Dailies 5/30

Final Assets

Things are wrapping up and final renders are in.

 

Stills of Assets Used

Final textured and lit still of the forest.

All the tree models used for the procedural forest. The 5 on the left are the high resolution pines used for the closer part of the forest, while the 2 on the right are at a lower resolution for the distance part of the forest.

Final Oak tree fully textured

Final rusty painted texture for Cobalt.

Robin with a squared orange chest.

 

Final Cobalt Turntable

 

Final Robin Turntable

 

Dailies 5/23

Cobalt with painted textures. The procedural rust did not work as planned. After failing to debut the baking of the houdini material, I decided to go with image based texturing. I also tweaked the metal shader to make the metallic shell less plastic looking.

 

 

 

Robin with a squared orange chest.

Robin with a “heart” shaped orange chest.

Along with the robot, I adjusted the orange chest of the robin. I made the pattern more symmetrical and came up with two version. I personally am leaning more towards the heart shaped highlighted orange.

Dailies 5/18

Character Shading

After running into some roadblocks with applying textures to alembic imports, I finally got my materials applied to my characters.

Close up of the robin to show off its texture

Close up of Cobalt to better show his texture

Now that the materials are created, I can apply them to the characters in each of my 5 shots. There may be a minor tweaks here and there from critiques, but this the overall final look of my characters!

 

 

 

Cobalt’s head texture map.

Example of the bump map texture used throughout Cobalt’s body.

The robin’s body texture map.

Here is the texture map for the feathers.

Dailies 5/16

Rough Cut

 

Here is a rough cut of Cobalt. I got all my animations back this weekend and I can now incorporate them into my Houdini environment. I also started working on sound. The song is made up of 2 royalty free songs that I cut up and layered together. I’m currently gathering sounds for Cobalt along with slowly rendering the actual scenes.

Dailies 5/15

Sample Frames

Shot 1

Shot 2

Shot 3

Shot 4

Shot 5

I started rendering over the weekend, I’m having trouble applying the textures to the alembic files. The materials reset every time I update or change the model, which puts a large speed bump in my route. Not too big of an issue, I’m hoping to have a work around for it soon. If not, all my model animations are final and I can just assign my textures to each individual geometry one by one. I also worked on the lighting a lot more. Finally got that sad environment without making it look like night time.

Dailies 5/10

Background Revisions

Shot 1 with revised background and lighting.

Shot 1 with Cobalt added. Cobalt’s textures need some refinement; he needs more rust and face is yet to be added.

A few revisions have been made to the environment, the main one being the background matte painting. I also adjusted the lighting a bit to darken up some the the background pines and light up Cobalt in front of the oak tree.

Dailies 5/9

Animation Updates

 

Here is an update on the animation, shot 3 has been revised and shot 1 is almost completed. I just need a few minor tweeks with the bird in shot 5 and get the bird animated in shot 3 and 4 (which should be done by May 14th).

Dailies 5/8

Character Texturing

Bird body texture.

Feather textures

 

The bird textures were not all to difficult to modify. Since the bird is a canned model, the UV’s were already set. I used the robin references to adjust the color of the feathers and get his chest highlight correct. My next step is to add the texture maps to Mantra shaders and apply that to the model in Houdini.

 

I also had to make some adjustments to Cobalt’s rust texture. I went back and got some more references for rust textures and realized they’re a lot more saturated than I originally thought. They appear more orange and red, rather than grey.

Rust on unsaturated metal.

Rust on a very vibrant metal that’s a similar color as Cobalt.

Rust on various colored metal plates.

Dailies 5/7

Background Full Res Renders

After a few hours of tutorials I finally was able to get render layers to work in Houdini. This not only reduced my render times significantly, but it is also going to allow me to fine tune assets such as color and exposure later on during compositing.

I also started converting my Maya textures to Houdini Mantra textures for Cobalt. Below I have a WIP of Cobalt’s current progress. His rust needs to be bumped up more since it’s barely noticeable, I’ve also yet to add the scratch and bump map to his texture.

 

Foreground oak tree layer. 17 minute render time at 2K resolution.

Mid-ground pine trees layer. 22 minute render time at 2K resolution.

Background pine tree layer. 8 minute render time at 2K resolution.

Composited background for shot 1 at 1080p resolution.

Shot 1 with Cobalt added. Cobalt’s textures need some refinement; he needs more rust and face is yet to be added.

Dailies 5/3

Background Development

Houdini render of trees in forest.

Matte painting of far background.

Composite of Houdini render with matte paining.

Finally I have added the ground texture and optimized my forest for rendering. There is essentially four layers to my forest: the oak tree, mid-ground trees, less detailed background trees, and a matte painting. My next step is to optimize the render time (currently at about 6 hours per frame at 1080p…) and to set up my render layers in Houdini.

Reference Photos:

CG forest with a brighter lighting. The far background is a matte painting, using general shapes with minimal detail.

CG forest in Last Bastion. The matte painting in the far background is very dark but never hits complete black. Also note the small strokes of green to hint to shrubbery in the background.