Flammable Penguins Blog The internet home of Claire Blackshaw

Second biggest shot

So the second biggest shot, the walk up and meep sequence needs some polish.

• I need to re-render it at a higher quality
• The little guy needs to blink
• I wasn’t happy with light balls

Now the real question… 

White or Green lighting strip?

My laptop is 20hrs into a 90hr render

I am back at work. My laptop is 20hrs into a 90hr render. Post from iPhone as my laptop is locked in the grasp of uber render.

The pipes are cleaned up

All done

The pipes are cleaned up. I’m not cleaning the IK pipe as its a messy mangle, but I’m leaving it in because its educational and this is a university assignment. I’ll just make sure the camera avoids it.

Tried making the red lights wash more to the nearby materials. It works nicely on the top light with the pipes and the stair lights but the angles aren’t quite right for the down lights on the base unit. Also the tube light doesn’t have much to bounce off. So I’m leaving it as is.

The Goo falloff diffuse shader works well I think. I just need to compile the 2D animation for the big screen TV and the scene will be complete. The 3D work for this shot is all done.

Overnight

Overnight

Okay so some serious progress with texturing, cameras, materials and the like. The render times are getting silly though. I rendered an overnight job at full quality every 45th frame (not all included due to Tumblr limit). 

• The big TV screen is going to have some pre-rendered animation on via animated texture
• There are one or two intersecting wires which need cleaning up.
• The Green Goo and bubbles I’m going to introduce some colour difference based on camera facing normal if I can. Maybe up their emission in lumen.

This is the longest continuous, and most complex shot. Other shots include.

• Some initial close-up fly bys of machinery and screens, finally doing full reveal of machine in frame. Lots of small bitty shots which will need compositing.
• The green lights change to red
• After this long shot one quick look at some screens.
• Some shots of the red lights switching back to green.
• Walk up, stairs, camera using walking bob animation for first person feel. To reveal cute frank inside.
• Meep Shot.

Sounds like loads but its mostly camera animation so no biggie there. The only thing that worries me are my render times are silly numbers. Which means I might need to postpone the final render to when I’m back at work and can leave my computer running a 30+ render.

Please comment below or tweet @EvilKimau for your thoughts if you have any.

Good to be making progress

Success!!!

Success!!!

Doesn’t look very different but its VERY different.

1. The wires animate around the pipes
2. The second pipe is in using spline & loft (animates nicer than my messy IK)
3. Everything without a proper UV map has been mapped

No full blown render as it takes too much time out of my productive cycle

Glass Glass Glass

Glass Glass Glass

Wrapping my head around the materials system again. I think the work will need some great texturing and lighting to come alive. Also I think the quality of the green goo and smoke will have a high impact.

I still want to keep things light though.

Having some trouble getting out of game mode into render mode. I’m so used to game assets that every vertex and edge counts. Hard habit to break. I did most of my modelling, texturing and animation back in the Quake 2 days. Making maps and new characters. Hard to get over the strict texture and vert limits of those old days. I keep finding myself welding verts and lining things up on a minute level. *shudder*