Week 4 - Lights, Camera, Action!
- Leighanne Fernandes
- Oct 23, 2020
- 4 min read
That's right! We had our shoot for Just A Dream this week and it was absolutely amazing! I was officially able to direct my own Music video and work on the Art Direction for the set planning! This has been a long awaiting dream of mine and it just feels so great to be able to see my vision come to life!
However, apart from the shoot, there were a couple of animation related things that happened this week, which put me all over the place. I will list them out here while showing my progress for the week as well.
Shoot Planning and Preparations
As an Art Director, I was tasked with creating some posters for the protesting scene. Naya, our graphic designer, worked on some digital drafts and we discussed a few things before finalizing the designs I'll have to paint on the charts. Below are the digital drafts she worked on.
I then tried to replicate the same brush strokes onto the chart paper after cutting them out in various sizes. I also painted an image of Martin Luther King with an artsy palette. Below are snippets of my work and some time-lapse videos I filmed of myself doing it.
Timelapse Video for painting
Timelapse video for poster: Black Lives matter
I'm really happy with how these turned out.
Moreover, I requested for some extra assets to be done for the Paradise music video where the guy will be looking at his phone while plugging in an audio headset to listen to the song. I gave Naya the vision and brief for this and she worked on it.
It wasn't ready until on the day of the shoot, but because we were done with filming Just A Dream early, we had the time to work on it on set. See below for some behind-the-scenes and the final video that was made to use as a prop in the shoot.
BTS
Final
With this, I am already excited to edit the video and see the final outcome. Let's see how it goes.
Animation work
Let's not forget about my actual animation work for this week. I got the green light to render the second shot. I left my shot to render over night. I was working on the feedback for the third shot but I still need to nail down the weight displacement of the character which I will work on soon.
I even started working on the fourth shot as per my schedule but things didn't go according to plan. I underestimated the work that was required for this shot. As I was working on it, I realized that there were a lot of things I overlooked when re-scoping the project and was only able to see these items as I was going through the file. Below are the list of things I thought I needed to do versus what MORE I had to do.
Shot 4 - WALK- in scope but needs guidance with the lighting and scene build up
(animation) walk cycle
environment build up
afternoon lighting
Render Farm
________________________________________________________________________
Shot 4 - WALK
Miles walking (walk cycle animation)
Key poses - blocking
Smoothing
Follow through
Ensure Jacket skinning works
Lighting - HDRI - animations
Animation from Dim to bright light
Stylized HDRI
Spotlight Animations
Control Lighting on Character after light become bright
IES Lighting from street lamps
Animate the lights from the street lamps
Opacity of lamps as they build the scene
Texturing of houses
Lighting from houses
Make outside compound of houses believable
Add grass, pathways, accessories
Use references
Speak to Bing**
This was something that I didn't realize would take so long to do, nor did I realize how empty the scene looked. With the excess of tasks for this particular shot, it made me overwhelmed. However, I had some render tests and animation preview for my meeting with my advisor as part of my schedule. Below are the snippets.
Render tests - lighting and placements
Animation Preview
What stressed me out was that I am not in line with my schedule anymore. The work needed for each shot has become very demanding which has lead to me being unable to complete the number of tasks during the week. Moreover, when opening the file Amos was meant to send me weeks ago, I found out that he used the VRAY Material Library which is only available in the new VRAY 5 version (that I don't have). This would also be a problem for the render farm since SAE's render farm has the version compatible with the one I am currently using. This got me worried. Should I re-texture everything from scratch on my version? It's a whole suburban scene that needs new textures. When I spoke to Bing about this, he immediately told me that it will not work. It will be a disaster if I need to texture from scratch, and asked me to find a way around it.
So, I spoke to Amit to ask for advise on this issue. He told me that there's a computer on Remote PC (computer 5) that has the version compatible with VRAY 5. Hence, he asked me to upgrade and use the newer version and my work "should" be fine. This happened on Thursday of this week when I was at SAE waiting for the render farm to be available. SAE's render farms also had issues so the IT department was working on fixing it. Hence, it sort of wasted my time as nothing productive came out of that.
I then went on to research a little more about VRAY 5 Material Library. I looked up the manual documentation and read about the pros and cons of using this new update (ARCH.VIZ. ONLINE SCHOOL, 2014). I even looked up some videos on how to use the material library to guide me with this new methodology in texturing as it was extremely new to me.
(Vrayguide, 2020)
Nonetheless, I will work on the feedback provided to me for the above shot and will upgrade my version to check the compatibility of the VRAY versions in the upcoming week.
References
ARCH.VIZ. ONLINE SCHOOL (2014). VRay 5 Materials Library | IPR Rendering. Retrieved from https://vrayschool.com/vray-5-materials-library-ipr-rendering/
Vrayguide (2020, Aug 20). VRAY 5 Materials Library | Interactive Progressive Rendering (IPR) [video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duvdN5WQ9qs&feature=emb_logo
Comments