Teaser Trailer

So this trailer is still a work in progress, but I thought I’d post it anyway, cause it’s kinda funny. Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMA6ewrYS0

The final piece

To the 211mb puzzle.

westvale exterior…..again

Thanks to herd mentality, I’ve had to spend an extra half day re-doing Westvale. Someone looked at Westvale exterior and  said ‘Hey, nice potplant’, then of course, everyone thought it was a potplant and all had opinions to give on how to ‘unpotplant it’.

So it no longer follows our ‘vision’, but at least people now can tell its a building.

Bokeh lens vs Mari

So I think the way to get the best highlights with the bokeh lens is to make the lighting severe with clear areas of  bright light and shadow. I’ve also helped obscure the area of confusion by strategically rearranging the cherry blossoms.

I think I can get even better highlights if I play around with the lights a bit more. Also I could get better quality blurring by increasing  the sample but already this render takes 8 minutes to complete. I’ll wait until I get on a uni computer

More textures and lighting tests. Almost getting to render stage now…

So this is the mental ray shader that Tyson has been working on for me. It takes ages to render but it will be worth it. I know it’s in the wrong scene but fortunately I’ve tried it out in the Articulate green scene and it works with the lighting set up as well.

Lava lamp done with a photoshope texture. I think this could work. It is a partially transparent phong material with a  point light inside  which I may turn down. Originally we wanted the lava lamp to be done with dynamics but obviously we ran out of time.

Defeated by Bokeh Lens!

Noooo! Why can’t I get the diamond highlights??? Why? Anyone? I’ve tried all the settings, I’ve tried creating my own bokeh map. Is it the initial lighting set up?

Times running out. Must start rendering soon!

Texture highlight

smoke test

More texturing/modelling/lighting

This one is the opening for the ‘Emily and I’ song. I designed and modelled it and Anthony did most of the texturing. Fortunately, this was one of the scenes that didn’t need a lot of cleaning. The generic lighting was very easy as well. One directional light pointing down and a spotlight and a pointlight on the two main backgrounds. I really like the pop up book effect of the background.

Today I started the onerous task of finshing of the Westvale rooftop. I’d been leaving it until last because I figured it would be the biggest job. Its not actually so bad. I’ve spent all day cleaning up the props. Sascha originally modelled most of our props for this scene but she did them in NURBS and then converted it to polygons which resulted in the largest polygon count ever. There ended up being an inside and outside to every test tube and there were two many faces on simple shapes. It caused our files to crash every time we tried to separate an object to clean it up. So I spent today using Sascha’s models as ‘model sheets’ and rebuilding it by simply extruding polygon. I’ve also experiemented with textures and lighting.

We will never see the flasks like this but I think if they look convincing in this close-up then they are good enough for all the other shots.

I set up two point lights. The only difference betwen the two is that the screen left one has light linking turned off for the shelf.

Most of the flasks are textured using procedural ramp mapped to colour and transparency. The beakers are coloured in photoshop using a cloud filter to obscure the blending.

Mari’s latest updates

Okay -we really need to stop apologizing for not updating and start BLAMING the people responsible for us having to regularly update despite our stress level.

I’ve kind of finished my bit of the animation though I do need to go back and do a second pass on my shots.

In the mean time, the plan is that Nandi, Tim and Anthony animate like the wind while I go back and finish modelling the environments, texturing, lighting and cleaning up the files for rendering.

I do feel that for once I got the fun job.

Here are some of my results….

I ended up building an entire new scene for the rap sequence. We were expecting someone else to do this but the plan fell through so I ended up with it which I was kind of pleased about as I did have a certain vision in mind for this scene. The lighting isn’t perfect yet. The original plan was that Tim would light it but I will probably end up doing it.

The fire scene was the only one built  from the pre-vis. When I did the pre-vis, I put in blocks to stand in for where the buildings would go and then passed the files to Anthony who built the buildings.  But he thought I wanted them all square and blocky so a lot of them ended up maintaining their prism shape. I ended up going back and changing a lot of the roofs and facades because it was too blocky and didn’t fit in with the funky design in the rest of the scenes.

We have decided to use a generic directional light which will go in all our scenes but then eventually, I will need to go back and light each scene individually. This generic light only works for the first few shots of the firemen song. As the fire truck reaches the other end of the road, everything is thrown into shadows and looks terrible.