Week 24:
November 14th, 2023
I was asked to create a base texture for the canvases as well as something to put on the hero canvas
I made the hero canvas based off of these references on the miro board, mainly going back to the art that Aelma made during the pre-production team (Top/Middle)
However moving forward, I think I need to bring back some of the more painterly aspects of messy paint strokes as the piece I achieved feels too modern and digital for the right vibe. The paintings towards the bottom are more the direction I believe it needs to go, with some of the charcoal sketches on the left mixed in to give it an underpainting layer.
After reflection on the canvas texture I thought they initially looked alright in Substance Painter however I believe the noise on the canvas grain is just too dense, particularly after seeing it render in Maya and I'd like to adjust it in the future.
I also made a quick painting texture for the moon.
November 15th, 2023
Today I worked with Paul a lot back and forth to make topology adjustments to the character face. Previous notes I received were to:
Fix google loops around eyes to be continuous and not spiral
Shape eyes to be more realistic
WIden underside of jaw
Create more undereyelid geo
Make concave angle between cheek/eye
Adjust height/width of lips
Moved geo kiting between eyebrowns down to support brow ridge scrunching
Pull eyes forward
Make cheek be less horizontal
Pull bridge of nose back
I did my best to address all of these notes in Maya. I also
Finished UVs
Made a first pass at character textures
Substance Viewport (LEFT) vs. Arnold (RIGHT)
His eyelashes look quite dark right now because they don't have an opacity map.
I worked mainly on the face/hands, hair, white shirt, and a bit on vest. I have not touched the pants, socks, or shoes at all besides giving them a fill color.
This was mainly just a test to verify that the model does in fact work in substance painter and that the UVs didn't have any weird issues that needed to be resolved. Bringing back the sculpted detail from ZBrush for things such as volume/wrinkles on the pants and shirt, as well as finer wrinkles and skin details on the face will help with achieving a better look.
November 16th, 2023
I worked on lighting s3000, one of the hero/master shots in our film.
I need to work on adjusting the falloff on some of the lights such as the ones with the tree gobos to make them more subtle, but overall I'm quite happy with the color. I've noticed in the lighting process that the roughness maps on the walls of the room have very large noise on them and the roughness is peaking too shiny and it gives a very reflective appearance which is unintended, I will inform the group about this detail.
Production Pass:
November 17th, 2023
After the production pass when my group reconviened we decided that since the character likely couldn't be rerigged and rereferenced into every single shot and have animation adjustments to all the work that gets messed up by the rig changes in a span of two weeks, my group and I came to the conclusion that instead of trying to finish the character for the Preview Screening, I should instead refocus my attention to taking the lead on lighting since I got a very positive reaction to the shots I lit in the Production pass. I'm a little nervous because I still don't feel like I know how to light very well in a technical sense but I am very confident in my ability to research things and use my artistic eye to be able to judge color and contrast. I had a feeling earlier in the semester that I would end up doing some lighting work so I had previously done some practice renders of old projects that I revisited in order to refamiliarize myself with lighting sets, as most of my previous lighting experience is just limited to lighting individual assets for demo reels.
Week 25: (Thanksgiving Break)
November 22nd, 2023
The group had a zoom meeting at our regular time with our sound guy Cameron Tetz where we chatted about the December 15th preview screening and what to expect by then. We handed off the folder of foley sounds we had previously collected to Cameron. We also did verify that Eric Tetz will also be working with Cameron for the sound.
Week 26: Return from Break
November 27th, 2023
When I reopened my s3000 shot after break to reassess the render issues, I found that despite thinking that I flattened the whole scene, some references were still included and got overwritten as well as the envionment, which meant that when rendered the shot looked completely different than before which was extremely frustrating.
I worked on trying to recreate the lighting as it seems that almost every light had its properties changed a bit, but I couldn't quite recapture the same effect I originally had which was really frustrating.
November 16th (LEFT) vs. November 27th (RIGHT)
I would like to try to get back to the nicer vibe of the November 16th lighting but it's not at the top of my priority list atm and I just need to get lighting passes out.
At the request of my group, I also made some little animated gobos in photoshop and after effects that animate as if there are antennae and wings growing out of the characters shadow on the floor and ceiling.
November 28th, 2023
I worked on rendering s3000 again after encountering a Deadline error on the 16th where Deadline would not render the atmosphere volume which significantly changed the look of the shot.
I got Deadline to work properly rendering the atmosphere but encountered a different error where it wanted to only render about 30-60 frames out of any given frame sequence. So if I submitted 360 frames, it would only do maybe a 1/6th or an 1/8th of them and then give up and render black frames and I'd have to resubmit the same sequence. Within the frames that it would do, it would still render a black frame or two every handful of frames. This created a large amount of combing back through a sequence render to write out lists of everything that I had submitted and things that needed to be resubmitted. I've had Deadline skip a couple frames in sequences before but I've never experienced this issue so extensively.
After some feedback and discussion about rendering I flattened the scene I was working on and imported all references to the scene to try to reduce render issues but the same issues persisted.
I spent most of my day trying to fix the render issues with s3000 midnight interior lighting, but eventually I moved on later in the evening to lighting s3030 which has midnight exterior lighting.
This is the lighting that I ended up with from Arnold.
This is an edit I made on my phone in Lightroom to try to tweak the lighting in order to give it more of the contrast I was looking to make in camera.
The bounce/back lighting on the plants in the foreground and the tree on the left is quite unnatural and needs to come down. Otherwise I'm pretty happy with it. I couldn't figure out where to place the lights or the moon so that the actual texture on the moon would show rather than be completely obscured by the light. I don't know if there's a way to do that in camera or if that will have to be a solution found with render layers and editting in post.
November 29th, 2023
For my work on lighting I had made:
Interior Night (DONE)
Exterior Night (STARTED)
Exterior Day
Interior Day
Interior Sunset
My plan was to work on Exterior Day lighting, however it was discovered that the file for the environment had been improperly saved in an outdated lighting assembly and was deleted when cleaning out our files. This was a really frustrating moment where our group was confused and trying to sort out what happened to the file. It is a bit frustrating that file management is still something that my group seems to be struggling with despite us reorganizing our pipeline structure and dedicating a production meeting just to ensuring that everyone knows where and how to save/name things.
Because I wanted to still get a move on with the exterior day lighting, I made a replacement for the environment file that we lost with explicit permission from the rest of the group and continued lighting anyways.
This is the lighting/environment work that I ended up with by EOD for the exterior day lighting in shot s1011.
Over the weekend I worked to research and rebuild the environment in a way that would be easier to run in Maya. I did a lot of trial and error with MASH Networks and Arnold StandIns. I ended up making dense individual assets out of Arnold StandIns, and making MASH Networks out of Arnold StandIns as well. In the viewport I set everything to be a bounding box both on the individual standins as well as the MASH Networks. In the MASH networks I also set it to only display 10% of all objects in a network, and some networks I just set to display 0%. They live in the outliner and can be selected in the outliner, however for things like grass that would very easily overwhelm the scene, it is turned off in the viewport to make things run smoother, as well as reduce the elements that an animator has to interact with in the scene.
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