Week 9: The Two Towers

I completed the third pass of animation for my shots in the last scene of our film. I worked eight hours on it in a day and revised it again the next day. I received some good feedback from our animation lead, Jess, and I’m happy with the result.

At the last minute, I had to change the animation for the dog in Scene 5, showing the dog behaving calmly. I originally had it turning and curling up in a ball, but the rig was limited and it turned out bit crazy. It didn’t take me long to change the animation to the dog simply sitting and lowering itself down, giving a little shake and some subtle movements.

Once Nat finished the third pass for Scene 3, the boss scene, I added materials and texture deformers over the dogs in each of the shots. They looked ok; if our client wasn't 100% happy, they were very quick and easy to tweak to slightly differing effects.

There were in fact last minute changes to all the shots in Scene 3; some were taken out completely, others were refined. The animators couldn’t animate the dog correctly with the texture deformer on, which meant all six shots for Scene 3 ‘bottle-necked’ through me, to apply the mesh deformer and get approval before rendering. I'd done it so many times over, admittedly it didn’t take too long. I took the time to animate the strength & transformation attributes of the texture deformer handle, to have the dogs mesh ‘explode’ a little bit when he gets really aggressive, or ‘calm down’ into a polygonal wavy motion when he is no longer threatening. Me, Sarah, our director and Jess, our animation lead were quite happy with it. Hopefully our client is too :P

I also added a black and white noise map to the roughness of the shiny black glass material on the dog, to break up the specularity. It’s a subtle difference, but I think it gives it a bit more realism and personality.

I took some time to look into getting a motion vector pass to work in our short film. We got it working by checking a few attributes were turned on it the camera settings, AOV settings and general render settings.

Once a few shots were fully rendered, we put it into Nuke to test and realised that the motion vector pass was not only its own pass, but also baked into the beauty pass. Some of the motion blur was quite intense and as far as we knew it was inseparable from the beauty, so we couldn’t manipulate it individually. This was mostly my fault.

Luckily, me and my fellow wrangler Michael had some extra time to re-render Scene 1 and Scene 5 (the most important ones) without a mo-vec pass and Motion Blur disabled in the render settings. The results turned out much sharper, but we also have an identical pass with a mo-vec pass that we can now separate and hopefully manipulate by itself if we need to.

We had issues with our ambient occlusion and matte layer pass before rendering, but we got our priority beauty layer done, with four light passes, a z-depth pass, normal pass, point pass, ID pass and mo-vec pass. Our new worst case scenario is submitting an Arnold-rendered film, that doesn’t look horrible, even without post-processing.

I have a confession to make: on Wednesday I should’ve gone to uni to do other work that I’ve fallen behind on. But I was really tired. I stayed in bed till 4. Then I got up to go to uni. I was down the street, stopping for a coffee and Connoisseur ice cream. But then I went back home and watched The Two Towers extended edition, on bluray.

I also made a mistake this week: I thought campus would open at 8am on Saturday but it actually opened at 10am. So my fellow wranglers were waiting for nearly two hours out in the cold, early in the morning on Saturday. I rocked up at 11 with coffee and doughnuts as a peace offering to stop us from all going mad. My offering was accepted :P

Long week = long blog. My brains fried.

See you neyxrftdre;sm;x j...