Environment
As the subject says, the environment is now all done, I spent the last two day creating the background which we wanted to be in paper or at least have a feel of paper to it. This to relate to the fact that it’s a book the environment is located in. Had some design problems but I think I solved them and I’m pretty happy with how it finally turned out.
The tree was created a week or two ago, it was something I hadn’t done before which of course led some testing. Tried among other things particle system with sprites but ended up with using an instancer instancing poly leafs on a particles emitted from a poly surface (formed as I wanted the foliage to look like). Obviously this led to a lot of polys but nothing that wasn’t manageable.
The props and junk in the scene are from an old project I made here at gsCEPT and Mike’s bike.
The rest of the work on the environment since the last post has been pretty straight forward (texturing the fence and the crane and modeling and texturing the tank).
Lighting
Did some light testing earlier and decided to use final gather, so now the day light setup consists of one dome with a ramp simulating the light from the blue sky, a directional light for the sun and some bounce light to light up shadows here and there. The night setup is pretty similar in terms of the light it consists of; there is still den sky dome, much darker of course, the sun light is replaced with a moon light and some additional lights for the moon light on the hills in the background.
Rendering
Today I’m going to start the first real render that we are going to use in the final movie. Did a test render for to day and it looks promising in terms of flickering and artifacts in the light and textures. So I’m hoping this will go pretty painless especially since we have very little time.
Render Layers
The film will be rendered in about 5 to 7 layers. I’m using 4 layers for the environment one for the sky, one for clouds, one for the hills and one for the rest (the actual yard and everything on it). The last one is the only one I’m using final gather on. Then the characters and moving objects will be on one layer that I will use rebuilding final gather on in contrast to the environment layer which of course will save a lot of time rendering the environment. As for the final layer I might add an occlusion pass to boost some shadows in some scenes if needed.
//Olov
