University of Portsmouth - Animation Yr. 3 - Major Project Animation
Since the previous iteration of the film, the backgrounds have suffered the most changes. The action happens inside an implied military research facility. The aesthetics, on the other hand, are still deeply rooted in the previous idea: the concept of a dark environment, only lit by the headlamps and red (warning) lights. The confined, tubular structure of the compound also helped with the storytelling: the movie has become more linear, both spatially and story-wise, making the position of the characters in space clear to the audience, at all times.
The shape of the tunnels and the props inside them have been inspired by some of the following photos from Google:
Some of the main elements that have been taken from these photos are the semicircular shapes of the walls, arched beams, textures, pipes and cabling system and the shape of the entrance of the bunker.
Even from the beginning I planned to make the background from modular pieces. There are two reasons behind this decision: 1) I could reuse most of them as needed 2) Wanted to approach this project with a game artist mindset, as this is one of the fields that I am very interested in at the moment.
In the end, I ended up with only two different backgrounds for the whole movie, which have been modified accordingly for each shot.
Since multiple objects were going to use the same materials, like the walls, ground, metal pipes etc., I realized that I was going to need tileable/seamless textures. In order to achieve them, I tried 2 methods. The first one involved using Mudbox and painting and sculpting on a 'Tiling plane' and then extracting the diffuse and normal maps. The second method involved using the offset filter in Photoshop and then using Crazybump to bake the normal maps. Both methods worked great, and returned similar results; the second method proved to be much faster, though less customizable.
As mentioned in a previous post, some of the scenes make use of smoke. The effect was achieved by using some smoke cards that I have previously made in After Effects. Initially, the plan was to used these smoke cards in 3D space and render them with Arnold. After rendering a few scenes, I decided to not use them anymore, as they were exponentially increasing my render times (note: Looking back, I think the biggest impact was caused by the ray tracing, since the transparency was so complicated. Maybe I could have turned the ray tracing off altogether).
As lighting goes, before deciding to do this the 'hard-way', I tried to make an art test, in which the lights of the head lamps were added in After Effects.
The initial result was promising, but then I realized it only looked good because it was a static image. It didn't take long to rule out this method, considering the range of motion that the characters were going to have and the necessary masking that was going to follow. The manual labor time would have increased, and the results would have also been worse than using 'atmosphere volumes'.
In the beginning I have also used the standard lights in Maya, achieving decent results. At the recommendation of a friend, I researched the Photometric lights and implemented them in my project, towards the end of the production. Since I didn't want to create a discrepancy between the shots, I have added them in places where the impact wouldn't have been that noticeable (like the flashlight inside the storage room).
The following image proves the difference between the lights: (from the left: point light, spot light, Photometric lights). The IES Light profiles have been downloaded from http://www.derekjenson.com/3d-blog/ies-light-profiles
Rendered frames (beauty passes):
The rendered frames include various passes, but which will not be used for the hand-in due to the time limit. I am planning, though, to make heavy use of the Z-Depth to create focal points and the ID pass, to add smoke effects behind the characters.
