Unfortunately, this week was filled with a lot of rendering and a lot of late nights. I'll run through what I did during the week, and then reflect on it.
The main thing I worked on this week was the first shot of our sequence. I spent a full day getting the clouds working and looking right, and another day fiddling with the lighting, the scene layout, and the render settings.
I figured that this week would be the most important, since I could then basically just use the same lighting and render settings for the whole project. So, I spent a lot of my time on this shot:
I wasn't really happy with how the skydome looked, and how it projected, so I decided to look for another option. I found a few. Firstly, I could use a Bifrost fluid to render the cloud, but that would take a long time to render, and also require a lot more time to get figured out. Secondly, I could essentially just repaint my background and make it look better. I could even base it off of a photo. Thirdly, there was a volumetric shader in Arnold that would allow for basic cloud textures to be made. Since I wasn't confident in my painting abilities, and didn't have time for the Bifrost fluid, I went with the Aistandardvolume option. Little did I know I would have a lot of problems with this as well.
The shader I used was extremely finnicky, and understanding the Solid Angle manual took me all day. I eventually ended up with clouds like this, and I was happy enough with them to move on to animating the trees and bushes to look like they're moving in the wind.
However, after the group meetings, I had to come back to this and change it. Basically, it doesn't much look like clouds. It looks a lot more like an ellipse with a fractal texture on it. So, I began again to redo this lighting.
I do want to mention that the reason I was focusing on this so much is because it should help to make the rest of the scene look great too. The opening shot is also the most important one, and I wanted to get it done right. As a group, we also hadn't finished the rigs or the animation yet, so I didn't really have a choice. I did hope that the rigs could have been done by now, but I suppose it is the thing that's the most new to us, so we should have accounted for it taking longer.
This week, I also rendered the majority of this shot. This was an extremely tedious exercise with way too many moving parts and way too many render layers. to try and speed things up, I tried splitting the render up into three different computers. I don't think this sped things up as much as it just made the render more confusing to me. in the shot, seen below, I rendered three different layers, not including the background.
I also added in the leaf falling across, to make it a bit more interesting to look at, and to make it lead into the next shot.
I think that the most important thing about this week is that I learned that learning new tools in Maya takes time and energy, and sometimes that does't quite fit into the work flow of a project. With the rigs and the lighting, we've been trying to do new things, and I think we've forgotten the time it takes to learn those things.
I also think that we should have been sharing our learning and our tasks with one another. We haven't had a lot of contact, and I think we've been missing out on what the rest of us our doing. We would then also be able to communicate our ideas better to one another. As it is, I haven't done a lot of rigging, and they (Emmet Ronan and Piers) haven't done too much of the lighting.
The main thing I worked on this week was the first shot of our sequence. I spent a full day getting the clouds working and looking right, and another day fiddling with the lighting, the scene layout, and the render settings.
I figured that this week would be the most important, since I could then basically just use the same lighting and render settings for the whole project. So, I spent a lot of my time on this shot:
The shader I used was extremely finnicky, and understanding the Solid Angle manual took me all day. I eventually ended up with clouds like this, and I was happy enough with them to move on to animating the trees and bushes to look like they're moving in the wind.
However, after the group meetings, I had to come back to this and change it. Basically, it doesn't much look like clouds. It looks a lot more like an ellipse with a fractal texture on it. So, I began again to redo this lighting.
I do want to mention that the reason I was focusing on this so much is because it should help to make the rest of the scene look great too. The opening shot is also the most important one, and I wanted to get it done right. As a group, we also hadn't finished the rigs or the animation yet, so I didn't really have a choice. I did hope that the rigs could have been done by now, but I suppose it is the thing that's the most new to us, so we should have accounted for it taking longer.
This week, I also rendered the majority of this shot. This was an extremely tedious exercise with way too many moving parts and way too many render layers. to try and speed things up, I tried splitting the render up into three different computers. I don't think this sped things up as much as it just made the render more confusing to me. in the shot, seen below, I rendered three different layers, not including the background.
I also added in the leaf falling across, to make it a bit more interesting to look at, and to make it lead into the next shot.
I think that the most important thing about this week is that I learned that learning new tools in Maya takes time and energy, and sometimes that does't quite fit into the work flow of a project. With the rigs and the lighting, we've been trying to do new things, and I think we've forgotten the time it takes to learn those things.
I also think that we should have been sharing our learning and our tasks with one another. We haven't had a lot of contact, and I think we've been missing out on what the rest of us our doing. We would then also be able to communicate our ideas better to one another. As it is, I haven't done a lot of rigging, and they (Emmet Ronan and Piers) haven't done too much of the lighting.
Weekend of Saturday the 5th
This weekend has been pretty brutal. I pulled an all nighter and a 2am nighter. I've been putting the animation and the camera angles together, along with repainting broken skin weights and setting up the characters in the scene.
The nights have been so long partially because of the time it took to rig, but also because there have been a bunch of problems. I'll list a few of them here.
Moving the characters into the scenes: For whatever reason, when we import a character into a scene, there's no way to move the characters around the scene without the rigs completely breaking. The only solution I've found is to delete the history, place the character correctly, and then to repaint the skin weights. I haven't found a way to keep the old skin weights, everything I do causes it to break completely, and I don't know why.
Messy outliners: This one is a bigger problem than the last, since rigs rely so much on the usability of the outliner. We've had to almost completely redo rigs because of this, and we didn't see it coming.
Learning Render Layers: I've been learning how to use render layers lately, and again, I've forgotten the time it takes to learn a skill. I feel like I've lost time because I've tried doing it this way. The render of the first shot got infinitely more confusing, and I had to re render a lot just to get it working. I think I'll stick to fewer layers in the future, and also to manage my files better.
Team Dynamics
The team has been a bit more collected this week. I think we're coming down to the wire, and so things really need to start happening, like the animation and rigging (Ronan and Emmet's task). We are also suffering from a lack of deadlines, in my opinion. If we had a stronger schedule, we wouldn't be rigging for so long, or rendering in such a complicated way.
I've had it suggested that we should be making written contracts, so that we have some schedule to follow, and I'd like to try that in the next project. It doesn't have to be anything specific, but it would be nice to have some assurance that the tasks will be done on time. I'd like to give it a shot next time.
Hopefully we'll be able to get things together this week.
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