It's been a long journey, filled with trials, tribulations, and rendering problems, but I can finally see the end of the tunnel. It's the night before thesis is due, and I'm spending this last night finishing up my paper and gathering all the documents I need for delivery.
The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of animation, lighting, dynamics, and Realflow. Several of the effects I wanted to do did not make it into this cut of the film: the disintegrating ash effect was a particularly difficult sacrifice to make.
Interestingly, the shot I am happiest with is the fire breathing shot. I love the color of the flame and the subtle smoke and burning effect on the book itself. The effect is a great study in compositing, dynamics, and light. Everything was done in a separate component and composited together. This shot took about as much time as I expected, and looks almost exactly the way I wanted it to look. As I have come to learn, the key to great looking effects is compositing. In a sense, 3D visual effects is one of the most difficult areas to master because you have to be technically savvy in both 2D and 3D environments.
The underwater effect was the most annoying effect in that I spent the most time on it out of all the effects, and I'm still not quite happy with it. I still want to do a little more testing to create more tendril-like fluid emission instead of the gaseous look it has now.
I spent a lot of time these last few weeks with Realflow, and I'm starting to move from novice to an intermediate knowledge of the program. I feel very comfortable generating splashes, pours, and fills -- simply, everyday liquid effects. While the simulations for thesis aren't perfect, I'm quite happy with the results I got out of the program.
Lighting was a consistent problem due mainly to the fact that this is a night setting. Getting enough light on Billy and the dragon to see their facial expressions was a challenge for nearly every shot. Too much light, and they looked glowly and pale. Too little light, and their faces would be in complete shadow.
The compositing and editing for this piece was a complete nightmare. I have Demetri Patsiaris to thank for editing my movie together. I mainly had to keep track of all the different renders and all the different shots, which was crazy enough in itself. 37 doesn't seem like that large a number until you're trying to manage several layers for 37 shots. All in all, I think I rendered out about 100 passes. All the shots had at least a beauty pass and an ambient occlusion pass, and many had one, two, or more effects passes.
Well, I should wrap this up. This is the last journal entry that will make it into my paper. If you have read this journal up to the very end, thank you for taking this journey with me! And send me a comment!
Over and out
jk
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Final Countdown
We're due in 10, 9, 8 ... It's the final 10 days before thesis is due, and of course I still have a mountain of work to do. I'm jealous of my fellow thesis mates who are starting to coast knowing that they will finish on time.
For me, finishing is contingent on three things: particles, realflow, and compositing. Besides the drudgery work of lighting, animating, rendering, and editing/sound, I still have no idea how long the particle, realflow, and compositing work is going to take. This is especially bad considering the thesis is due in less than two weeks.
At this point, I am still focusing on getting all the shots rendered out before trying to perfect any one shot. Right now I have most of the beginning shots done. Tomorrow, Monday, all my animators should theoretically be finished, and it will be a big rendering day.
Conrad finished his animation on the manual page turns, it looks really nice. I had to tweak some frames to make sure Billy's hand traveled with the paper, but all in all I'm happy with those shots. Cidalia's textures look awesome, and the nCloth turn is very fluid and fun to watch.
Still working on the pour, although I've got some good bubbles and animated the meniscus pretty well such that it looks like water in a bottle. That will be my first realflow test, and if that is successful I'll use it for the potion splash, and then the dragon splash. Blobby particles in Maya is my contingency plan, and I've already experimented with using splash blobbies (with some success). For that shot I also tried another way of doing ripples on water, still mapping to the wave height offset of the ocean shader, but this time instead of animating the ramp color positions I animated the 2D placement node's UV repeats and frame translates. The result is a much more controllable ripple. So I've gone from using a rendered moving ramp as an animated texture, to directly using an animatable ramp, to using a ramp that is animated by its 2D placement node. That's some great problem solving if I do say so myself.
The spices shot is done, rendered out. I lined up the ripples as best I could with the spice pieces, and it looks fine. Gavin said he didn't like the trees in the background for that shot, but it was really difficult to get nice-looking ripples without the shot composition being really oblique.
The drop out of the bottle looks good as a blendshape, and interestingly so does the resulting drop splash. I considered realflow for the drop splash, but in my footage that I took with my family over Thanksgiving, I found it only lasts for about 4 frames. I thought, what the hell, I can model shapes for 4 frames. It went really fast and the results and look really good. I had to put a ramped transparency on the blendshape to get it to fade properly into the water and make it look like one solid liquid entity instead of the ocean surface and a modeled splash.
Next on the list is all the dragon, non-effects shots, for tomorrow, when my animators deliver (hopefully). After that, all that's left is the ash and smoke effect, the fire and burn effect, the potion splash, the dragon splash, and the underwater shot. That's a lot of work for 10 days! I'm really liking the way the rendered shots look. Now if only I could get the major effects to look right, I'll be in good shape.
For me, finishing is contingent on three things: particles, realflow, and compositing. Besides the drudgery work of lighting, animating, rendering, and editing/sound, I still have no idea how long the particle, realflow, and compositing work is going to take. This is especially bad considering the thesis is due in less than two weeks.
At this point, I am still focusing on getting all the shots rendered out before trying to perfect any one shot. Right now I have most of the beginning shots done. Tomorrow, Monday, all my animators should theoretically be finished, and it will be a big rendering day.
Conrad finished his animation on the manual page turns, it looks really nice. I had to tweak some frames to make sure Billy's hand traveled with the paper, but all in all I'm happy with those shots. Cidalia's textures look awesome, and the nCloth turn is very fluid and fun to watch.
Still working on the pour, although I've got some good bubbles and animated the meniscus pretty well such that it looks like water in a bottle. That will be my first realflow test, and if that is successful I'll use it for the potion splash, and then the dragon splash. Blobby particles in Maya is my contingency plan, and I've already experimented with using splash blobbies (with some success). For that shot I also tried another way of doing ripples on water, still mapping to the wave height offset of the ocean shader, but this time instead of animating the ramp color positions I animated the 2D placement node's UV repeats and frame translates. The result is a much more controllable ripple. So I've gone from using a rendered moving ramp as an animated texture, to directly using an animatable ramp, to using a ramp that is animated by its 2D placement node. That's some great problem solving if I do say so myself.
The spices shot is done, rendered out. I lined up the ripples as best I could with the spice pieces, and it looks fine. Gavin said he didn't like the trees in the background for that shot, but it was really difficult to get nice-looking ripples without the shot composition being really oblique.
The drop out of the bottle looks good as a blendshape, and interestingly so does the resulting drop splash. I considered realflow for the drop splash, but in my footage that I took with my family over Thanksgiving, I found it only lasts for about 4 frames. I thought, what the hell, I can model shapes for 4 frames. It went really fast and the results and look really good. I had to put a ramped transparency on the blendshape to get it to fade properly into the water and make it look like one solid liquid entity instead of the ocean surface and a modeled splash.
Next on the list is all the dragon, non-effects shots, for tomorrow, when my animators deliver (hopefully). After that, all that's left is the ash and smoke effect, the fire and burn effect, the potion splash, the dragon splash, and the underwater shot. That's a lot of work for 10 days! I'm really liking the way the rendered shots look. Now if only I could get the major effects to look right, I'll be in good shape.
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