Rendering

I hate rendering!

It has taken over three hours to render one scene. The shot of the arm only has one animated texture and the animated spider. The texture has a bump map and a colour map and that is pretty much all thats in the scene (including the lighting).

It was a 300 frame piece of animation and it took a long time to render. I also tried to render the shot of the tree but it took five hours to render 30 frames of a 325 frame animation. In the end I gave up and sent it to Deon. Deon and Gerome both have super fast PCs so they have told me to send it all to them and they will render it and add it to the final compilation. They also asked me to send the green screen footage so that they can add it to the rest of the compilation. They can also add the footage straight away when it is rendered.

They have told us all to send all the files to them and they will finish it all off. With the lack of communication, I hope they got my files and it will be ready to hand in on Monday. I don't know what else I can do. It's all in their hands. I don't know if they are even going to use my shots but I have written all my work in this blog, so if they don't, you know what work I have done and that I have actually worked hard to get this done.

Fingers crossed.

Arguments

It is safe to say our group is not really a group anymore. 

There has been so much conflict and arguments that we are definitely not united anymore. There have been  loads of emails to and fro and lots of unnecessary and unkind facebook messages. Lastly there have been some very nasty and again unnecessary texts. 

It is safe to say the group is divided. The main reason for this is others accusing others of not doing any work. However, we were all assigned tasks and people have either taken too much on or there have been issues so the tasks could not be completed. 

This is devastation for the work. No one is communicating properly and blame is being shifted around rather than the issues being resolved. Because people are not speaking it also means that progress is slow. 

In my opinion, I think that there was no need for abusive messages. Everyone has tried their best but Deon has not been very helpful as a director. He has criticised everyone and rather giving advice and encouraging people, everyone has just received a "this isn't good enough" or "do this again". I have personally tried my hardest and unfortunately, on some days I have not been able to make it into uni due to finances or other commitments but I have worked from home. I feel that I have not been given any support and when I asked for the files, I never received them. It took a whole day to send one texture!

I am trying my hardest and do not appreciate being texted at midnight or early hours of the morning to be had a go at when they do not even keep to their promises and send me the files that I need to do the work.

I must say I am furious about this and it has destroyed this project. Deon has told me that all my green screening is wrong and my shots are not good enough and they are not going to use one of my shots that I created because it wasn't the exact clip but a very similar one. I think its pathetic and I am not trying to say its all Deon's fault because it's not. We are all to blame for this project not being as good as we hoped but I think the way people have reacted is appalling and everyone is barely talking to anyone else. 

Hopefully we can pull something out of the bag but I have no idea how it is going because of lack of communication. 

Shot of the tree.

Seeing as no files have been sent to me, I have had to create a new shot with the files that I had.

I have a lit tree (with no swing), an environment and that is about it.

I have added the environment to the tree scene and had to light both. I have made the lighting on the environment blue and purple from the concept art that I was shown several weeks ago. The sky is supposed to be an ocean but I could not get it to work and when I tried to get it to work, it took forty minutes to render one frame. To get around this, I added a standard plane with a ramp texture. I also had to take the displacement maps off the tree and environment and just leave the bump map. To be honest, I can't see much different when I took the displacement map off so I will just leave them off.

I had to use the tracking again to set up the cameras correctly. After I did this the camera looked correct but the tree was too static. To get around this, I had to animate the tree to get the scene to look correct. When I did this the environment then looked wrong so I parented the environment to the tree so it would animate with the tree. When looking through the camera, it finally looked how I wanted it to.

It took me quite a long time to get the cameras in the correct place and making the scene look how it should. I also had to keep adjusting the light to make sure it was correct all of the time.

Here is how the scene looks:

This is a shot of the scene so that you can see the tree, lighting and where the camera is set up.

 This is an overall shot. It has the whole environment and lighting plus the tree very small in the centre so you can see how small it is compared to the environment.

The shot below shows the camera half way through the animation and shows the scene and composition. You can see the textures but it looks very geometric and unsmoothed. You also cannot see any of the lighting but can see the way it is going to look. 

The shot below is a rendered frame. It is at the beginning of the animation and you can see the purple and blue lighting on the mountains. You can also see the red on the floor and how the lighting is reflected onto the tree. There is also the textures applied (bump and colour map) which gives the tree a much more realistic look. With all the textures and lighting on here, it took about 4 and a half minutes to render this one frame. Thats without the displacement maps. Deon has to add the swing because the file was not sent so could not add it but it shouldn't be much of an issue to import it in.

I also added some depth of field to the camera. This made the tree more focused and the background slightly out of focus - like a real camera would. This makes it more realistic and adds a sense of depth to the 3D scene.

I have to send the file to Deon to be rendered on his super fast pc as it will take about a year to render on my dual core mac. 

Away it goes...

Lighting

Me and Ash have been put in charge of the lighting. My first scene to do is the spider walking next to the arm.

All I was given was Lily's animated spider. To begin I added the shot into the background. I created a plane and applied an animated texture to it to give me the shot within the scene. The next thing I did Was create a camera and lined everything up so when you looked through the camera, the spider walks along the table.

I had to animate the spider a bit more so it moved along the table because it only walked on the spot. This was where I used the tracking to match up the points so the movement of the spider matched the camera and movement within the shot.

I then had to light the scene which was what my main priority was in the first place. This was quite easy as for my other project I have been studying lighting. I needed one main spotlight to light the animated texture and another spotlight on the spider to create a shadow. This spotlight had to be from above looking down so that the shadows would match the shadows in the footage. This is how the overall scene looked:

I had to bend the plane with the animated texture on otherwise there was not a surface for the spider to create a shadow on.

There was also no texture on the spider. Sarah created an amazing digital hand painted texture using the UV mapping she had been working on. However, it was all created on the wrong Maya file so when I went to apply the texture, nothing had been UV mapped. Deon then assured me that he would create another much more basic texture and send it to me so I could apply it to my scene.

In the meantime, I worked on the camera a bit more. At the moment the spider looked far sharper in the rendered scene than the footage. From the image below you can see how the spider looks odd against the background because of the focus in the footage:

I did a bit of searching and realised I could change the depth of field on the camera. I started fiddling around with the settings and tried to get it so the spider was only slightly out of focus.

The only thing left to do was apply the texture and it could be rendered. Unfortunately I had to wait all day. I was in contact with Deon and he had promised me to send it in the morning. I had to nag slightly and push him to do it but by the evening he had sent me his basic texture which I applied. Then it was ready for render. A day after it was planned but at least it could get rendered.

Here is a final image from our scene.

Tracking

So I'm happy with the work I have done so far and at the same time as this project, I am learning about lighting for the other project I am working on and also later on in this project.

To track, I have decided to use Matchmover. There are only four shots to track so it shouldn't be too bad.

Ok, so the shots were are tracking are pretty simple shots so I have decided to use automatic tracking and see how it turns out. It was pretty easy to do which is a plus as I have never done it before. So I loaded the footage into matchmover and set it to auto track and this happened:

It continued to track the points until the end of the clip. Then I exported this into Maya so I could see how it will look and how the tracking looked in 3D. This is how it turned out:

With footage:

Without footage:

In some of the shots, it can be difficult to work out what the markers are so it's important to have the footage behind it. I think it works well and will definitely help when we come to put it into the environment. It will help when we animate the spider too because then we can make out where the camera will be and when.

Now I have to wait for a while for other members to do the animating of the spider and finish modelling the environment and things but most are nearly done. This will then mean I can move onto lighting and hopefully start finishing some shots. In the meantime, I'll get on with my other project.

Moving House

Just managed to buy a house and turns out the moving date s in the middle of the assignment. 15th of February to be exact. This means working hard and trying to up and shift my whole life too. I'm not going to lie, I'm enjoying the move and its a great new house but could do with it not being in the middle of the assignment.

Work is going much slower due to this shift however, most of the work that I can do is done. I'm in charge of lighting but until my group give me the modelled and textured scenes I cannot light. Hopefully I'll be moved by then.

Putting it into After Effects

so I have put all the green screen shots we are using into After Effects and have keyed out the green screen. This was a much longer process than I thought. The main reason for this was because the green was not evenly lit. I had to keep adding layer masks to key out the green.

The other problem was the white tracking markers. I had to add tiny layer masks on top of each one and then make sure it kept covered through out the whole clip. This took a long time because there were about eight on each clip and there are about six or seven clips. On one clip there are sixteen markers and they move because the camera moves so I had to make sure they kept covered by animating the masks. Here is a screen shot of an example of all the masks.

There was a shot that we were going to use of me walking away from the screen. I was wearing black converse shoes and this was the scene:

When I tried to key out the green, half the shoes were keyed out as well. Apart from layer masking it frame by frame there was no way to get around it. I tried using colour range rather than keylight but that didn't work as the grey and white from the shoes started disappearing. In the end I just had to scrap the shot. It was the only one that wouldn't work and we were advised when we shot it that it may not work anyway.

It has taken me about three days to fully key out the green and tracking markers. It took a lot of focus and the masking was the most aggravating thing I have had to do.

The next task is to track the footage where the camera is moving.