Achooo...

The last few day's have involved serial sneezing and blood shot eye's because of the dreaded hayfever! I've been rendering out the animation that Jim has done so far, (which is nearing the 30 sec mark) and playing around with the overall look of the film in After Effects. Some people think rendering is an easy job, like watching paint dry. It is mainly, but it also requires quite a bit of organization, responsibility and trust. So there Kennett!

It's clear that we're never going to have the film finished and rendered by Friday (we're not alone here!), so we'll have to bolt together the rendered stuff with some of the old blockout. The rendered shots we have are looking promising..if only there was more; but I guess we haven't done too bad for a 2 man team.

Luckily we have 2 extra weeks in which to finish off the film, play some Frisbee and up the eye candy ready for the degree show.

The latest comp

The latest comp from Matt Beale on Vimeo

Cured of the black blobs?

I don't seem to be coming across the horrible black blobs on my frames anymore. This is strange, the only thing I've done different is save the renders out as TGA's instead of TIFF's. I keep you posted

Sulky Monster Kid Z-depth test render

Here's a little test render of Z-depth, allowing us to play around with the depth of field . Rendering out a Depth Channel is a simple case of ticking the Depth Channel box in the Maya render global settings. However, this is Maya and nothing is ever this simple! Maya exports the Depth Channel as separate IFF files.. which Adobe After Effects (and I suspect every other programme except Maya) cannot read! Handy as this is.. I have had to re-save out each render image (by hand) as RLA files, which AE likes. I'm not looking forward to the hundreds of frames coming my way.

To get the depth of field channel working in AE I had to multiply the RLA files with the TGA renders and then play around with the Compound Blur effect.

The Z-depth renders look like this:


and is multiplied with the TGA images that look like this:


Tweak the brightness/contrast/compound blur and a few others things and...



Hopefully you can see that Monster Kids head is more in focus than his colouring book, toy car and the daisies in the background.

Monster Kid sulking from Matt Beale on Vimeo

Tractor pluck scene

This is a render of the field environment. Monster Kid will pluck the tractor that's in the distance and later on spin around with it. All kids love tractors! I've deformed some of the hay bails to make them less perfect and cylindrical and put a simple texture on the trailer. I had to lower the resolution of Rags textures for this environment to 512 x 512 as they were way too big for flat shades of colour.

I've also had a go at lighting the scene, but will obviously need to enter the same light and render settings as the other scenes for continuity.

The grass colour is going to change and a matte painting will be placed in the background in post production.

City by night

Today I've been placing cubes in place of the building windows and making them glow for the city night scene. I also changed the light colours to a dark blue. Trying to make the city look good at night is proving to be harder than the day version; mainly because this Final Gather malarchy tends to illuminate the faintest light.

(Above) Not enough window glow

(Above) Need to make the hills more blue

City night - day test