Week 32: Semester 2 Presentation

The presentation, I believe, went much better this time round. I felt much more confident throughout and I felt that helped me in my delivery.

Basically I did a sum up of my progress throughout the semester.

I mentioned primarily the Going Live and the Mastronauts project.

For Going Live I focussed primarily on Texturing and Rendering.




Concept art I'd created for 'Concerning Dragons'.

Texturing/Concept tests for 'Concerning Dragons'.

Lighting tests using IBLs for 'Concerning Dragons'.

Rendering for 'Concerning Dragons'.



Throughout the Mastronauts Project, I will be honing in on the Lighting, rendering and compositing processes and I felt my roles in Going Live have really helped me to prepare for this. In the presentation I also described how Going Live has assisted me throughout this test:

Comping the character into the scene

Node Tree in Nuke

IBL for lighting the test

Week 29: Going Live - Visit to Axis

Yesterday, we finally got to meet up with the guys from axis and show them the film we made.

I'm not going to lie, I was super nervous about the whole thing. Over-all though,  the day was very enjoyable. The guys at Axis were lovely.

With all the sharing of the film we've had some pretty good feedback. The views so far have reached over 20,000 and Axis, The Tolkien Society and a few other places (DJCAD as shown above) have shared the video and made some lovely comments. Overall it's pretty exciting.

We also got to run down to Digimania yesterday, which was great. The guys there could not have been more welcoming and I really enjoyed seeing how they work. So, Wednesday turned out to be a pretty good day.


Oh, I haven't even posted the film yet.
So I hear Vimeo does not play too well with Blogger.

Nevermind, here's the link:

Our Going Live film: Concerning Dragons

Week 28: Going Live - Progression of Ink Reveal

Just a wee progression of the ink reveal using the diffuse ink layer and the sunlight layer.

After my last tests, Tom suggested I have the ink look more watery/blurry as it appeared and to add a sort of ink wave to enhance the unveiling of the drawn map elements.

Sunlight layer - no ink

Ink reveal using matte

Added effects to create more watery-ink reveal

With ink wave

Week 27: Going Live - The Rendering

So after mucking up with the renders first time, they were finally done (with a lot of help/fixing from Kieran).

Just a few steps in the process.


                         

Some of the layers (after being re-rendered).

AO

                                                               Depth

                                                             Eagle AO

                                                          Eagle Translucence
                                               

ID Pass

Subsurface Scatter

River Diffuse

Indirect

Sunlight

Holiday Shmoliday: Going Live - Ink Reveal with Rendered Layers

So, After I managed to have a rendering malfunction on the scene and it had to be sent of for a re-render, I used some of the existing layers to try out the inky/water colour reveal on the (what should have been) final renders of the shot.

After making a couple of mattes for the reveal, I tested the scattered-reveal first.

This was a more of a sweeping-reveal and was the preferred version for the director.

Week 26: Going Live - Mountain IBLs

Using IBLs to look at lighting for the mountain.

Some of the earlier ones (not colour corrected). This is
Still without the textures etc.

                        

But I looked again at some of these as the light should be coming from behind the mountain...

Obviously a little colour-correction and messing around in comp will be necessary.

Week 26: Going Live - A few more mountain textures

    Does whatever a Tiger Mountain does...


                                                            First test - horizontal lines.

                                     
                                         
                                                 Second test - vertical lines. There are more
                                                 lines in this test. I'm unsure if this is too much
                                                 or not.

        

        

I may try another vertical line test, more in the style of the first test with less lines. I also feel that perhaps more tests involving simpler and straighter lines may provide a bit more variety. If it calls for it, this is something I will look into further.

Week 24: Going Live - The forgotten tests

So I meant to throw this up here a while back. Long ago, around the time of the first age, before the 3D fires were alive and burning, I began a rough 2D fire comp test...it turns out it's supposed to be played super fast - LIKE LIGHTNING...but fire instead, so it's not really what we need anyway. Also, there's a few strange artifacts going on that need tweaking obviously. I was also going to look in to having the paper blackening before the fire as well, but I see no reason for it now; thankfully the 3D fire looks like the way forward!

So there super slight differences in the timing here. When it's too slow it doesn't look right, it's supposed to be a fast wipe sort of deal.

This one's slightly slower but it's not hugely obvious.



So here's a few stills to help you get the idea.


                               

Week 23: Going Live - A Hasty Lighting Test for the Town

I quickly threw some image-based lights on John's lovely buildings...the HDR images I found were mostly lighty- daytime ones, perhaps too bright for what we need?


                               

Obviously the positioning of the buildings are not correct, I literally threw it all together to see how it would look.

 And here's how they look without the Background images...

                                      

It's pretty rough. It will require a bit more time obviously. I'll maybe look into changing up the colour of the lighting and messing around with some things to make the light a bit more atmospheric.

Week 21: Going Live - Forever Texturing

Ok so, I've been meaning to post this up for a while. Rebecca and I have been messing around with projection in mudbox and maya.

                                  

This first piece is more of a  concept. The texture was projected on in maya (if I remember correctly). But there was so little control over where the texture sat. There's just a backdrop and light thrown in there too, to help create more depth.

                                                                     UV map

                                                     Texture created in Mudbox & PS

Elements put together in Maya

This is just like the test Rebecca previously posted, checking the projected texture against the map (obviously it's not in the right place, but you get the point).

The method that seemed to be easiest was to apply the paper colour/texture of the map as an actual shader and then to project the lines on top, placing them where we wanted them and just updating the changes from the projected stencils in mudbox to the existing shader. Once the lines were on the 3D model, they seemed to be less sketch-like. I think we'll need to tweak the stencil a bit. It's not perfect, but it is getting there.