Summary (05/09)
Fine tuning lighting details (shot transitions & creating a sense of depth!) as well as keeping consistency in assets throughout all shots.
Viz (05/06)
What We Accomplished:
● Finalized lighting for shot 3 & 4 - more variation/contrast (AJ)
● Rendered at 1080p (AJ,KK, GL, ML)
● Added variation to train windows (GL, AJ, KK)
● Refined depth of field and color in comp (ML)
● Rescaled crowd layers to 1080, adjusted overall color contrast/levels (ML)
● Created/Added new music (YP)
What's Next:
● Decrease bump on amp (KK)
● Decrease overall render noise/specular fireflies (AJ,KK, GL, ML)
● Finalize color grading/comp effects (ML)
● Add SFX (YP)
Shot 4 Lighting Tweaks (05/07)
The main thing I worked on this week was my second attempt of adding a greater sense of depth to shot 4. Seeing as the light blockers from last week did not work, we asked for professor feedback and the biggest thing was adjusting the overall black values as well as the reducing cone angles in the foreground to create more areas of dark. I adjusted both of those and then turned off the volume in the sky dome completely, and I am happy with the result of it!
Week 6/7 Comparison
Shot 3 Spotlight Lighting Transition (05/07)
Today I worked on decreasing the exposure of the spotlight transition in shot 3. I felt like I was backtracking a little because last week I worked on increasing it--but this was due to the feedback being about having more of a textural transition with the smoke instead of just a bright
white hotspot that appeared flat on the screen. I focused on creating a low intensity light that still had a clear center but took up a larger portion of the screen, still being able to see the objects behind it. Lastly, I turned up the specular roughness on all the metal instruments in the BG to reduce the distracting hotspots in comp that got blown out after adding Depth of Field.
Compositing by Miranda
Train Window Variation (05/08)
One of the Mill feedback comments form last week was to add more variation in the illumination of the windows. To do this, I plugged in a noise node to the Transmission color output of the window shader and tweaked/reduced the frequency. This seemed to do the trick perfectly!
Rendering Headaches (05/09)
It has been 3 days since we submitted our shot renders and they are still incomplete. The farm has been totally backed up this weekend due to senior films and finals, but we are pushing through! Some of the frames that hit a two hour kill had to be locally rendered across multiple computers, and then some of our final shots didn't show up in the job folder until 24 hours later.
Recap (05/10)
We are so close to finishing!! Despite the many rendering hurdles we faced this week (and quarter), we managed to get all our 1080p shots out and are almost at the finish line :) I am very excited to be able to share this project at the end!