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Confluence: Safe Crossing

SVA MFA Computer Arts 2023 Fall Exhibition

Opening reception: Thursday, November 9, 6-8pm

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Confluence: Safe Crossing,” an exhibition of animations, films, prints and sculptures by MFA Computer Arts students, alumni, and faculty. Curated by India Lombardi-Bello, department assistant to the chair and outreach coordinator, and department administrative assistant Jack Meisterich, the exhibition will be on view from Wednesday, November 8, through Monday, November 27, 2023 at the SVA Flatiron Gallery, 133/141 West 21st Street, New York City.

Been a while I updated the production blog. I’ve been busy working on animations and modeling for the sets. I marked Half point of animation so did some fun jobs as a reward which is texturing, shading and lighting.

I did some initial light setup for the sets. Did a “Production Quality” render test to see how long it’ll take in Full HD size. Right now it takes 1 hours and 19 minutes. The good part is the quality setting gives me amazing render without any noises but the bad thing is it takes more than I expected. Once I finish all the shading works I’ll do the Production quality test again and going to look for a way to reduce it below an hour. This render does contain lots of complex shaders and geometries so that’s probably the reason why it takes so long as well. Thinking of taking out the displacement maps in the background elements. Probably bake the texture for the candle in the wide shots as well. 

Throwing some work in progress. I stopped working on my hero character and move on to less important character because I was learning so many new things and method as I go and thinking maybe I can get used to all of those by starting with the less important character and implement all those technique to my hero character. So I started with texturing in Mari because this is my first time using Mari. I also tested some dynamic simulation of her dress too. Found a very good way to reduce simulation time on Autodesk website and very excited about it.

With texture, I started testing SSS shader in Vray. I am still deciding my renderer and so far Vray is my primary choice. I am taking Arnold workshop at school and planning on render test in Arnold later this month as well. 

Moved on to hair, using GMH plugin to populate hair and adjusted as I go. It is really powerful tool, however, need some tweaking to make it look realistic. 

Changed the hair shader from default to Vray hair shader. Loved it! 

Tried render in production quality. Probably need to tweak the shape later (her bang seems too wonky) but pretty happy with the shape. Render time so far is about 25 minute, but it was done in low-res so it will take longer than that. I am aiming for 40 minutes per frame in Full HD resolution but have a feeling that it will be ended up around 60 minutes. Which means I need to render some frames out starting late January or early February. Gonna need to work extra hard this month and maybe need to work during my 3-week-vacation in Korea. 

But so far, I am sticking to the schedule. I finished modeling human characters and I asked my modeler friend is working on God of destruction character. He sent me the base model today and it is looking really promising!