Re-re-renderisation-o-matic-a-tronic-al-ism-ist-ic

That's gotta be the longest title this blog has had.

Hopefully one of the shortest content: A few things we missed in the 2nd render pass. I've re-rendered shot 5 and 29 tonight, but there's still the following to fix:

shot29 STILL has orange rendered without smoothing. Double-ultra-mega-check this.
shot31 is missing the last few frames of the shadow pass - they may be on a computer @ uni somewhere
shot38 needs orange amb

There's several compromised shots, but with the magical power of compositing, nobody will notice. Except me. But I have a terrible memory. So I'll forget. Then the movie will be awesome. Yeah.

Done comping for tonight. Show up for sound tweaking Saturday evening, we'll have all the shots rendered before 5, and edited before 6. So there.

Electric Feel

This is a test of the electric bzzt n shit for shot 30. I think that's pretty cool, what do you guys think?


Crosshares shot 30 test

Stock footage rain

Crosshares shot 3 test 2.

Woo! Explosions!

I got the shadow pass to work without taking 2 hours to render per frame (thank f for that,) and Z depths... to an extent.

The tree looks like this:


Which in turn, looks like this:


Crosshares Rendering Demo.

Rendertests engaged...

Prepare to be marginally amazed:


Shot 32 rendertest.

Whatcha think?

This render took about an hour and a half for 130 frames, split into:
1 background beauty pass
1 background amb occlusion pass
1 sky texture a la Brad
130 character beauty pass frames
130 character amb occlusion frames

There's 1 directional light for key (colour white, intensity 1,) fill (80% grey,) rim, shadows (raytraced, 1 degree, 5 depth)... and 1 omni for a little face detail (0.2 intensity, specular on, shadows off).

I don't have any clever naming conventions or path structures yet, but in theory this is gonna work quickly and painlessly. Comp'd in Shake with a bit of blur and distance fog.

W00t!

ALSO!!
Watching this at the proper framerate, I realise this particular animation sucks some serious testicles. I'll be redoing a lot of animation and religiously playblasting - just to get it absolutely perfect.

And Neil, check out his wrist. We'll need to repaint those weights a little, I know Orange has something with his finger too...

Blast!

Another explosive experiment. This one I just stole from the Visor. Looks cool though.


Another explosion test.

Explosms evrywarr

More explosions n stuffs. A few layers of smoke, kinda stylised looking. Massive render time, so we'll use this as a billboard, or just add it purely in post.

Explosion test 3.

Explosmnimation.

Like I said earlier, I now have Maya.

To celebrate, here's an explosion.

Explosm mark 1.

Whatcha think?

Refer-a-Ninja

Remember Mini Ninjas? I can recall being quite excited about it, maybe some time last year. Then it was forgotten...

...Then I found it for $30. It is so freakin' awesome!! You should definitely play it, but more relevant to this - have a look at the art style. This is very much the rendering style I think we should be aiming for. I'll bring it in to uni some day, so we can play and have a good look at it.

First Render Test

I thought I'd better back up those lofty claims I made today about how easy it will be to work with 3D characters and 2.5D backgrounds. Here's an experiment with my emotional walk cycle from last year and a roughly chopped up version of Brad's story beat thing:

Click here to see it @ Vimeo.

His feet slip a little, and the picture will have to be planned better for the shadows to work properly, but I remain confident. Not a bad first shot at all.

GAZE INTO THE LENS FLARE!!