Stomping test render

City motorway

I've added a motorway to the city. Later on when Jim has animated monster kid grabbing city buildings from the scene, I will animate cars going up and down the roads. As well as the cars, there will also be helicopters and of course the monorail running around the city.

Texturing Monster Mum

The texturing of the city is now complete and Jim is happy with the building colours, though I still need to texture the monorail train (go-faster stripes). I added more telegraph poles to the scene, going off into the countryside (above). I'll also add some pylons in the distance later.

Back to the city

Here is a colour test for the city. I rendered out a vector image of the scene with outlines and colour filled the individual buildings in Photoshop.

Texturing progress:

Picnic hill look dev

Today I've been practicing compositing the layers that will be rendered out. This will be done in After Effects. So far we're having a colour, ambient occlusion, ray traced shadow, global/final gather, and a Z-depth pass. I think thats quite enough for one person to cope with!!

Colour pass

Ambient occlusion pass

Final gather pass

Raytraced shadow pass

The image above is of all the layers composited in After Effects. I adjusted the levels of all the shadow passes, the hue and saturation of the colour pass and added a Gaussian blur to the ray traced shadow layer. This is perhaps too blurry, but I'm liking the dreamy effect it produces.


I realised that I didn't have the background colour set to white. Having the background as black resulted in the shadow passes being a lot darker than they should be, particularly the final gather pass. Above is a composited image of the re-rendered passes.



(Above) Playing with the Exposure filter in After Effects

Latest picnic scene developments #02

I added ambient occlusion to the bench and hill in the render above. The shadows around the bench are a lot better, but the colours are incredibly burnt out! I will need to experiment with rendering ambient occlusion as a separate pass and composite it in After Effects, allowing for more control over its brightness and contrast.

The latest picnic scene developments #01

Super duper treee

I've been adding lots of leaves and branches to the tree that sits on top of the picnic hill. This realistic method is looking far better than the simple marsh mellow look I had before. It's very fiddly and time consuming, but the time I've spent on it is finally beginning to pay off.

Rag has also retextured the bench for us: