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.

31/05/2011 - 17 Days till Deadline

Scheduling

As I have finally got scenes to render I have set my self the goal of getting 2 shots finished every day although I know this is going to change all the time as I am going to be waiting for scenes to be finished by the animators and also rendering can vary in length depending on the complexity of the scene. Tara has lent me her desktop to help the rendering get done faster and I also have my laptop for rendering and compositing on. For my production schedule rendering and compositing are in the same box as I am compositing as soon as the renders finish so that i can see if any extra passes are needed.

Ideal Production Schedule

Realistic Schedule

Rendering

Got the first 4 scenes that I could light and render today. The first was the opening shot of the mountains, most of this was pretty much set up as its the scene I had been doing render tests with before I gave it to the animator to do his work.

From my test I knew that I needed to have 4 passes to match the tests that the director liked Ambient Occlusion, Shadow, Colour/Lighting and background. Ambient Occlusion is the easiest to set up as the default usually works well in mot scene. Shadow and Colour/Lighting all relied on the lights being set up. For setting up the lights I generally used a 3 point lighting system with one light as the main light simulating the sun with shadows on and the other 2 i use on a lower intensity to simulate light reflecting of surfaces giving the animation a generally nice look to it.

Here is an example of the basic layer set up

An this is an example of the Layer when they become more complex. This typically happens with shots that have more depth to them so that can be broken down into sections for adding Depth of field and motion blur etc.

There was an issue when I started prepping the opening scene for render because when the animator imported the character the characters hypershade was a mess but were the character had been imported multiple time the scene was a mess and something went wrong with the shaders on the environment and it wasn't letting me render out all passes in one go. I didn't realise this until the batch render had finished, after spending a couple of hours trying to solve this I found the easiest way round this was to render the passes separately as I couldn't afford to waste anytime.

Here you can see a screenshot of the shading issue I was having no matter what I did in one render layer it would affect another making certain object loose their texture completely and render transparent it was nothing to do with the materials transparency as I have had that create issues before . I just couldn't work it out but once this film is finished i intend to solve this problem as it could occur in future jobs.

Hut Modeling

Originally this hut was modelled by dean in our group but when I got got round to using his it so that I could start putting the sets together I had a few issue. the first was that it had a 9 sided polygon and we have always been told to have no more then a 4 sided in a model although this was fairly simple to fix, after letting dean know that I was going make some adjustments to the model. I started to fix it by using the split polygon tool, which divides the polygon between 2 selected points. This was all simple and I very quickly had a tidy looking model, all it needed now was some small adjustments to the vertexes to make it look tidier. Once I moved the first vertex it turned out there was another under it, from this I also found out there was a polygon under another and it appeared this happened all over the model. After talking to the director and dean it turned out it was going to be quicker for me to rebuild the model.

I started the modelling of the hut by creating a cylinder and scaling it on the X and Z axis but not the Y until the cylinder looked the right dimension. In the picture above you can see where began extruding sections of the cylinder until I got the right look for the hut. I finished the hut in about half an hour but unfortunately the director wasn't to happy with the design so I ended up remaking the model although this didn't bother me as I enjoy modeling anyway.

You can see above see one of the huts that I made but the director want it to feel more like it was a tent and the material was hanging over a frame.

Here you can see the 3 iterations of the hut (from left to right) Deans original, My First attempt and then the final which made the film.

Above you can see a ambient occlusion render of the final model used in the film

Man Modelling (Problem Solving)

Originally the Character of the mongol was going to be modeled by another student on the course not a member of my team but the modelling of he character was so hi-res that our rigger was having issue when it came to the rigging it. The character was also modeled with no legs under the coat that created a lot of issues once the rigging began. it was at this point that i said to the rigger did she want me to create a character model over the weekend to see if the rigging would be easier. After showing the model to the rigger she decided it would be easier to use my model but I had to get the director to okay it first. The director loved the model it was beginning to look more like the original concept.

Here you can see the characters development stages, this is an images just showing the beginning stages of the body before the head was added and the director gave me his input on the model. I know that at this stage there was a lot to be adjusted such as proportions of the body and making him more stylised.

At this point I had been given a fair amount of input