Rendering

Its crazy rendering is such a big process, it is such a vital part and making sure everything works properly when it comes to compositing. It is so painful to come in, in the morning and see that your render on the farm is complete yet when you open it something i (we as people) have done wrong. Meaning that whole evening has put you behind its these silly mistakes that turn your day into a bad one, but i have had a great day schedule.

Get up 7ish
Breakfast with Sky Sports News
Play Call of Duty for 30mins
Wash
Clothed
Make lunch
Get to college for 8:30
See renders
Redo renders if needed or composite them
Whilst lightlinking a new shot on my laptop
Set up a render
Have lunch
Check renders
Light link
Set up a render
sometime after 7 leave
Play Call of duty or see girlfriend whilst rendering backgrounds of shots
Sleep at 10:30

Some of the shots!

These are just some of the shots i worked on showing you the lights i used and the final out come of using the light setup. I wish i could put them all on but there really isnt enough time with the amount of work left to do for Friday!

But yeah it jsut gives an insight into what i have been doing!

Lighting Is Done!

Yep thats right, all the shots are lit and are now either movs or are rendering at the moment, so thats all gravy for us and with some motivation the film can be finished for friday hand in. Ther are shots that i want to go back to but i am happy with how my abilities within lighting have developed and it just shows that with a bit of time and patience you can achieve something. I just wish this was the same for animation, but for now i am pleased with the skills i have. Its crazy thinking that i have pretty much inputed lighting in every shot along with Grigsbys lighting he did for us. So yeah once agian i am on to compositing these shots along with alec which has been a great aid, and always wanting the next bit from me, which has kept me on my toes and working hard. Tomorrow will be a day of sorting out folders which i am worried about, i think it may take out the whole day, but needs to be done well! Leaving friday to finish odd bits and bobs and the final shots to composite. Below are jsut some examples of the shots and what was required i also have a quick eample of how i changed the setup.

Its been tough and it has definatly taught me alot about lighting especially light linking something i wasnt to sure of before this project, but it is definatly a useful tool when it is working as i have had some problems with it.

Facts and Figures

Today was a good day got four shots done and yesterday i got four done as well, so that means 35 shots have been turned into uncompressed quicktimes. 9 are rendering as we speak leaving 16 left for next tuesday at the latest, so i work it out as around 3 a day. Tonight i hope to have another one ready and start a second, who needs sleep when we are in panic stations.

But yeah apart from being tired occassionally i am happy with what i have learnt and achieved, in term 3, in lighting and compositing, which i really enjoy making me think about what my specialism is and at the moment i really dont know. I definatly know i am not an animator!

Alec and Dan have been doing an amazing job with animating on polished off and i just love to open a new file and watch their animation, before lighting it and just hope i do it justice, but with every shot i am learning something new about lighting and what i should do and tweak. they hope to finish animating on saturday meaning they can take some of the load of me in compositing, which is great news.

Some Shots

Well, it has been so busy i am finding it hard to get some quality time on the blog, but we are halfway their in terms of rendering which is good and at the moment Im working on some key shots, which will make my life easier as i can recycle the light setup in some shots, like we have done with the base shot.

But today i rendered two shots they arethe bum hitting bed and the ding, i have worked on and off the ding as i wasnt happy with the results, but i am now and below are two screengrabs from these shots. The bum hitting bed was enjoyable and i added fake depth of field within after effects, i cant wait to use a bit more depth of field with some of the other shots!

.ma to .mb error

Ok well i was working on a shot today when it suddenly crashed, i was able to reopen it as a .ma file, i started doing all the work i wanted on it, light linking, changing shaders etc. When i went to save i wanted to save it as a .mb and this error came up...

Error: File contains unknown nodes or data. To preserve this information, the current file type cannot be changed.

Bit anoying as i was worried if the render farm would understand .ma so i did some searching on the internet by putting this error into google and a cg forum came up so i looked at it and some guy called Richard said type in...

Is -type unknown;

this brings up a list of unkwown nodes and for some reason it was looking for renderMan so the way to do this is to type in...

'delete Is -type unknown';

this will deleate the unkown nodes and allow you to save as .mb

rah

Changes

List for me to change:

Shot 46; afro seams hazey, skin needs some sorting out, polisher looks like it is glowing and jed isnt casting shadows.

Ding; Headphones wrong colour (post work) i changed the colour of occlusion to a blue so orange +blue makes a yellow/green, add a rim light to jed light coming from one source at the moment. Also here is the bg of shot 17 jed walking had to do the texture for the radiator, doh! Also may need to move camera due to the room finishing their.

I hope to have these three ready to render for tomorrow, except the afro!

Sunday At college Banter

Yep thats right at college on a Sunday, i might as well live here i am here so much, but stuff needs to get done and ther are to many distractions at home! So i have been working on shot 46 a bit more and moved on to the Ding as i am stretched for time at the moment and my laptop is playing up a lil bit but i have finally created a skin shader for jed that i am pleased with i am using a maya fast simple skin shader and i think it works well! I have checked the ding shot on different frames and the lighting works well. The only thing i am really worried about is the afro we really need to sort something out? I dont mind giving it a go but i feel it will really dig into time that i need to spend on rendering, lighting and compositing! But anyway some nice pictures for you guys let me know... Dont worry about blurriness on the ding that is my image format, sorry.

SHOT 46

After talking to Edgley last night i have made some improvements on this shot and i am pretty pleased with it there are still some issues with the polisher but for the majority of it is nearly their! 90% done i think? Oh dont worry about the occlusion i didnt have time to render another one! Also i tried darkining the mouth and it came out with bad results for when he is in the last pose otherwise it is really bright. Any advice on that would be appreciated! Reflections arent correct either at the moment, and brightness can be changed as this is a bit dark?

WIP

OK people working on Jed singing and tonight i wanted to work on the shot of the whole room and for the first time my laptop has failed and i got fatal error, so im gona talk about the shot that is working. Basically there are a few problems with the room, but that is now resolved so dont worry about anything to do with the room, however i havent solved the missing parts of the polisher and the different colours yet so mainly focus on Jed please and give me some advice as i am stuck now! Oh and it looks really dark on this monitor so i will lighten it up

The Wheel

Ok after discussing the issues with the wheel its finally completed and i tested out my zDepth skills with this one. In maya i rendered off a zDepth pass which is basically a render of close objects white and far away objects black, tweaking this layer in after effects using curves and invert you can then add it to a lens blus on the main layer, which gives a blur, which you are able to control :) once again this one needed some tweaking especially with the occlusion as it was making everything look dull and dark.

Compositing

Well, this week i have been cracking on with rendering shots and so on and can safely say we have done 24 or around that which isnt to bad, just behind schedule. But its hard when some shots need alot of attention to them like th one below this image shows a screen shot from withing after effects and shows the amount of layers i am dealing with now the name conventions were good at the beginning but have slipped over time. And when u get silly mistakes its difficult to know what layer is doing what. The second image is from the shot and before this it was looking pretty bad and the original image is the bottom image, now tweaking had to be done as all the focus on the light setup was on ed, when it should be on the plug and the machine as this is the shot when it all gets rebooted. Whilst looking at a tutorial i realised that you could create lights within after effects, so after some playing around we used a spotlight and a abmient light, which worked great. You cant see in these images but sparks were added to the plug which were inspired by burning safari when the ape gets electricuted, so yeah overall a pretty good day.










Improved one:







Original one:

Wheel Shot

Ok at the moment i am really not happy with this shot it doesnt fit with the rest of the shots in terms of lighting and colour and how clean it is. The first image was my initial test the occlusion looks bad, its way to dark and dull, its boring.

My second attempt is from today, which i feel is better, but i still feel it is rather dull, the metal need to be more shiny on the bed, the dirty yellow needs to be lighter and have a more plastic feel. I am happy with the rubber wheel. Im not to sure on the bump on the bed. The cabinet just is a massive bit of colour in the background and the tiles and floor is to dull, but the shot is under the bed how bright is it realisticly going to be? If you guys feel the same as me and have any suggestions let me know! I also prefer the shadows from the old one, maybe an inbetween of the twos shadows?

Degree Show

This weekend me and Dan Shuffle have started to put together a list of industry people and companies that we are inviting to our degree show, but it is taking longer than i expected as we want to find names from these companies as we dont want to send out a generic e-mail, but one for each company. I have looked into games and pre production, which has been fairly successful.

As for the website Shuffle has taught me some stuff about html and how to upload images and text on to the website, which is useful for me and beneficial for him as i can now upload peopls work and take some of the burden off him.

Bank Holiday Tasks

Ok i gave myself a huge task and im not to sure why i did, as i really dont have to much time on weekends to do anything, but i am hopeing to get at least the wheel shot done today and maybe shot 43 again as someone gave me the wrong file. Which, i love the guy who did it and that wont change but it just means an extra hours work on something i thought was sorted, and when we all have tight deadlines its a bit anoying. But anyway try to stick positive as people are always too negative in this world.


So, on friday i worked on the bumshake and i was finally geting somewhere i was happy with and thought yeah its looking good i will go back to it on the weekend only to find i didnt save the file! ahhh, i was so anoyed, but this morning i got it back to its standard i left it on friday, just the pole missing!









I also did a render for shot 6 with lights on basicaly i just used the base shot light set up, it looks bad i havent a clue what that texture is on the matress the shadows on the bed, dont particularly like the ones on the machine, and this is with a bit of work in photoshop as well.

Old School nCloth

Yeah these are a few playblasts that have been chilling on my desktop for a while just showing how we have been using nCloth for some of the shots!


Well i was hopeing to have them here however there is either something wrong with my files or blogger as they wont seem to upload? But they will be on my final dvd :)