Final Film

There seems to be a loss in quality after uploading to YouTube, it's not too bad though.

Pillar Fall Test with Snow

The crack was painted on in after effects and then keyed to reveal more as the shot went along. There was also a tiny of of motion tracking which I have never done before.

There are two layers of snow, one is the After effects CS6 snow and the other is a layer of snow created and rendered in Maya by Leanne.

Test

Diving into Post Production

As time is running out the pressure to get this film finished has risen greatly. But we are working flat out with rendering and editing with the aim to have the whole thing finished within a few more days.

I have been doing 4 passes when rendering out of Maya, and it hasn't been adding too much extra time to the rendering.

Just last minute colour adjustments and subtle effects to top it off.

Once I have all the shots rendered, snow added and composited together in After-effects, I will render it out with no sound and we will then give it to our audio production guy Nathan.

Post Production

Because we are so short on time I helped Jason by doing some of the animation for him. Now I'm currently working on some post production jobs such as adding the right amount of fog to each shot and checking textures and lighting for any errors.

A quick example of the fog:

I'm currently struggling with trying to fix a white-out issue with one of the shots, hopefully it wont take too long too fix, last resort would be to start the shot again and hope the same error doesn't come up again.

The Full Environment

Temple Textures and Bump Maping

Just a few renders of the temple, textured and bump maps added.

Making a Temple

Just showing my current progress for the Temple.

Character UV Mapping

Due to a large number of errors with the character model, the UV mapping process has been incredibly slow because I have spent more time fixing the sloppy modelling than I have spent UV mapping.

This is one of the problems encountered, along with several cases of polygons with over 4 edges. This is another thing added to the list of setback along the course of this project. I have no idea how long this is going to take to fix but I do know that it's going to cut a portion of the time we needed for animation. The deadline is less than 8 weeks away and we haven't even started animation, I'm not too optimistic at this point that this film is going to be finished.

More Snow And Fog Plus Colour Correction Test

Fog and Snow Tweaking

Fog

This week I have been trying to figure out a solution to our special effects render times. It took twelve and a half hours to render less than 6 seconds worth of snow. We are struggling for time as it is so this is a definite no. So I've been trying to come up with simpler solutions. one of which I'm fairly happy with to use as a base for the fog. This involved just using the Maya Software fog instead of Mental Ray's.

No Fog

With Fog (Decreasing Fog Near Distance)

Playing with displacement maps

Using this tutorial as a stepping stone I've been trying to wrap my head around displacement maps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONm2iX5TscE&feature=player_embedded


Here are some of the results:

Test Shot

A test render with all the assets and special effects in place.

Pillar Textures Finishing Touches

I have just finished texturing the pillars and have added slight bump maps to make it look more like stone. Next step is to add a little snow to them to make them fit in with the environment.

Pillars in the Environment With Basic Textures

Broken Pillars

I've modelled and UV mapped the broken version now as well. 

UV Mapped Pillars

I've just finished UV mapping the first pillar. Now I need to model the broken version.

Designing Pillars

 Now that I've finished everything except the textures for the environment, boat and bridge. I've begun working on designs/models for the pillars and the temple. This is what I currently have for the pillar design.

After modelling my first design I found it to be a bit too plain so I added elements from my second design and I quite like how it turned out.

Still UV Mapping things

UV mapping the Ice breaker ship has been going slow. The last couple of weeks have been a bit crazy because there was a dead line for the draft of my dissertation, and that has been taking a lot of my time.
I'm about 95% done with the UV mapping of the models that have been built so far, just a couple of things left to map on the ship, i should have it done by tonight, if not then tomorrow.

It's a bit of a crazy jigsaw puzzle at the moment, because there a so many different angles on the model I had so do quite  a lot of UV projections and making sure the UV shells are all the right size and then putting them all together has been very time consuming.

Colour Testing

A colour test to get a general theme for the film.

The colours for the boat are going to be based on the colours an actual ice breaker would be. We are going to have a colour filter over the whole thing though, which will hopefully make the orange/red parts stand out less.

Lighting Tests

Some lighting tests using a colour in the key light to act as a colour correction. This would most likely work better as an actual colour correction layer in After effects though. 

Environment texturing test

Just a quick update to show that I'm in the process of texturing the environment, this post may have more render images added to it as I progress more.

UV mapped environment

The environment is fully UV mapped now after only a few problems.

The textures can wait for now because I need to Finnish modelling the ice breaker so that we can start animating. I will however, have to work on the model a bit more to make sure the textures fit right after I have smoothed everything.

It's been a rough week and not a lot has been accomplished for me.

Jason is still working on the character rig and Danielle has been finalising the pillars and Working on the temple.

Environment Base

I've finished the base for the environment, it just needs UV mapping/ texturing and the smoothing. Should take a week to finalise it all.

I've also been working on modelling the Ice breaker ship. Admittedly I haven't gotten as far as I had planned to by now due to several problems fixing other models, taking time away from finishing the boat.