Here’s the second vechicle, the idea was that the characters built the rocket themselves. The top engines are based on the Boeing 777 commercial aircraft, the ones at the bottom are F-1 rocket engines. The child actors name is “nova” hence the name on the rocket. I’ve written a couple of expressions for the engines, and now me and Olle are working on the particles for it.
//mike
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
This is an image showing the rocketman and the monkey together. While we are working on the animations we wanted to give you a better idea of how the interaction between the two characters may look in the final result. We are aiming at maintaining this kind of production quality throughout the whole short.
//Mehmet & Tim
Been a while since I posted any progress on the environment. Here is a quick render of how it looks at the moment, the shed is all done, the ground texture is almost done might add some more dirt after I added grass and rocks, the crane is modeled and UVmapped and the fence around the yard is modeled. As you can see there is some previz objects in this render (the tree and the tank). I put them in to get a better feel of how the yard will end up, but of course there will be a lot more junk and scarp also.
I’m a little behind in the time plan, mainly because I’ve been working with my showreel and things related to that. But I don’t think there will be any problems making the deadline even though there is clearly some work to be done.
//Olov
I am now done with the rigg and textures and here it goes. I rendered the monkey with a pose that portrays his personality to give you a better idea of how the animation will look.
//Mehmet
Now the rocketman is textured and i will start finalizing the rig. We will begin animating shortly as soon as the rigs are completed, wich they will hopefully be next week as long as nothing unexpected happens.
Here’s also a walk i created a while ago to get a feeling of the character.Walkcycle
Here is my house all finished with textures, shaders and some preliminary lighting (as a part of our MS2 Delivery).
Here are some texture/shader tests I’ve been working on.
Tryed to recreate metal, with reflection and specular maps. Also experimented with a procedural rust/metal shader (picture 2 and 3 from the left), will hopefully make the texturing of all scrap in the yard go a lot smoother:
And some wood textures:
