Adaptation B: Scenes 2 & 3 Playblasts

I've begun making some playblasts of the camera moving around my models. The camera moves slowly, but that is what I want because I think if the camera moves too quickly it won't feel as eerie. I've been doing quick renders of the first and last frames to make sure there are no errors on the lights such as being able to see the lights behind the model that are producing the highlights. I need to do a few fully rendered stills so I can be sure that the resolution on my skin material is high enough for the individual scenes before I set the animation to batch render.

I'm happy with how these are turning out so far but I think I may want to blur any of the models in the distance for certain scenes. I plan on doing this in post production in After Effects along with my light rays. I have a tutorial I found a while ago that uses rotoscoping to imitate depth of field blurring that I think will work. If not, the camera doesn't do any drastic movements so if I needed to hand draw a mask and add blur I could since that's what I'm doing for the light rays too. I'm looking forward to being able to slice up these scenes and mix them together.

Adaptation B: Decreasing Render Time

After realising that I needed to decrease my render time in order to attempt to get a finished animation, I asked Alan to take a look at my scene to see if I was doing anything wrong/if there was anything I could do to reduce the time spent rendering. After looking at my scene, it became clear that the majority of my problems I was having was a result of the lights. To try to alleviate some of the render time, I decreased the Ray Depth Limit to 1 instead of 3 for any lights that don't affect the floor. I also deleted some lights that I decided didn't do enough to enhance the scene to justify keeping them in, I altered some other lights to make up for this. I also decreased the 'Shadow Rays' on all of the lights that did not affect the floor. I reduced the Resolution of the skin material to 1/3 instead of 1/2...I also tried 1/4 and 1/5 but that did not seem to affect the render time anymore. I also decided to change the floor material a little bit so it is slightly less reflective and glossy, but it's still enough that I'm happy with. Originally, my scene was taking about 24-25 minutes to render on my bigger computer but with my changes I've managed to get it down to about 10 minutes (sometimes less or slightly more depending on the camera angle). Some other things I tried was to change the 'Lighting Quality' in the Render Settings, but this did not seem to affect the render time very much. I also tried messing around with the 'Acceleration Method', but the default was the best results I got.

Traditional Sculpting Lessons

To help us better understand how to sculpt in software, we had lessons in traditional sculpting using Super Sculpey. We had to choose what to sculpt, find reference photos/orthographs, build a base, and use the clay to get the likeness of the character as much as possible. I found some images of Darth Maul from the live action film, the animated series Rebels, and the animated series Clone Wars. I was also lucky enough to find some orthographs of Darth Maul, which I combined to create a coloured version with a dark line that was easier to see. I really enjoyed these lessons, and I wish we had more of them. I think they were very useful because it shows that if you pull the geometry/clay in the direction of the muscles, you get much more realistic results.

I liked slowly building up my sculpture, although I admit I feel I worked very slowly on it as I was nervous about messing up. It was my first time sculpting traditionally, so it made me wary as I obviously can't just go back to a previous save or hit undo. I think I did an alright job building up the basic structure of the skull, although overall the sculpture is not nearly complete yet. I do feel it was very helpful, just like how traditional drawing and painting is useful for digital painting. I hope to continue my sculpture later on during the summer and possibly do more traditional sculptures in the future.

Original Image Source

Maya Pipeline 1: Facial Rigging Pt. 3 - Adding a Blink (Part 11)

I was finally able to return to this tutorial and complete it. Since I've been away from this tutorial for a while, I made a few silly mistakes at first when adding the pose interpolators such as selecting the wrong joint. However, I eventually got the hang of it again and now I can progress onto the eyebrows...I'm glad I returned to finish this one up before I completely forgot where I was/what I was doing in the tutorial.

Adaptation B: Opening Scene Playblast & Title Test

I wanted to first sort out the opening scene, where each light would individually illuminate their corresponding model. I found that playblasting this would not work, as I could not see clearly what the lights were doing so I could not determine if the timing was right. So, in a separate file I made the quality low, applied lambert shaders the geometry, and made sure everything was out of smooth preview mode before rendering out the frames since I only cared about seeing what the lights were doing.

I'm quite happy with how the lights are working, I think for the rest of my playblasts I shouldn't need to fully render them out (excluding possibly the closing). I also decided to do a quick test for the title of the animation...it is similar to what I've done for Leviathan, but I like the style. I may experiment with something different, but that is for when I'm sure I have time to do so. I may also do some really rough storyboards I'm more organised and so I have a better idea of timing and what I want to do with my scenes.