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.