So its been a while with no sleep and hard work

Okay, so heres two of the "Final" images from our piece:

Matte

Here is a relatively simplistic breakdown of how the background matte painting was created. We used stock photos, and some stock footage of smoke and fog. The entire matte painting was created in Shake. Why? Well I guess its just because we love shake....

Dingy Breakdown

This is a preliminary breakdown for the "Dingy" or the "Esca" that will be attached to our main character's forehead. The video gives a short animation of the appendage, and goes through the extensive amount of render layers that we created to have ultimate control over this piece of geometry. I say that it is preliminary, because we redesigned the shape of the arm protruding out.

Here's a quick breakdown of how the baby was composited. It starts with a section of our final camera move without the fluid and particles simulation, then proceeds into the render layer breakdown.

Compositing now further refined...

So with my last post I talked about using Maya's render layers render out individual passes of the subsurface shader. I liked the results I got out of it, but I didn't really like the colored diffuse layer. So what I decided to do was to render out just a layer including the ambient color with absolutely no shading, then I created a white lambert type material, and made my lights RGB. My key light was given a red hue, my fill was given a green hue, and my rim light was given a blue hue. I then rendered these layers out and brought them into Shake. Once in the compositing program, I can reorder the red, blue, and green and color correct them individually. This will give me overall control with my lighting and coloring of the baby. Basically, with this method I'm actually lighting within Shake. I would like to try and use a normal pass also to give me the ultimate control over the entire model's lighting and actually allow me to have an unlimited amount of diffuse, specular, and reflection passes...The only problem in I'm not sure whether it will work with subsurface, as a change of lighting would affect the backscatter and the actual effects of the subsurface scattering going on here.

Here is a still of my diffuse pass, and the ambient color pass:

Total control over the baby

In order to get the best amount of control over the baby in the final compositing stage, I decided to work on breaking the shader down into render layers. With Subsurface scattering though, this can be a tricky process. I asked around, and found a good tutorial by Nick Bartone on how to break down this shader for compositing. (nickbartone.com/docs/subsurfacelayersTutorial.pdf)

So I decided to go into maya and break our baby down into render layers for diffuse, epidermal, subdermal, backscatter, specular, shadows and occlusion. Heres a really simple Shake script showing how the layers could be brought into shake and then composited giving complete control over shadow tweaking and color adjustments

Baby Animation

Sean recently finished the animation, and I just wanted to see what the baby would look like animated. Especially with my texture added. So here it is. I'm sure the compression doesn't do it justice, but its a work in progress...

Baby Update

I've been working on the subdermal layer and heres what I've got.

Baby On Board

We got a ridiculously awesome model and rig of a baby from Mike Milano. And my job is to texture the bad boy. Yes, its a boy. Trust me... Anyway, I threw a quick mental ray fast skin material onto it and added a few simple color maps which I'm still working on. I figured I'd throw a images up just to let everyone see the progress.


And from the side:


Theres still some work to be done adding veins and maybe making it look a little less pink. But its coming along really quickly

Start of an army

So I've been duplicating myself to create a crowd of...myself. But if you think that this is starting to look cool, just wait till we get the people textured. I'll post a still of what that looks like in a bit. But here's the onlookers in the window.

And Heres the script to organize this crowd. Note: the right foreground still needs more people, but I'm not going to do that until we get the final footage. No point in perfecting something thats bound to change...

The elements are coming together...

We went into the green screen studio and shot some plates of our main character and the onlookers. Let me first say that shooting on the HVX was a blessing and a curse. I say this because it pulls some beautiful keys. And with such ease! However, we rendered out an uncompressed tiff sequence for one of onlookers in the window, and its 51.7 GB!!!!! So we're working around that and trying to cut that bad boy down a bit. Anyways, we took the footage of our main character, and Sean worked some serious movie magic with some crazy color correcting, and warping in the bandage and extending my nose and chin a bit. I then did a quick composite of the main character over the background. So heres the script:
And here is the character over the Background:

The background is starting to take shape!

Okay, so heres the first set of images that we've been working on for the project. I started working on the matte painting that makes up the room wall, the window, and the backgrounds. Its very Shake intensive. And to prove it, here is the script as it stands right now:

















The Background image is made up of photographs of smoke stacks, stock footage of smoke, cloud images, mountain images, there is even an observatory on the top right of the background, and a giant satellite dish. Also in this script are some environmental elements like dark fog that is hovering above the factory.

So by now, I'm hoping that you want to see what it actually looks like. So here is a screen capture of the background as it stands right now:

We had been talking about what the appendage may look, so I decided to just jump full on into sculpting up a maquette to base the 3D model off of. I went with a very organic design that I modeled off of a tree branch and the roots as it were. Hopefully we'll be getting a 3D model out soon

Tentative Storyboards

We've been working off sketches and pre-visual work that Sean had been doing previous to this class. Here are some of those images. As you can see the character will be bandaged and aged almost like a tree in the head and face area. As of right now, the writing on the wall may be scrapped, we have been discussing creating a 3D room with a grungy wallpaper texture. The people in the window will be filmed on a green screen and then multiplied and composited in post production. We will also have a matte painting to create the outside environment.

Pre-vis

So far we've been discussing aesthetics of the appendage that we will be adding to our main character. The appendage will be much like that of an angler fish. We've been looking at designs that are achieved in Z-brush by Meats Meier. Above are a few images that have inspired our design as of now. I am also working on sculpting a plastaline version of the appendage that I'll upload soon.

New Quarter, New Projects

Well, its the beginning of the new quarter, which means working on a new project. I'm going to be working with a fellow visual effects student Sean Loughran. Together we'll be creating a Visual Effects heavy short piece about the cycles of life, in a very surrealistic way. I'll be updating this site as much as possible, so be sure to check in for updates.