Major Project: Room 'Smoothness' Animation, Snowfall Particle Test & Initial Sugar Playblast

I've been doing quite a mix of things today since again I wanted to fill in some gaps for my pre-vis. I spent some time animating the brick wall for the line When I see perfection I see smoothness. I had some conversations regarding this line, and I felt that just showing the bricks really distorted then smooth out could work well. I still need to experiment more with this since I think I may want the height to be even more extreme initially before it smooths out. I also want to see what other camera angles could work for this.

I also worked on creating some snowfall within my room. I was feeling as though my ice texture wouldn't work well with this particular line as it didn't feel as impactful as I wanted. I had some discussions earlier in the week encouraged me to look at other options for this part of my film. I liked the idea of actually creating snowfall in the room, an attempt to make it feel almost like a snow-globe. I found this snow tool, which I thought worked really well. I made the room a passive collider so the snow settles on the floor...although in this shot you can't see that.

I blurred the room when the snow appears, so the focus is on the snowflakes rather than the room, similar to my soap bubbles. I was worried initially if this would be bad since it doesn't 'fit' with the pattern of my other objects but I wonder if this will work alright since there are live action intercuts and the more positive lines in the poem break from the pattern anyway even if those are mostly later in the film (for 'hope'). This was also made in Mental Ray, so I'll need to see how it looks in Arnold and if it casts shadows/light rays because of the fog, which would be ideal.

Snow Tool

Lastly, I created a very quick playblast using my sugar cube. This line of the poem is pretty fast, so I don't have a lot of duration to work with. For now I just have the cube rotate and the camera move around it, to sort of 'exhibit' that it is different from the previous objects.