Today I also worked on my pufferfish entity. I was actually quite anxious to get to work on this, as I struggled with the texture maps in the past. I decided to go for a different approach for the bump/displacement on the model since my painted maps were not working as I wanted to, although my diffuse map worked fine. I also played around with some settings and managed to stop the spines from collapsing when I use a displacement map. I played around with a few found images and settled on a more amphibian/reptile-like look rather than wrinkles which is what I was originally going for.
Since my final set is a lot brighter than the old set, I couldn't re-use my old camera animation since it started off black and then lit up to reveal the pufferfish (I'm avoiding doing any dip-to-black transitions). I'm currently doing a render test since I also animated the skin on the pufferfish, but I wanted to share the playblast for now. Tomorrow I will also include some renders of the pufferfish within my final set, I just ran out of time today to allow a full render to finish.
After several days of shuffling through frames and fixing the ones that were watermarked...I think I finally managed to snag them all. This took me so long because this shot (which is going to be used for the intro and outro of my film) is 600 frames. I split it into 6 parts so it wouldn't take too long to render, but since each part then got watermarked it became difficult to fix. Despite the trouble that it caused me, I'm really happy with how this shot turned out.
I'm really glad I also spent the extra time on fixing the bricks because I think the shine on the walls is a nice detail that adds a lot. Also, since this shot was so long I couldn't make one GIF for it, so I made two shorter ones and included the YouTube video (where I post all of my animation tests).
As mentioned previously, I also decided it'd be good to create a few more shots focusing on the bricks/the room. Like the first brick shot, this was really fast to render since it wasn't heavy on samples and rays. This time I focused on the bricks on the ceiling rather than the floor (Brick 001) so I could capture the highlights on the bricks from the lights.
Here are the final renders for meat, room 006 and wires. I'm really happy with how these turned out, especially meat because I think the red looks really good against the white bricks. For room 006 I also played around a little with animating the intensity of the motion blur, lens blur, and vignette as the scene progresses and gets more distorted.
Here are two more animation tests that I've made for my sponge. I like how #5 came out...after some feedback yesterday and seeing #4 I made several minor tweaks and animated the scale of the sponge so it grows slightly throughout the time it's on screen. I don't have it completely fill the screen as I found when I scaled it that much it looked too obvious because the animation was too quick. I think #5 has a nice balance to it growing without it looking odd. I also kind of like how it nearly fills the frame but not quite, I think it still gives the sense of it swelling.
Since I liked how #5 turned out, I went into my scene and adjusted the render settings to clean up the graininess and lights. I tried to get away with having 2 samples for diffuse rather than 3 (which is what I use for most scenes) to make up for the SubSurface samples, but during the start of the animation where the camera was facing the floor I thought the bricks looks just a little too grainy.
I tested out a variety of frames so I could ensure different parts of the shot had enough samples such as the shadows, lights, diffuse, specularity, and subsurface scattering. This was to try and ensure that everything was cleaned up enough without render times being too excessive.
When I worked on Dysmorphia and YPGTTO, I learned a lot of valuable lessons when it came to organisation with rendering. I'm making sure I'm checking several times what frames are rendering on what computer to ensure I have a bit of padding when I split shots up over several computers to render. Like always, I have charts in my notebooks to keep track of what is rendering on what computer. I decided to also put together a chart so I have an idea of what shots require the most work and which are nearly complete. This is not the final shot list, I will likely put together a few more room/brick shots that I may inject in-between different lines of my poem but this is what I am working on so far.
All of the purple shots will be filled with the 'room shots' I am making. I also wrote notes on a few of the shots, such as needing extra passes or live action footage (pink). I'm trying my best to just gather footage from my family as I feel that is more meaningful (to me at least) as it is raw and not 'performed'. But, jello is quite a specific one so I may have to make that myself.
