28/2/2012 - 2/3/2012 - Day 12 - Day 15

Day 12
Today, I spent the day doing test animation, in between shots, test color grading while waiting for my shot to render.

It was a rather slow day as each frame took about 9-15 minutes to render.

Test Color graded shot.

Day 13
Today, the shots rendered finish. I composited the monster and the water particles together with my group members. The overall look felt dark after adding ambient occlusion pass. Therefore, we graded the water particles and monster geometry.

We showed the comp to our supervisor and he said that it looked CG. Therefore, he suggested that because we couldn't render the passes again due to lack of time, we add a light pass. I rendered the light pass overnight.

Day 14
The light pass was composited into the shot and it looked a whole much more better. I finished the in between shots today and also match-moved stock footage such as smoke and fire in shot 3.

The tracker was a nightmare, the match-moved elements were jittering and I tried my best to stabilize it as much as possible for the shot. After repeated attempts, I decided to use the best looking render.

After doing finish the 3 shots, it was time to finish our trailer. We had to cut out multiple scenes as we felt that the story didn't flow well. Now, all to do was to prepare our presentation for the following day.

27/2/2012 - Day 11

Day 11
I came back to school and found my renders had failed me. One of the renders had died early on Saturday morning. The water particles turned out fine, although I didn't render it correctly. I later had some help from Mr.Pang with the various rendering issues.

I learn to use the geometry with matte. Another alternative was to change the entire geometry's shaders into a surface shader with black color maps. This could make the geometry a matte and was key in rendering the dynamics for my shot. That's all for today. Hopefully I can render the passes in time.

 Water particles without matte geometry. Have to re-render.

I have some extreme flaws with my geometry render. There are constant flickers in some parts of the model. I have tried reducing the reflectivity to solve the problem and it helps hide it a bit. Hopefully the render will be problem free by tomorrow.

23/2/2012 - 24/2/2012 : Day 9/10

Day 9/10
I didn't update recently as I didn't have much to show for the days. It was mostly rendering the scene over and over again and discovering mistakes. I had the animation and scale of the model finalized, along with the water particles done properly.

Then it was time to render. I left the render on at school over the weekend.

22/2/2012 : Day 8

Day 8

Rendering takes a very long time.

Nevertheless, I sort of came up with a make shift parenting system for the alien creature. The only problem with this that it has to be manually animated. I looked at various references such as fishes jumping out of the ocean and tried to simulate the movement. However, I couldn't do that without making some sort of CG replacement for the ocean.

Therefore, I had to place it as close as possible to the edge and therefore saving me a lot of time on rotoscoping. The shot looks kind of bland but I guess I'll have to add in some other stuff behind. Perhaps adding in some more tentacles will make the scene that much more epic.

 "SAILING THROUGH THE AIR"

 "Render after animated to scene"

Other then that, today I worked on a solution for animating the missiles fired in shot 3. The movement looks pretty decent. 

21/2/2012 - Day 7

Day 7

Today I once again tried various ways to rig the worm model. I thought I had succeeded after multiple tries but the it didn't work as expected. I guess I have an inkling of how to make it workable.

After some research, I discovered that such rigs would be very hard to make and require lots of effort to maintain it. The only solution to this as it's just for the one shot to manually animate it without skinning the model.

Today we finished most of the test animation for shots 2/3. Shot 1 not so and hopefully I'm able to finish the model by tomorrow. Now, we will focus on experimenting with emitters for the smoke trails/ engine exhaust. Also, we will need to find a way to cause a CG building to crumble in Maya.

For the rest of the day, I tried to add in smoke/explosions/elements in AE to simulate destruction. Here is what I came up with.

We are pretty on track but the only thing that we are worried about is the long render times. Probably have to stay back one of these days to finish up the shots.

20/2/2012 - Day 6

20/2/2012 
Today, I continued working on modelling/texturing the worm model I worked on within the weekend.
I decided not to model the drills/tentacles for I fear that it would be hard to animate/rig or composite within the shot.

I also discussed on how to use the model with the scene. After much discussion, we decided that we had to attach emitters to the model so that as it rises out from the ocean, water will be seen streaming down its sides as it flies through the air. Though it will be hard, i guess it will be quite impressive if we do get the shot done right.

I haven't finished rigging the model yet as I'm quite lost as how to rig the model. After consulting with the supervisor, I only had an inkling of how to achieve the desired animation. I guess I'll focus on rigging finish the model by Tuesday or Wednesday for use with shot 1.


Today, the rest of the team worked on animating the planes/spaceships so that hopefully we can start test renders by Wednesday. Full renders of each frame take about 3-8 minutes so we are really worried that rendering will easily take about maybe a week to finish. That's the reason we are rushing the animation right now.

Also, there is the issue of post processing effects to be applied on to the shots later, such as applying explosions, fires. We also toyed around with emitters from missiles.

2/17/2012 - Day 5

Day 5

Today, I gave the rigging another go and found out it works, but there's still some problem with the rotation. I had the model cleaned up and experimented with various methods and finally got something workable. However,  I had feedback that the model looked like a sword and not a menacing alien creature like the shot required.

With this in mind, I will probably be doing another model from scratch, probably something similar to shockwave from the transformers series.



For the rest of the day, I made HDR panoramas out of the footage we had.  Also, I supervised the various shots the team was working on. Today basically was a modelling/texturing day. Only towards the end around 3pm+, were we trying to composite the models in. They look quite alright with it but more can be done to improve the shots. I'll probably have to model the shockwave creature over the weekend and possibly have it rigged by the time next week comes, or by the time we will focus most of our efforts on shot 1.

2/16/2012 - Day 4

Day 4: Today, decided to film the rest off the connecting shots. Footage came out decent. I tried to rig the model for shot 1 but failed miserably. Probably will spend the better part of tomorrow learning how to make the model look more menacing and rig it. Darren and Asraff were quite successful in matchmoving the background plates. Though, the trackers are not quite stabilized yet.

A list of things that we need to know/do
* Water simulation for shot 1 - We might replace the water in shot 1 to make it easier for the cg model to interact with.
* Rigging a model to make it move robotic. Currently, the rig makes the model stretch and lose volume.
* Finish modelling the buildings needed to replace some of the buildings in shot 1/2 for destruction/chaos.

Hopefully by the time this week is over, we would have finished matchmoving the various scenes and start on shading/texturing.

2/15/2011 - Day 3

Day 1 : Plan out story theme. Made storyboards in photoshop. Made a rough storyline. 

Day 2: Planned the locations to where we would go to shoot for the day.

Managed to get decent looking footage. Only problem would be that the panning was not as smooth as we liked. Managed to take footages to make up some HDR panoramas.

 

Day 3: Finalized story. Team found/modelled the required models to use for the shots. It's partially done, should be able to finish the models by Friday. We also discussed among the team to select the best shots for the final background plate.

Tested tracking the various shots and it turned out quite decent. Although a lot of cheating methods must be employed to get the desired results. Also tried out various effects and reviewed the shots with our supervisor. Got good feedback and now we have got a good idea of how we can do our shots now.

Probably going to try replacing the water shot tomorrow. Will try to find out how to simulate water dynamics and match it to live footage to make our shot 1 easier.