08/06/2011 - Scheduling so far

This is a production schedule of how my work has gone so far, you can see how all over the place it is, as I have been given different shots at different times and some of the shot have taken longer to render then planned because of rendering issue. Unfortunately it is really hard to accurately schedule myself as rendering is one of the most unpredictable areas of animation, I have managed to reduce the time as much as possible by using layers and passes but there isn't much else I can do

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.

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

02/06/2011 - 15 Days left - Shot 15 Set up

 Here you can see a selection of images for when I began setting up the log scene for render. the only issue i had with this scene was that everything in the scene is so close together that Ambient Occlusion was coming out black. As this was an issue I had never had before it took a while to work around the issue although it was just a matter of playing with the settings.

 Once I got the Ambient Occlusion looking right I had a play with the amount if shadow till I got a nice look to the character

I then moved the time Slider to make sure that the Occlusion was looking right on the Mongol Character

One of the thing I wanted to do on this scene was try to simulate the light shining through the holw in the log. If i had time i would have brought in some particles for the light to catch to give the log a musty feel but realisticly the shot was only on screen for 2 seconds so it didnt really make much of a difference.

With this intiial light set up you can see that that i only had the one light but it kind of show the effect that i wanted.

Here you can see where I brought the character into the shot as I wanted him to slide through the light. You can see that the character was catching the light but it deinately was to dark.

Here you can see where i started bringin in a light from a lower angle to iluminate the mans face, this scene was also hard to have 3 point lighing as the log got in the way so it meant i needed to play around with the lighting a lot more.

Here you can see where I brought the marmot into the shot so that I could making sure the light look good on him as well

This was the final lighting for the scene as I needed to move on to the next shot for rendering.

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.

26/05/2011 - 22 Days Left

After getting some feedback from the group in uni I adjusted the camera to give more impact as the camera before hand was a mid shot lacking impact, where as the new camera was is an over the shoulder shot which helps the focus towards the marmot. I also got feedback about the animation saying that it needed to be more subtle and that i should take out the animation where he placed his hand on his leg as it was too much for the simplicity we wanted.

Also Helped Dave neaten up the graph editor as it was quite daunting to look while helping tweak his animation.

Before editing the graph

After editing the graph

Went up to the Prototyping in uni in the afternoon to find out about getting our characters printed in 3D for our degree show, so some of my time is going to be taken of by preping the files for the printer.