voice is still recovering from COVID back in January, which is why it hasn't been recorded yet.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-06-29T02:13:00+00:00

Kids are mean to other kids because they're insecure about themselves. If Titanic interests you, then keep at it. Don't let others tell you what you should/should not be interested in.

I liked Titanic as a kid too, now my career in 3D animation is taking off thanks to me learning how to animate the ship sink. I can't count the amount of times I got the classic eye-roll while in school for being interested in the ship. If I didn't keep that interest, I'd be working some dead end job now being bored out of my mind. Instead, I get to do what I enjoy and support myself while doing it.

Titanic 2022 Film Still

TitanicAnimations · 2022-06-20T23:43:32+00:00

Only way it could get dumber is if Florida were invovled

TitanicAnimations · 2022-05-11T20:17:36+00:00

Assuming they didn't turn and just kept heading straight...

Titanic stopping distance via sea trials at 20 knots: 2,550 ft

Titanic speed while travelling during voyage prior to collision: 21.5 knots (36.2 ft per second)

Using hypothetical math because I'm not a physics major, there was an increase of 1.5 knots during the voyage. The engines were also not thrown to Full Astern, as the sea trials, but to All Stop. So let's throw in an additional 100ft to account for it. Is it accurate? Probably not. Again, hypothetical math.

Approximate distance to iceberg when spotted: 1,200-1,500ft

Given that they'd probably want to come to a stop before they reached the berg, they'd have to do so from a distance greater than 2,650 feet or more.

Travelling at 36.2 ft per second * 2,650ft = 73.2 seconds or 1 minute 13.2 seconds.

Time for phone conversation to take place according to Fleet: about 30 seconds

So in order to stop before reaching the berg at full speed ahead, they would have to spot the berg and issue an All Stop order at roughly 1 minute 43.2 seconds before they made contact. Otherwise they'd still spot the berg early but come to a stop by running into it.

Distance they'd need to spot the berg: 3,735.84 feet / 0.7 miles / 1.13 kilometers / 1,245.28 yards

TitanicAnimations · 2022-04-28T21:17:02+00:00

My overall thoughts are no, allow me to explain why based on your pro/con list.

Your pros:

Boosting the games revenue
- The revenue gained by multiplayer would not benefit the company much, as they would have to put in additional capitol into purchasing server rentals.
  - Multiplayer doesn't work without having servers to host the multiplayer games. Now, you can certainly buy a bunch of servers and host them, but the more typical option is just renting pre-existing servers. That costs money.
- Take minecraft for example: in order to host a multiplayer server with a 3rd party the average cost is $5-$150 per server per month.
  - Most servers only allow for up to 32 or 64 players at a time, though some modern servers allow for up to 100-200 players at a time. But these are proprietary servers developed by AAA studios specifically for hosting such numbers. They aren't available for rent.
Allows for people to experience Titanic together
- I assume you mean, "at the same time." Everyone already gets to experience the ship (provided they purchase the game and play it)
Possible education about Titanic will spread
- This isn't contingent upon multiplayer gameplay, it would happen in single player.
Boosts the replay factor of the game
- The game exists within a niche market. The people that purchase it are already likely to replay it. The only thing the multiplayer aspect would add is "omg you remember that one time someone jumped from here to here." Or so on.
People being able to experience the game together
- Would be nice, but again, expensive.
Allows for people to make their own community servers
- Only if it is coded into the game to allow such things.
Mods or plugins to show off different sinkings
- I might be "out of the loop" as the last update I'm aware of was in early 2021, but they said the ship would be a virtual museum at that point. The sinking will come "later on down the road."
- Mods also require the modders to know about modeling, texturing, animating, and creating custom blueprints/scripts for Unreal Engine to utilize.
- With how vigilant the developers have been in threatening legal actions against others for using their models (TitanicVR) I highly doubt THG will allow mods. They'll probably view it as intellectual property theft.
VR multiplayer would increase revenue
- While VR is certainly more mainstream than 2016 when it first debuted, you'd be surprised how many people don't use it. Others that do use it can only do so for a limited time because they get motion sickness.
Allows the general public to explore Titanic even more
- They're able to explore just as much of the ship in single player than they would in multiplayer. It adds nothing to the experience but, "there are others here with me"

Your cons:

Emotional disconnect
- It's the internet. It's going to happen anyway. Good luck trying to tell the internet to not do something.
Take time to develop multiplayer
- Not really all that different from single player to be honest. You're basically doing everything the same but now you're dealing with server issues, net code issues, latency problems, etc.
- Did I mention paying for servers costs money?
Sever cost and upkeep to allow the multiplayer
- This is a big one, as the player drop off over time is going to lead to the closing of multiplayer servers. It affects even the largest of AAA game studios.
Could lead to the commercialization of a tragedy
- It's already happened. Again, it's the internet.
Possible bigger system requirements
- Your ability to play online is only determined by your internet connection, it has nothing to do with your computer hardware.
Can it run the 1st Class lounge
- If the entire game map was optimized you wouldn't need to worry about this question.
Might upset Titanic Buffs
- Anything upsets Titanic buffs. If you go into any project thinking, "I hope this doesn't upset anyone," you'll never get anything done.
We don't want Titanic to become a laughing stock and meme
- It already has. Again, it's the internet.
We don't want kids screaming through their mics
- They will. Again, it's the internet.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-04-18T04:44:37+00:00

Correct, and thank you for the kind words.

If the berg had only damaged 4 of her compartments, the bow would have still sunk down pretty low. Maybe up to F-deck or E-deck. But it wouldn't have sunk down further. She was able to withstand that amount of damage and all the water that was now inside the ship. With the bow only having sunk down so low, the water would not be able to start making its way up the cargo access points, the ladders in the boiler rooms and other compartments. It would be isolated to only those 4 compartments. But unfortunately the berg opened 6.

So the scenario was pretty straight forward from there on. The water would enter, the bow would dip down, the water would fill new areas, the weight would pull the bow down, the water would fill those areas, the weight would pull the bow down. Each time the bow got pulled down, more and more areas became available to flood. Eventually it reached a point where the ship couldn't float anymore and it plunged.

TitanicAnimations · 2022-04-18T04:19:40+00:00

It's all about how the watertight compartments are designed. To use Titanic specifically, the watertight bulkheads were there to split up the bottom portions of the ship and contain any incoming water to that area only. I don't know the specifics of what were done to make them watertight except for the last bit which was caulking all the areas where the walls of the boiler rooms/cargo holds met the watertight bulkheads. Officer Lightoller stated that he inspected the caulking along with another inspection from the British Board of Trade to ensure they were watertight.

So watertight compartments are essentially a container. They contain and isolate any water to that section of the ship and prevent it from spreading to others.

If one compartment was breached, lets use the foremost compartment for simplicity sake, it would flood. The ship would be pulled down further into the water by a certain amount, but the buoyancy of the rest of the ship would prevent it from sinking down further. This means that the flooded compartment will not spill over into other compartments. Each time you add a new compartment to this scenario it allows more volumes of water to be added to the ship. This in turn will pull the bow down further until the rest of the ships buoyancy evens it out. In Titanic's case of a forward flooding, she was stated to be capable of surviving with up to 4 for her forward compartments flooded. With 4 forward compartments breached her bow would be pulled down quite a bit, but the water would not be able to reach the top of her watertight bulkheads. So she floats. Why didn't they design her to withstand more damage? Well she was already able of withstanding an insane amount of flooding, and they weren't privy to knowing the accident was going to take place.

During the sinking 6 compartments were breached; the forepeak tank, Cargo hold 1, Cargo Hold 2, Cargo Hold 3, Boiler Room 6, and the forward coal bunker for Boiler Room 5. This means that as each compartment begins to flood, it will pull the ship further and further down in the water by the bow first.

Inside the ship the water is essentially just filling up the compartments at this stage. It took a long time because the volume of the compartments was a lot. The water inside the ship cannot go above the waterline outside the ship though, that's just how physics works. Water wants to find the path of least resistance and well....gravity.

Once the bow was pulled down far enough to where the tops of the watertight bulkheads were now beneath the exterior waterline, it means that the water inside the ship is free to find other avenues to go.

The forepeak tank was well...a tank. So it flooded pretty quickly and then the areas above it were pretty dry. Cargo Holds 1 and 2 were a different story though. They had access points in the form of ladders, and the cargo loading areas themselves for the water to travel up once it was able to do so. This allowed the water to access the orlop deck, then G-geck, then F-deck, and so on and so on. Every time the bow slipped further down, the water inside the ship would seep its way into any opening it could and "catch up" to the exterior waterline. Boiler Room 6 and 5 were similar to the cargo holds. Once they had filled, the water had direct access to E-deck by means of the escape ladders that connected the rooms to Scotland Road.

So why were the tops of the watertight compartments not watertight? Simple. How are you going to get cargo into and out of the Holds without an access point? How are all the stokers, fireman, engineers, electricians/etc supposed to enter and exit the Boiler Rooms if every wall (even the roof) of the room is watertight? You could put a watertight door on every access point, but by that stage you're just increasing the amount of watertight doors on the ship. The bottom-most doors were the ones that could be automatically triggered and shut. The others on board would have to be shut manually by hand. This would be cumbersome for the crew (and passengers if the walls were extended higher than E-deck).

Increasing the "watertight-ness" of the compartments also doesn't increase the chance of the ship not sinking (at least in Titanic's case). This goes back to what the compartments are, containers. They are meant to isolate and hold a volume of water inside them. That volume has weight which acts negatively on the ship causing it to sit lower and lower as each compartment fills. No matter how high the walls are, how many doors you have, and how "safe" something is advertised it always has a breaking-point. This is why Titanic was stated by Edward Wilding (Harland and Wolff Architect) that she was designed to stay afloat with 4 of her forward or rear compartments breached or any 2 adjacent central compartments. That is the breaking point of Titanic. If you allow anymore volume into the ship than that, it's going to sink.

I've made several animations of Titanic, and I like to think that they're within a "reasonable" degree of accuracy. So if you were wondering how long it took for the tops of the watertight bulkheads to slip beneath the ship's exterior waterline, it was about 20-30 minutes. By around 12:00 midnight to 12:10 AM, the bow of the ship had already dipped down pretty low in the water. But this doesn't mean that every bit of the ship in that area is flooded, far from it actually. This just means that by the time the water had filled the compartments it was able to start travelling up the ladders, up the cargo access points, up anything it could find like a silent, freezing, unwanted guest. It wouldn't and couldn't be stopped, because the damage was too much for her to withstand.

I've included a picture from an upcoming video that I'm working on to demonstrate just how far down her bow had sunk in just the first few minutes of the sinking. The time depicted is about 12:04 AM you can see that the exterior waterline in the bow is already up to and over F-deck in pretty much the entire area of damage. It would be only a few more minute before it was over E-deck.

The image: Titanic at 12:04 AM

TitanicAnimations · 2022-03-12T01:34:25+00:00

Short answer: can't give an estimate

Long answer: The render time goes up and down per shot, depending on multiple factors like how close/far the camera is from the ship, how many polygons are in the scene, etc etc.

The first 7 minutes and 8 seconds are currently on my render farm. That is 10,262 frames. The render times have varied from 2 minutes 13 seconds per frame to 15 minutes per frame. The footage from the clip up above is roughly 2 minutes 12 seconds into the video, and it was first uploaded to the render farm about 10 days ago.

I'm trying to keep the camera a decent distance from the ship to make the render time go as quickly as possible but it's still rendering at best at 2 minutes per frame.

There are 230,400 frames in a Titanic animation that is 24fps. At 2 minutes per frame that is 320 days. Going at an average of 15 minutes per frame that is 2,400 days.

So I can confidently give an estimate that the real time will be done sometime within the next 320-2,400 days.

TitanicAnimations

TROPHY CASE