Final Project

On finishing the Going Live Project. We had to start working on our final project, so that we will be able to finish it in time for the degree show. So we planned to schedule our separate projects and put them in a single google spread sheet so that we will be knowing about each others work and wont clash during the final stages of rendering.

My Schedule for Final Film

Going Live Axis - Final

After a good team effort by everyone in the class, the going live project was completed with 2 days to spare. Was really hoping to be rendering till the last day. But all us stuck to the plan and kept it simple and finished the project in time. Credit goes to everyone in the team who supported each other and brought the best out of us.

Our project was submitted to Axis and they were pretty much impressed with the out come and the final changes we made in the video. Totally it was a positive reply from the AXIS ANIMATION STUDIO.

Final Stage

After a tiring week of doing the lighting and rendering again, it paid of quite well. The essence and feel for the short film is acheived after we added some depth of field and color correction. Now having done this we are planning to proceed with the sound effects and the editing in the start of next week. And finish the project on time.!

Change in compositing path

We had our feedback session with the Axis for the going live project, where we had the feedback that our renders are pretty much flat and need some more improvement. So we decided to re-render the shots with some new lighting. Also we had a workshop with Matt Cameron about compositing in nuke. It was really a great tutorial session.

We just did a quick comp in nuke & after effect and  we were pretty much pleased with the result in Nuke and planned to proceed with Nuke. Late Matt Cameron showed us some techniques in Nuke that were very much helpful for us in compositing.

Scheduling

With the end of the MSc Animation & Vfx Conference. It was like we took a time out from going live project from a couple of days and we had to regroup and see where we are standing and how to proceed further. So i made a new schedule to go alone from here till the end of the project (going live). We nearly finished the lip sync for all the shots. Next we had to proceed to the animation stage and lighting setup. So we agreed to start the animation with each member assigning a character to them, so the continuity does not get lost. And Stathis agreed to do the lighting test parallely, so that once finished we can get to render the shots and speed up the process

MSc Animation & Vfx Conference

The second semester has come to an end with the completion of the MSc Animation & Vfx Conference 2016. It has to be a presentation of what we have researched so far and what we will be doing in the future about my final project. My final project is about Realism. How to get realistic movements of 3D characters in Live Environment. We had a mock presentation before the final conference in which I wasnt up to the mark, lacking some content and not utilizing the whole time (15 mins) giving to me. After the mock presentation I had an individual tutorial with Jeanette with helped me a lot and gave me more confidence and it reflected pretty much noticeable for me in the final conference. I did my presentation with lot of confidence and had more content in my presentation and it went on much better than my mock presentation

Experimenting And Optimization

As the work for the going live project is getting intense, we were introduced to a new problem. How to put hair for the TROLL DOLL. Several techniques were used for the hair  like fibre mesh in Zbrush and maya fur & hair. The only problem that was constant is the time taken for the rendering the hair in maya(37 seconds for a single frame). So I experimented and tried to minimise the time taken for the render. Like rendering the hair in 3ds max, using scanline render and rendering the rest of the object in maya. But initial experimentation in the morning didnt workout really well. After the lunch it was a success. Yes.! the hair was rendered in 3ds max ( 19 seconds for a single frame, half the time in maya) and it could be easily composited in After effects with the other render of the model in maya.!

 Maya Render

3ds Max Render

AE Composition