Sebastian // FINAL YEAR PROJECT 2014

Compositing WIP of the second last shot.

I used the same snow shader, rendered the background hills and mountains in separate layers so that i can put fog and clouds in between to create depth.

i did some more work on the lights in the snow scene since i'm not using maya's physical sun & sky for night lights. here is an improved comp with the new snow shader, stronger directional lights + shadow, an area light to bring out the specular details in the snow, a few bounce lights to fill the dark spots and the same IBL around the entire scene to give that blue, cold feeling to it all.

i've been working on cleaning up all scenes, adding the rest of foliage/background trees and background mountains/hills. at the same time polishing animation so that it's good enough.

comp test

general look of all layers comped together. adding: more grass, rocks and flowers to the near plane, noses to the background trees.

the pictures of sky i took fit so well as the background sky. it's layering on top of the tone from maya's physical sun&sky. zblur added in nukeX.

started putting in some grass and stuff to fill the scene

between finishing the animation, i went on to just get some background mountains ready. gonna need to make a few more thougn so i can finely composit a nice horizon of mountains for the backgrounds.

i'm also looking into grass as well so that I have some sort of idea how to organize my scenes ready for rendering once the animation is finished.

Scene 04 v14 - The Lumberjacks

The animation still needs a few tweaks and i need to fix the prints in the snow.

Scene 04 v08 - The Lumberjacks

Here's how I do the process of animation:

I started blocking out the first poses and walk cycles, some with stepped and some with linear keys. As long as I can ignore all invalid keyframes, linear keys works fine to me to be able to work out how the timing and motions are gonna look. I started with moving the CoG controller in it's directional axis, then the feet's IK controllers to follow it. After that I fix the CoG's weight and then it's height movement in Y. The spine is controlled by an IKSpline controller so I can do a sort of micro squash and stretch movement. Then I animate the arms and hands and then the neck. I also fill in the foot rolls and toe movement as i go along.

3/4th of the shots edited together to a previz/roughly animated version.

As I animate the shots from my shotlist, it really helps to already set up the cameras and output some playblasts in order to edit together the shots as they will look from the final render. With this I get a better sense of what's going on when and which shots to put in different scenes as it requires other sets of assets, scale and lighting. For example, the main scene, where most of the shots takes place is my scene 02, whilst the establishment shot, the shot of the crows coming out of the forest and the lumberjacks exiting the truck are in different scenes. The shotlist has been extremely helpful. Having all shot numbers and camera numbers really helps to get the workflow between rendering and editing/compositing much smoother.

On time management

Surprisingly, I'm right on track according to my schedule. During the holidays i finished all models and rigs for the characters. These first weeks of january is set out for animating. I pushed the deadlines for the final animation a bit forward when realizing that my animation isn't too complex, and it's mostly about the visual image of it all put together.

My goal is to make all assets from scratch, and put all these pieces together to make something lovely to look at, and for it all to support a story. My goal is not solely animation.

started the crow model. it's gonna be super simple so I won't focus much on details...