07/06/2011 - 11 Days left - Group Feedback on my work

Didn't do any rendering today as I had to go into uni so that I could get some feedback from the group on how the renders were looking I Also used today as a chance get Playblasts of every animation shot so far that we could have a edit to give to our sound designer.

Feedback

Initially the feedback was useless as the group was just looking at the render and say that's amazing as it was the first time that we had seen any real renders with the characters animated. After an hour or so I managed to get some feedback from the director although as i had worked closely with him throughout my render test he was pretty much happy with the renders he mainly just wanted to tweak the backgrounds of the scene adding a bit more variation to the skies. this would mostly involve me spending time sitting with him while he worked on the backgrounds in Photoshop and I put them into the scenes.

I also managed to see my tutor today who gave me a lot of help with Shot 14 to add the light beam that I wanted to shine through log, we did this in After Effects rather then Maya as it would cut down render times and be more efficient.

Initially we tried putting in a light in After Effects to see if we could mimic the light beam but I didn't realise that you needed to have 3D activated on the layer that you wanted to be effected. we spent a while trying to find the button that activated it but eventually we found the button amongst the layers tabs.

Once we then got the light working we were tried imitating the beam. the lights in After Effects aren't the most flexible especially when compared to Mayas lights. Below you can see the effect the lighting had when applied to the shot. after playing around with the settings for a while I struggled o get it looking much better than the screenshot.

I then tried applying a mask to the light to see if I could trick it into having the beam effect but when i used the mask to it just created a new shape layer instead as lights cannot have mask applied to them.

I was sat there for a while until I remembered a mistake I created a few weeks ago while applying an ambient occlusion, rather then choose multiply I chose the soft light option. I decided I would try applying this to a shape layer. 

 You can see above this had the exact effect I wanted. but this brought up a new issue of the light beam was constant even when the characters passed through it. luckily this was a lot easier issue to solve as it was a matter of keying the opacity of the light to 0% when the character would pass through.

I then decided to take this another step further but duplicating the light and changing the shape as when the marmot passes through the beam he doesnt fully break it. I find little things like this can really add the the overall quality of the film.