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.