Lighting: Render farm tests

Today I went down to one of the medialabs in our uni to test out rendering my files on the render farm. After a few false starts with not setting up the files correctly, I managed to get the correct settings and it took about an hour to render the summer cinematic at half the required resolution. Taking into account the fact that the winter cinematic is longer and I need to render passes as well, I've allocated myself three full days using the render farm to get everything rendered, which should be enough time.

In order the use the render farm the file must first be fully set up in Maya, selecting the the correct render settings including camera, resolution etc. Then the information must be exported into a .mi file which can be opened in Qube and added to the render queue.

Lighting: Test renders

Tomorrow is the 1st submittal deadline for our major project. So far I've devoted most of my time to doing the game animations for Echoes since they need to be handed over to the Unity team first. The purpose of this hand in is to allow our tutors to give us written feedback on our work thus far and so we can improve on it before the final deadline.

Anyway, here are some test renders of the summer cinematic using the HDR image I created. I'm fairly happy with the result as I should be able to achieve the final look that I want by combining this with a basic light set up.

Lighting: HDRI

To light the cinematics, I decided to use image based lighting in Maya as a starting point. To do this I needed to go out on location and take pictures of a light probe at different exposures to get the required lighting information. I went the the woods at Stansted Forest on two different occasions when the weather was different to get a unique HDR image for each scene.

For each scene I took 19 photos of the light probe at different exposures in order to get an accurate HDR image.

Below are image of the HDR image working in Maya for the summer cinematic. The first image shows it working in the viewport and casting light on the cube, and the second shows a rendered metallic sphere reflecting the image back.

Before taking the HDR image into Maya though, the photographs must first be converted into a HDR file using Photoshop and HDRShop. To do this I opened Photoshop and selected File > Automate > Merge to HDR Pro and selected the photos. Photoshop then automatically aligns the photographs in case the tripod was knocked when taking the images. 

Once this is done, the image needs to be cropped down to a square containing the light probe and saved out as a HDR image. I then opened this file in HDRShop and selected Image > Panorama > Panoramic Transformations. The image must be converted from a Mirrored Ball to Latitude/Longitude, and then saved out again as a HDR file.

This stretches out the image onto a rectangle which is then opened up again back in Photoshop. The final step is to paint myself out of the image before saving it for a third time as a HDR, ready to be opened in Maya.

Double Acted: Setting the scene

For my double acted piece I chose to use the Morphy rig created by Josh Burton as it's a very flexible rig and I've used it in the past so I'm familiar with the controls. After tweaking the two rigs to my liking in separate files, I referenced them into my scene file which I've populated with prop models from sites such as Turbosquid and Creative Crash.

I wanted to keep the chairs as separate objects, so that I can animate a little bit of bounce in the seat separate from the base when a character sits in or gets out of a chair. To do this I simply set up a parent constraint so that I can still control the chair as a whole when moving or rotating it in the scene, but which I can turn off when need be.

When I came to animated my blockout of the scene I came across a problem, my audio clip wouldn't play in Maya, despite the fact that it was a wav and appeared to have the right settings. I found a replacement online to use instead, this too was a wav, but for some reason this one played fine in Maya.

Lighting: Skyboxes

So for my lighting project I need a background or a skymap for the sky. For the corresponding scene in Unity we're using a cubemap, so Ruth sent me the texture files as then the cinematic would match up more with the gameplay environment. However cubemaps can only be viewed correctly from fixed camera angles, and this presented a problem as each scene contained multiple camera angles.

As seen in the picture above, I attempted to add the cubemap textures to an envcube material in Maya, but unless lined up correctly the illusion was ruined, and when rendered the cube's seams showed up.

I looked into a few workarounds for this, and found that a cubemap could be transformed into a spherical image in HDRshop and then applied in Maya using the image based lighting environment option. However this required a lot of manual work and the end result would not be worth it compared to simply using a suitable image to begin with. With this in mind I looked online for a an image I could use as a skydome, which is a half sphere that surrounds the scene. However using a skydome can create more problems, as if all of the settings are not calibrated correctly the skydome can end up casting unwanted shadows on the scene or interfering with final gather.

After considering these options I've decided to simply use a background plate attached to each camera, or to add the sky image after rendering in After Effects. This means that the cinematics won't match up with game environments as well as I'd hoped, but considering the differences in lighting and assets anyway this is the best option as it'll allow me more time to tweak the lights and render settings.

Lighting: Scene set up

When I first received the scene with the cameras set up from Hollie, none of the textures showed up as they were linked to a harddrive on another computer. I started to manually relink all of the textures, however this caused another problem as some of the files had the same filename. This led to Maya trying to fix some of the broken links for me once I had relinked one, and I ended up with the dragon textures on the trees.

In order to get over this problem I renamed the textures with clashing names and saved all of the files used in the scene to a new directory. I then set the project in Maya so that when the scene file is opened on another computer Maya will open the texture files from the scene directory rather than from the original pathname. 

Business: Ultimate Image

As another submission for the business module I had to create an 'ultimate image', which is like a promotional poster to demonstrate my skills and abilities. I struggled with this project to start with as I didn't have any ideas to show my skills as an animator in a still format. After looking at a great deal of film posters and album artwork I was inspired by posters that featured reflections as part of their design. Although I explored a few variations on this idea, I didn't really experiment with any other formats, which perhaps I should of done.

However I'm very happy with the outcome of my ultimate image, by showing the rig controls and the thumbnails reflected in the ink wash below it's clear that I'm an animator and not a rigger or modeler. I chose blue to correspond with my business card and the ink backdrop as a lot of my graphics work in college featured this effect and it's something I enjoy doing. I also think the layout works well as I carefully laid out the different elements of the design with diagonals and the rule of thirds in mind. The only possible improvements I can think of are on the renders themselves, the posing could be tweaked further and the colour balance improved but overall I think it's a solid design.