Week 7: The Break... or the Breaking Point?

Studio 13

Now that we are going ahead with the boss scene, there are a few minor things I need to tweak in the texture deformer, to make it suitable for the specific animation for that scene. Diew produced a refined mesh and rig for the 3D dog and started to setup the environment/lighting. Natalie has started to animate the dog using Sarah’s most recent storyboards and I will be adding the texture deformer when it’s ready. Our animation lead Jess will be allocating roles to us to animate the character, health bars, text messages and anything else that has not been clarified.

Storyboard

Animation

Lighting

This week I spoke with Phil, our lecturer, to get a head start on the different kinds of passes we’ll need embedded in our render files, so we can separate them out in NukeX and manipulate them if need be. For Black Dog we will only be including light passes, not texture passes, which means the textures will need to be on point before rendering out. Fortunately there are colour-corrective nodes in Maya we can plug in if need be.

AOV tests (different lighting groups):

I didn't have much of an understanding before of how data gets separated out in rendering (light & material passes in AOV settings, character mesh and environment meshes in separate render layers, masking them out etc). But now I feel much more confident to go ahead and test rendering out passes in a mockup scene, composite it in NukeX and try and achieve a quality, ‘Pixaresque’ result.

If we can establish a method for rendering/post now, things will go smoothly when post hits full swing. I feel my role as lead in post-production will overlap heavily with the technical department when it comes to setting up rendering, naming convention and processing all the data streams.

We had our KPI meetings this week and I am very pleased with the feedback I received on my performance so far; it put a lot of self-doubt and concerns of mine to rest.

I had been neglecting other areas of study/work/life this week, so I had to shift my priorities a little. Unfortunately, that means I didn’t get to put in as much time to studio 3 as I would have liked, but I will work hard to catch up, especially on my individual study.

See you next week!