Major Project: Scene Cleanup, Meat Animation Playblasts & Render Pass Tests

Today I returned to my meat texture to bring it into my final digital set and to set up camera animation for its shot. It's been a while since I worked on 'meat', and I hadn't brought it into the final room before so I was a little anxious to see what the results would be. Some of my previous entities needed quite a bit of readjusting so it looked correct in the different lighting.

However, this one was pretty much fine when I imported it with some minor tweaks needed. I played around with different camera animations but I liked the idea of the orb of meat being placed on the 'bed' as I feel that makes it feel more disturbing and invasive (as long as the audience gets that it might represent a bed). I also animated the scale of the orb, so as it rots it grows larger and more intimidating.

I made this scene quite long, because I think I may be able to use at least a portion of it (the red 'healthy' meat), even if it just flashes in for a few frames, for the line when I see myself I see meat encased in plastic wrap. Then, return to it when it's rotting for the line when I see meat I see disease. Either way I'd rather have too much footage than too little. Below is a playblast of the animation, although I'm doing a low quality render test since I also animated the height of the displacement on the orb. Overall the playblast is not that accurate, for example in the beginning of the shot the camera is somewhat under the floor but in full renders it seems to be fine. I want to do a test batch render just to be sure everything is okay.

I also played around with using the matte setting to separate the orb from the room when I render. I wanted to do this since the orb requires subsurface scattering, while the rest of the room doesn't. However, after several tests I noticed that the frames where the orb was furthest away from the camera...the outline was still noticeable even with a light wrap. I then tried rendering the orb and the room together to see if it was even worth rendering them separately. I found it didn't increase the render time by much so I think I'll render them together just to be safe and to avoid having too many render passes floating around.

Orb Pass

Room Pass

Light Wrap

Visible Outline (light wrap off)