14/06/2011 - 3 Days Till Deadline

So far my Scheduling has gone to plan as I only have 3 days of term left I and 2 more shots to render, this has all gone a lot quicker then I was expecting as I knew I was being optimistic when I wanted to get 2 shots done a day.

Starting to worry about my folders as well as I don't think I will be able to fit everything I have done on there as I have Rendered the whole film

Shots Rendered 17 part 2, 3 and shot 20, 21, 22

12/06/2011 - More rendering

A lot of what I am doing at the moment is all very similar to previous posts as I am trying to get the simpler scenes out of the way because they are quicker to render, this should mean that I have more scenes finished giving the film an overall more finished feel to it.

Visually I feel that the film is coming on leaps and bounds with the style working through out and the story flowing consistently as I am editing it together in Adobe Premiere.

While compositing I had some issues where the environment was bleeding through the characters because I lowered there opacity to give them a more blended feel with the film. This was fairly easy to sort out I just used the layer with the characters as an alpha map over environment layer creating a mask so that the layer does not appear behind the characters. Although I was limited in the amount i could do as i wanted to get my laptop back to rendering as soon as possible.

Render Screenshots

05/06/2011 - 12 days till deadline

When I first gave this scene to the animator I knew the camera was going to be Slightly out of position but it was meant to be representative of how the shot should look, so when I got the scene back I needed to adjust the camera so that the scene was more focused on the torso of the character. I also set up the a couple of trees between the man and the character as it added more depth the scene.

 

Here i tried adding a slight colour to the light to see what effect I could get, you can see it has a nice yellow hue to it although for the final scene I did tone it down to blend in with my other shots.

This is the nearly finished render of this shot, I will improve more once I have feedback from the group.


This is the other shot I completed today this was a easy shot in compositing it used the basic layer set up I have.

02/06/2011 - 15 Days left - Compositing

When it came to compositing I had a very simple method of achieving the look for the film. I had the 4 Basic passes set up with the Shadow Layer on top and the opacity down to about a quarter so that its really faint as this is meant to be a very sunny environment, I Ambient Occlusion (AO) on with multiply applied  so that I get just the nice shadows. I then have the colour at 50% opacity so the background layer behind bleeds through.

This is a character test render that i did about a week ago before I got the scenes to render you can see how the final image looks. the environment will have more depth to it this was just quick representation mock up.

Although this is the basic set up usually the scene have more that needs doing to them. A good example of this is Shot 12 as although the scene looked fine with the basic set up I wanted to add a motion blur to the trees as they pass the camera quickly but to do this I had to isolate the trees from the rest of the footage as I didn't want to blur anything else.

I had already started separating elements with my first render by having separate colour layers for the trees, characters and landscape. The difficult part of this was trying to separate the different areas on the Ambient Occlusion layer as otherwise i could end up with the occlusion effecting elements which it shouldn't be . As I had to create 2 small compositions within the main composition for each element I wanted to separate, each of these contained one AO layer and which ever element I was trying to isolate I would then use the element layer as a mask which I would the invert for the second layer.

 Here you can see an example of the a mask of the trees applied to the characters, its easy to spot on the man an if you look at the screenshot before hand. It was now that it was beginning to become more apparent that what the final shot was going to look like.

Here is the nearly finished shot although after looking at it, I decided that the main thing that wasn't looking right at the moment was the trees in the background as they were to sharp considering the speed that the camera was moving at. To add more depth involved adding more layers which involved going back to Maya.

In Maya setting up the trees for the layer was a pretty simple job of selecting them along with the lights and adding them to a new render layer and choosing batch render.

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Next it was a simple matter of repeating the process for blurring the trees earlier although this time I had less blur as the trees were further away from the camera.

 

1st shot done today


2nd shot done today

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.

24/05/2011 - 3 Weeks Left

At this point I am still waiting on animators to finish give me a finessed scene to render, in the mean time i have been working on some promotional shots for the degree show as well as working on the animation for the final after credit shot of the marmot being cooked. i have been having a few issues as our tutor told us to not have a too detailed model of the marmot on the spit as it could be seen as a bit crude but when taking out some of the detail the marmot was losing too much character and not looking right. i decided to leave a bit more detail in there and have smoke and fire overlaid in the compositing stage.

Here is a screen shot of the final scene set up, you can see that the marmot has a small level of detail to which will hopefully be more subtle once I have comped FX into the scene

 While working on the animation for this scene I am trying to keep the graph editor as neat as possible, as although not being an animator I know that the graph editor is one of the most useful tools. If i had the time I would like to learn to animate stepped but I fit it in with everything else I have.

Here is a Playblast of the animation so far, I am struggling as the animation has to be subtle but I'm going to see the tutor on thursday so i should be able to get some help

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Here you can see the promotional render I am working on, its going to be a simple environmentwith the 2 characters mid run added in later.

Rendering 6

Here you can see the the first full quality test that we had for our this was a simple Ambient Occlusion render with a colour matte underneath it.

Simple Render Style



Below you can see 3 renders I did for the environment with textures applied but it turned out that Dave preferred the simple style but it was good for development as we were really beginning to see how the film good look.

Texture Render Test 1



Texture Render Reduced Parper Bleed Through



Mountain Colour Depth and Improved Texture

Rendering 5 and Secondary Animation

 This video is one of the render pieces where I was trying to match one of Dave's concepts this was a simple matter of using the layer as an alpha channel and using this as a silhouette. This was also a shot where you can see some of the secondary animation that I have been working on.

Silhouette concept match



Below is one of the very first renders that I did which showed a good representation of what the final film should look like.

Beaty Shot For Pitch



This Render was also in preparation for the 2nd term pitch that we had to do. Dave and I decided that I could use this opportunity to practice my editing techniques to create a Making Of Snatched film.

Rendering 4

Swing Test



Swing Test Drawn

Rendering 3

After my talk with the director I could see that this style wasn't working and the director said that he want to go in more a scroll style direction and maybe try and have the characters look more drawn. Initially I tried using the outline shader that is built in to Maya but I was having a lot of issues getting it to work. While I was trying to get it to work I didn't realise that I still had the cell shader active and I accidentally rendered from under the light and saw the my model had and outline of one colour.

It occured to me that if I used this right I could colour key the inner colours in After Effect i could the use the outline as a maskfor a solid black that could give the drawn look. Below you can see a test I creadted using this techniqueso that I could show the director how this could start to look, I also used a background from the web that looked like a scroll to give as good a representation of the final piece as I could at this stage.

Rendering 2

One of the issues I had at the start of this project I had a few issues as there was no specific style to work on, all I had was 'we want it to look mongolian' and what was in the directors head. Also not really having a concept artist on board at first, I was struggling at first as it is not normally the job of the renders to find the style of the film but to mimic what the concept looks like. We had plenty of artists in our group just who weren't fitted to what the director wanted.

After sitting down with the group and having a discussion with the director we managed to decided on a cell shaded style mixed with a scroll look. Unfortunately at this point I still didn't have any concepts to work from, so the first thing I did was to go to CreativeCrash.com and raid their huge bank of user created content to find a cell shader. I eventually managed to find a cell shader that allowed me to start experimenting. 

I spent a week or two playing with the settings to try and see what kind of style I could find. Once I had a basic idea of the controls for the shader i started creating a series of basic images just o show the director what it could possible look like. for these render is decided to focus on the face of a character rig i had a it showed variation in shadow because of all the curves on its face.


For the shader there were 3 main settings to be played with first of it was possible to changes the size each section (Shadow, Normal and Highlight), the amount of sections and finally give a hue to any section for coloured light.

Below are a selection these renders which were the starting point that i showed to the director

Here you can see a mock up I did for the environment to test the renders with some simple mountains just to get a feel for how it could look as a whole.

After showing this render to the director it was decided this wasn't really the direction the film should have been going in so I was going to have to bring experiment with some different styles.

Render 1

Had a talk with my Director yesterday he wants a cell shaded/scroll look for the film, here are my first tests while getting used to the cell shader that I downloaded. I know these are nothing special but its my first day playing with the toon shader toon shader I thought I would play with there is a fair bit of control with the settings so its worth a look at.

http://www.the-area.com/downloads/shaders?word=toon&where=1&software=&material=