Finished!!

Finally got it all through! today was a simple case of tweaking the editing slightly, coming up with a new name for our guy as not everyone agreed on Pony Fontana. This is fair considering a) he doesn't look cuban, and b) we didn't really want to just rip of an existing name. (Tony Montana.)
Anyway, it's all rendered out in quicktime. I wanted to post it up on the group blog to tie everything off, but blogger wont let me upload anything above 100 mb. Never mind though, I'll probably wack it up on facebook or youtube instead!

One last time!!

Foreground layer works perfectly! Shadow layer however, does not. I basically need to render it out again only set the porch roof to cast no shadow, as according to the current layer it's being cast on the ground. This means it looks wrong when layered on top of the mansion. We tried removing this on After Effects, but it would get far too complicated having to keyframe a layer mask. Not to worry though, I've sent it to the render farm to run overnight, so in the morning it should be ready to go. Plus, Dan's been working hard on compositing and editing, and we now have title sequences. Basically everythings in place and nearly ready to go minus some minor tweaking, so we will easily be able to hit the deadline tomorrow at five. I got to admit, I'm very excited!

aaargh more re-renders!!

Ok so while the door now nicely sits in the middle where it should be, the foreground statues seem insanely bright and the trees/statues cast no shadows on the ground. This is probably because the ground is on a seperate layer to the objects. So basically today I've had to send 2 more layers to the farm, one being a shadow layer, (had to introduce the ground into the layer, but am still only rendering the shadows so it shouldnt cause any compositing issues), the other being a new foreground layer just with the incandescence turned right off and the ambience turned down on the effected objects.

Hopefully these will come out today.

Lolz!!

so so nearly finished, I cant believe what an obvious mistake I made! I sat through the whole hour and a half it took to render the mental ray layer of my scene only to realise that because the porch was included in this layer the door floats in front of it when compositing. Haha! so today I couldnt really get much done other than sort out the layers so the mansion and hill are the background and the porch, statues and trees are the foreground. This should mean the door can sit nicely in the middle where it belongs. Unfortunately due to the vast que on the render farm I've had to leave it overnight! will see what happens tomorrow.

Epic day

Sorry havnt posted for a while, but heres the lowdown:

Yesterday me and Dan discovered there would be some issues with crossing between rendering softwares when the mansion exterior becomes the foyer. Getting the doors to match up was excrutiatingly difficult and we spent too long trying to get the textures and lights right. Today it became evident that the solution was far easier then we thought, and all we had to do was render the door and only the door out in maya software (with a couple of tweaks to the texture and a light set to only affect the door) so that it matched Dans. Everything else in the scene will still be rendered with the mental ray settings. These two layers can just be composited together afterwards.

The next issue that arose from this was that the door couldn't have a shadow on it as again this would make the crossover obvious seeing as Dans door has no shadow. We spent ages changing the lighting to try and get it so that the roof cast no shadow where the door was- we played with the actual light and even tried setting the roof to cast no shadow at all, though that looked weird. Again the solution is far easier than we were making out, as when it comes to compositing the door wouldn't actually be effected by that shadow anyway as it is on a seperate layer to that light, and the colours would simply appear to be what the colours look like under the influence of a shadow.

Next step was to slap down the new musical score down (with thanks John Solly) and adjust the camera movements slightly to fit the rythm better. No problems here.

Next I had to deal with the sky. This was easily enough created with a dome textured a pale blue colour set to recieve no shadow. This did mean I had to then adjust some of the textures on the mansion as they now rendered out darker than they should be. The fact that it was a dome meant that Phils image plane wouldn't work well on it, and it had to be a dome because the camera angles pretty much cover all of the sky. So I had to find another way around the clouds and hills. Photoshopping the image plane so that the cloud was a seperate image was the obvious first step, however applying this to seperate faces did not work. (The blue sky colour of the image is impossible to match up to the colour of the sky dome.) So instead Nate showed me how to cut the shape of the actual cloud out on photoshop and then tranfer it as an illustrator file. This enabled me to import the shape of the image as a curve into my scene, in turn enabling me to create an object to the exact shape of the cloud. Then it was a simple process to uv map the image to fit the object.

Once I had the clouds in the air they required some transformations to get into the compositions on the various major shots. This also required some keyframing to make sure they stayed looking good as the camera moved. For the shot where it holds for a few seconds, Dan suggested a litte bit of floaty animation for some cartoony cloud movement. This worked out well.

Finally I needed to deal with the hills, and this time the solution was far easier than doing complicated processes with photoshop or the image plane. All it required were some smaller spheres surrounding the main hill taylored to fit the film gate. The colours of which were identical to the colour of the main grass material, but getting paler with distance. And I gotta say it looks fantastic. Especially with the shadows cause by the mansion. (Although I did need to remove the shadow from one or two.)

Phew, I think that's about it. I have sent it off to the render farm and am currently waiting on it to come back. I should then hopefully be able to post the batch render perhaps with sound so you can see everything I'm talking about. Im seriously anticipating it, as this will be the first time I get to see how the transition between exterior/foyer works out, and if the compositing of the door works as well.

Worked closely with Dan on all this today as lack of computers ment we were sharing for most of the day, so thanks to him for helping me out so much.

Problem solved!

So the solution to this rendering problem was so blindingly simple I'm still kicking myself. Rob helpfully pointed out that if the rendering works through the perspective camera but no others, why not just animate the perspective camera? Im such a foool!! Of course I would have liked to have understood exactly why it didn't want to work through any new cameras, but with the time we have left I think it's best to just leave it be for now.

Here's a quick playblast of the updated camera movements. It means we get a better view of the statues out front now, which is good.

On a completely seperate note, Dan pointed out that I didn't have a folder with my textures in, and in fact the location of my bump map texture was set to the public folders. This was going to cause problems later on, so I had to save the texture into a newly created texture file and reload the location of the file in the scene. I also finally got round to deleting loads of old files, opening up so much more space for saving and generally keeping my project folders tidy.

Next steps are to get the image plane up for the background, maybe do some soft modification on the ground, and try and apply a bump map to the path. Other than that it's nearly render time!

Camera test

With help from Dan and Phil I finally got a half decent camera test playblasted. I hate maya so much though. So much. The introduction of a new camera into this scene has completely messed up my mental ray rendering. All the settings are the same, and the render time is the same, but the quality is Maya software standard. It makes no sense, but Rob's in again tomorrow so I'll get some help to try and sort this out.

I also finalised the second character rig today, with the jiggle deformer and correct shoulder weights. It felt good :-)

thong rig

I spent today on the rig for the thong model. Not too many problems here, though the model needed adjusting slightly so that the rig from the previous model could fit. Painting weights was not a problem this time. In fact I'm glad I had the opportunity to do it again, as it has completely cleared up any uncertainties I had before about what I was doing wrong. I have the workflow nailed and once the penny dropped I encountered no issues I couldn't solve.

The butt clench however proved to be a bit more of a problem than I first thought. Skin clusters can be difficult to control when it comes to parenting the control object to the root controller. Origonally I had two objects controlling the respective cheeks which were then in turn controlled by a master butt control. I ultimately had to ditch this, and resort to grouping the butt clusters together, and linking the scale x factor to a new attribute on the butt control. This provides the necissary butt clench, and the butt geometery itself doesn't deform when moving the root controller. However, this has also meant that the clench is entirely linear, and does not clench to account for any angles other than the standing pose. I don't think this should be a problem as this is probably only going to be used when hes standing straight anyway. I might try and work something out that might be a bit more diverse tomorrow, but until then here's a quick playblast of the control.

Door developement

Ok so having decided we would probably do the blendshapes when and where we need them, I've had time to continue work on the front door. Basically it was too plain for an object that's going to be seen close up. I had an experiment with the planks on a one in / one out pattern, but it looks bad, so instead I drew all the planks out and defined the gaps between them. This looks a lot better. Then there was the question of the wood texture. Mayas default 3d wood texture looks aweful no matter how much you play around with it, so I downloaded a better one from www.cgtextures.com. It is subtle and looks so much better.

Then I had to play with the gold texture a bit more, because in the current lighting for my scene it shows up a nasty brown colour. In playing with the abient colour and reflectivity, I inevitabley made it look brighter than the sun, but after further playing it looks ok.

I also took the reflectivity off of the tile material, so the porch roof isn't so shiny. I also had to use the automatic mapping function on the small steps, as the texture wasn't quite working.

Lastly, I switched the statues around so that they point towards the door rather than away from it. (It just makes more sense, and leads your eye into the door more.)

I'm pretty happy to call the door finished now.