November 23 – Final Post

Hello, this will be the final blog entry for this project.

The renders were all completed successfully two weeks ago, and we are currently at the compositing stage of the project.

Some render layers had to be re-rendered, due to visual issues, but with shorter render times, there has been no issue, or consequence to the project’s timeline and schedule.

The portal is underway, and looking to be promising, with test compositions already being churned out.

Despite being chewed out for our project with three weeks to go, we decided against re-animating, lighting and re-doing the camera work, because, including re-render time, a week’s rush job was not going to turn out any better than if we invested the final weeks of the project in post-production techniques that we have been learning.

During this time, we have rectified lighting issues, and we have added special effects, such as smoke to give a sense of ambient life to the scene. We are currently completing composition of the scenes in AfterFX, and we are confident we will have the project completed on time.

November 4 – Status Update – Rendering

Renders were good to go when the animations were done.

Animations were fixed where needed and scenes were cleaned for render.

Render process started – Ben’s computers (2)

Render process delayed – Ash’s PC Hardware Failure? (Still to be determined) and Cameron’s computers are unable to render the scene

Other render options considered

- Render Farm – Too expensive, estimated to be $1300 for the project (however would be completed within two days or so including upload/download to online render farm)

- Qantm computers – Quad Core only (2Gb RAM in the other computers would have gone past the time set aside for rendering) – Estimated 14 days – cutting it close

Solution:  Turn down the resolution and other render settings. This seemed to be the only option and did not appear to sacrifice too much quality.

Ben has the estimated time using Qantm’s Quad Core  and his computers at approximately one week.

 

Lance has kindly allowed us to “hog” the quad core computer for the next week or until someone complains

Cameron has completed the animatic of the trailer using the playblasts of animation for timing and music. So far, so good, despite the rendering issue which caused some grief to the group. **Drama ensues**

 

 

Trimester 6 – week 6

This week i’ve been lighting the new environment that Ash handed to me. This is coming out better than the last one, which is good. Though it’s still in progress and changes can be made. This week i’ve also got the render layers set and configured so now it’s going to make it a lot easier to composite and make changes if we need to. Also for a long time comming i’ve finally got a good balance for the render settings. I’ve cut down render time to around 7-8 mins for all the different render layers per frame. This is much much better considering it was origally taking 10-19 mins a frame. This will dramaticly reduce render time. Also due to the final render layers we can now render on smaller spec’ed machines. Before it was only Ashes and my computers that could handle the scene files and the rendering. Now it should render on almost any dual core computer. This means we can now use more machines and reduce the render time even further. During my testing I descovered that if you render at a higher resoultion then scale down the res to SD. You can render at a lower setting but when its scaled down it doesnt lose any quality. Infact it makes it better. This will also raise the quality of our project but also cut down the render times. The Portal is another thing ive been working on this now has two versions. Both are different styles though have almost the same effects appled to them. The portal is done for both version, though i just need the scene to add it in properly and get some additional fixes done, if they are required. That’s been all that i’ve been working on for this week plus some things that have been continuing through other weeks. All these results will be shown in todays presentation.

Animation – Progress

Animation on Scene 4 has been completed. (Ashleigh)

Animation on Scene 3 has been completed. (Ashleigh)

Animation on Scene 2 has been completed. (Ashleigh and Cameron)

Animation on Scene 1 is 80 percent complete. (Ashleigh… to be completed by Cameron)

Animation on Scene 10 has been completed. (Cameron)

Unfortunately, wordpress is not allowing the upload of videos at this time. To be shown at Weekly Presentations.

Will be delivered to Ben this weekend for rendering.

Week 4 – 6

Ashleigh and I have been hard at work during these weeks trying to finalse all content for animating as we wanted to make sure that everything was clean before we animated so that once it is handed to Ben he can go straight into rendering without worrying about any adjustments to the scene. We are now at that stage after receiving the final scene files from Ben (with one missing). The scene 8 (in which the good guy is kicked in the head) is missing but I will rectify that Friday as its a simple camera fix as i dont want to “burden” Ben with anymore work as its clearly taking its toll on him and he is busy with getting rendering ready.

On a better note sound effects are all collected with are a high quality set of sounds that are movie quality and there is about 4.5gb of these sounds therefore giving us a wide range of sounds. I have also selected the music that will go with the final animation and created a quick camera animatic to see how it flows which i will upload soon once it has a little more content (probably when all the animation is completed)

Ash and I are planning to hopefully have all animation finalised by end of next week to ensure alot of time for rendering and compositing. During the rendering time I will make a 1 to 1 animatic with playblasts therefore using that to place sound effects and music in the desired spot and have the finalised before comping so that once rendering is done all we focus on is visual and therefore finish this project.

Trimester 6 – week 5

This week cameron and ash asked if i can rig a lower poly version of the badguy character. This was greatly annoying considering when cameron first imported the mesh into zbrush to sculpt he imported it differently to how it was created, which changed the uv maps meaning we couldn’t use displacement maps. This was fine execpt that the mesh i was given to rig was 2 million in poly count. This was determind fine at the time… Though i did explain to cameron if he just changes the uv groups in maya then reimport them to zrbush we could still use displacement maps. This was over looked by cameron and we used the 2 million poly model. Now i have to rig the bad character for the 3rd time affecting time on the portal.

At this stage im worried about getting this project done to the quality that we wanted and on time. To my esitmations its going to take about 2 weeks to render this out. Considering its week 5 already take away two weeks of which makes us at week 7 or 8.

At the moment im looking at ways to cut the render time down signicatly to give us more time, but thats affecting the qualitly.

If i dont get final animated scenes soon its going to be really interesting to see how much time would be left for rendering and compositing.

Trimester 6 – Week 1-3 updates

The first week back i was given a list of fixes that  the rig would need done before ash/cam could animate with. These were compelted around wednesday that week. For the second week since ash/cameron were working on the characters i started development on the portal and how it would work in the scenes. This unfortunatly with my time restrictions is taking longer than i anticpated. Though it’s getting nearer to completetion. In the mean time on working on the portal im waiting for 1 scene that cameron and ash were animating so i can use it to get the lighting and composting layers under way, saving us time later.

The good news is that i’m allowed to use works computers to render with, so with some things taking longer than anticipated we can at least make up for it in rendering time. Though we only have about 3 weeks left to use their facilities thus we need to get the more costly sceens done so we can render using their equipment.

Trimester 6 – Week 1 to 2

Hi, for the past two weeks I have been remodelling the environment to create more interesting features and elements especially with the Time Dagger which is the centre piece of the environment.

With Character 2 I have been hard at work texturing it and adding in different patterns to give the character a unique and creative look. I haven’t got any shots of the character just yet but expect to see some soon.

Trimester 6 – Week 1 to 2 Update

We have come back from a nice break and now have a nice update to share. Character one has been fully textured and is close to completion. The rig has been verified and sorted so that is fully working. So without further delay below are the pictures that show off the texturing.

I will be updating the texture through the animation as we do test renders to ensure it comes out rendered in the environment as we want.

Week 11 – Progress Update

Progress on the sculpting is coming along very well. The good guy character has been sculpted and I am working on texturing and bringing both characters back into Maya! Which is proving to be a little trickier than originally intended. As of now I have settled on bringing across sub division level 3 of the bad character which is sitting at 1million polys in maya and is workable. Below are some screenshots of shader tests on the good guy character from zbrush