I didn't end up getting my showreel done for the hand in, well copied onto the disk that I handed in but here's my final edit and a quick showreel i knocked up before handed in never the less.
Enjoy.
A sound of thunder
2010 Showreel
Showing posts with label Maya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maya. Show all posts
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Rendering begins
I set up some renders over the weekend at uni, to render out my time machine that is.
I set some up Thursday night but came into to find problems as seems to always be the way with my work when it comes to render time...
Anyway I ended up spending nearly all of Friday tweaking and altering render settings to try and get a good enough render that I was happy with.
I've never really understood render settings overly loads to be honest and it felt a little trial and error which I feel I've never really had as it's been get the render done and I haven't had the time to play around and tweak before. One thing I did find out which was fairly obvious anyway but still shocked me a fair bit is how much longer final gather adds to render time!
It shoots it up so much!
Anyway in my effort to speed up the render over the weekend I decided to take out all the wires in my scene, and instead render them out separately on my home computer then composite the 2 layers later in after effects.
I was thinking this would be simple and easy, however upon assigning a black shader and turning off all the secularity etc (to give me an alpha to work with when compositing with the main render) I found that the render settings I was using for my main scene were pushing the render time up hugely just for a render of a few little wires, and after trying a number of different render settings in mental ray the scene still seemed to be taking ages.
I'm guessing was due to the high poly count of the scene, even with the objects all blacked out. So I made the decision to render the wires out in software render to speed things up a little.
However I went off to work yesterday and after about 2 hours of rendering my piece got to frame 177 out of 750 and just stopped rendering...
The render settings were set to go to frame 750, however it just wouldn't render...
Upon getting home from work about 15 hours later, I realised this and then started rendering again from the frame that died on me so to speak. Troughout the night maya kept just stopping at random intervals throughout rendering which in some cases prompted my fan to go mental waking me up to check everything was running, to find it wasn't and restart the render.
But after a night of stopping, starting, rendering, sleeping and not sleeping I woke up this morning and set the final part of the render going, and it's now finished!
Ideally I wanted to get the dynamics in the scene rendered out overnight last night and just finish off with final tweaks for my jungle today, but my render problems have thrown a spanner in the works as such. So I'm going to leave my dynamics until tomorrow as I'll set them rendering at home when I head to uni to check out my main renders.
To keep myself on schedule though I'm going to get my jungle sorted today so I can set it rendering tomorrow at uni if my time machine scene has been good and rendered itself out over the weekend that is...
Anyway that's me for today I'll get on with some work now.
But here's a few renders of my time machine while I was texturing it and one from when I was tweaking the render settings and stripped out final gather, I would post up the duff renders it did over thurdays night but I've left them on the uni computors...
And this one is rather dark, but this is when I stripped final gather out. So the final renders should look somewhere between this and the above render.
Hopefully!
Thanks for reading
I set some up Thursday night but came into to find problems as seems to always be the way with my work when it comes to render time...
Anyway I ended up spending nearly all of Friday tweaking and altering render settings to try and get a good enough render that I was happy with.
I've never really understood render settings overly loads to be honest and it felt a little trial and error which I feel I've never really had as it's been get the render done and I haven't had the time to play around and tweak before. One thing I did find out which was fairly obvious anyway but still shocked me a fair bit is how much longer final gather adds to render time!
It shoots it up so much!
Anyway in my effort to speed up the render over the weekend I decided to take out all the wires in my scene, and instead render them out separately on my home computer then composite the 2 layers later in after effects.
I was thinking this would be simple and easy, however upon assigning a black shader and turning off all the secularity etc (to give me an alpha to work with when compositing with the main render) I found that the render settings I was using for my main scene were pushing the render time up hugely just for a render of a few little wires, and after trying a number of different render settings in mental ray the scene still seemed to be taking ages.
I'm guessing was due to the high poly count of the scene, even with the objects all blacked out. So I made the decision to render the wires out in software render to speed things up a little.
However I went off to work yesterday and after about 2 hours of rendering my piece got to frame 177 out of 750 and just stopped rendering...
The render settings were set to go to frame 750, however it just wouldn't render...
Upon getting home from work about 15 hours later, I realised this and then started rendering again from the frame that died on me so to speak. Troughout the night maya kept just stopping at random intervals throughout rendering which in some cases prompted my fan to go mental waking me up to check everything was running, to find it wasn't and restart the render.
But after a night of stopping, starting, rendering, sleeping and not sleeping I woke up this morning and set the final part of the render going, and it's now finished!
Ideally I wanted to get the dynamics in the scene rendered out overnight last night and just finish off with final tweaks for my jungle today, but my render problems have thrown a spanner in the works as such. So I'm going to leave my dynamics until tomorrow as I'll set them rendering at home when I head to uni to check out my main renders.
To keep myself on schedule though I'm going to get my jungle sorted today so I can set it rendering tomorrow at uni if my time machine scene has been good and rendered itself out over the weekend that is...
Anyway that's me for today I'll get on with some work now.
But here's a few renders of my time machine while I was texturing it and one from when I was tweaking the render settings and stripped out final gather, I would post up the duff renders it did over thurdays night but I've left them on the uni computors...
And this one is rather dark, but this is when I stripped final gather out. So the final renders should look somewhere between this and the above render.
Hopefully!
Thanks for reading
Monday, 10 May 2010
Jungelicious
More stuff thrown into the mix
Just sorting the overhead canopy at the moment then onto dropping in highlights as Alan suggested then sync the background up a little more as the trees in the background are to light. Then just add finishing touches and render, so I'm planning to have it renderable by Wednesday morning.
Also treaked the header to try make it look a little more pro :)
Think my keyboards running low on battery to as it doesn't seem to want to work properly, either that or the constant use is destroying it :(
Just sorting the overhead canopy at the moment then onto dropping in highlights as Alan suggested then sync the background up a little more as the trees in the background are to light. Then just add finishing touches and render, so I'm planning to have it renderable by Wednesday morning.
Also treaked the header to try make it look a little more pro :)
Think my keyboards running low on battery to as it doesn't seem to want to work properly, either that or the constant use is destroying it :(
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Another little update
I've gone through altered the camera's on both the time machine scene and the time square scene
Time Machine:
Time square
Also I tore apart Time square deleting all the bits of the models that weren't seen in the clip to save time on texturing as oppose to doing something for nothing so to speak. As well I've filled in the background with bits of buildings as oppose to adding in buildings on an image plane, as well as filling a hole in the top left corner of the first frame with the which towers over the building on the left of the camera instead of remodelling the building which is actually there to save time (moving building is the selected one just to make it obvious in the playblast). I don't think it will notice to much as I'm intending on using depth of field anyway to blur out the buildings in the background anyway so there only going to have rough textures to give a suggestion of their for as oppose to perfect flawless textures again to save wasting time.
Feedback would be kool .
Thanks for looking ;)
Time Machine:
Time square
Also I tore apart Time square deleting all the bits of the models that weren't seen in the clip to save time on texturing as oppose to doing something for nothing so to speak. As well I've filled in the background with bits of buildings as oppose to adding in buildings on an image plane, as well as filling a hole in the top left corner of the first frame with the which towers over the building on the left of the camera instead of remodelling the building which is actually there to save time (moving building is the selected one just to make it obvious in the playblast). I don't think it will notice to much as I'm intending on using depth of field anyway to blur out the buildings in the background anyway so there only going to have rough textures to give a suggestion of their for as oppose to perfect flawless textures again to save wasting time.
Feedback would be kool .
Thanks for looking ;)
Friday, 22 January 2010
Done and Dusted
Right So I’ve finished editing sorted all my files out and am ready to burn so I thought I’s post an evaluation/ update on how it went as such.
The rendering process went less than smooth to say the least and I feel that I wasted time as rendering a large file with low quality textures which I then followed up by sorting out the file, upping the texture maps and downing the screen resolution. This then brought about much nicer results and I rendered out an ambient occlusion pass to give the piece a more defined real world look, as well as a Z-Depth pass and master beauty pass. I finished off with a wire frame vector render which was also somewhat drawn out by the loss of the Maya licence at uni for a few hours.
I also went and got myself 2 DVD’s printed onto with a design with which to present my work on as well as printing CD cases, however getting the DVD’s printed onto turned into a bit of an effort due to a spelling mistake on my part then when I went back to reprint them the technicians made a couple of mistakes firstly printing 2 of the same CD’s then printing one of the old ones with a spelling mistake on it...
But there all good and done now:
When I came to editing the piece I had previously made up the rest of the sequence using the stills I created via digital painting. So I went into After Effects after watching various tutorials on compositing and began compositing my renders. I hit a number of bumps along the way due to lack of experience with the software such as not being able to import an image sequence at 25 fps which took me some time to decipher how to change it and not being able to input the Z-Depth for my piece so I ended up creating the final movie without depth of field applied.
Editing went smoothly but one large problem has occurred with my final piece which just keeps staring me in the face every time I watch it. I ended up editing it all in 4:3 as oppose to 16:9 so therefore my final movie has nice huge boarders surrounding it. What’s more due to this and it not being edited at the size I created it for the quality has been reduced greatly and I’m frustrated to find that whilst toying with after effects as editing out my clips in 4:3 I found I had a copy of 2 of them in their original size. I must admit when I started this project I setup my work from Maya’s 70mm projection film gate (roughly 15:6.5) thinking it gives a nice wide low picture which is what I wanted from my work to enhance the filmic aspects. However I now just wish I’d gone with 16:9 as due to various errors in my editing process I ended up editing the entire piece and creating a movie in 4:3. With regards to the editing in terms of sound and cuts with the music etc I feel it has been successful but where I just feel that the quality of the picture lets it down so dramatically.
I’m please with the overall results but feel that my work is brought down by being of slightly lower resolution which in all honesty has left me a little disappointed.
But other than that I’m pleased with what I’ve created.
If I was to change anything I think I’d like to see spares snow on parts of the buildings as I feel that with the concept sketches of snow on the buildings it feels like there’s another bit of each little scene to go where the audience gets to see the snow on it which leaves it feeling a little incomplete as well as break the lighting link between the mountains and the light to stop the top of the city having shadow cast over it.
Here’s some progress screen shots:
Here's a few software renders of the city:
Post Render shots of the city
From here down are a few shots of the altered lighting which is sadly not present in the final render
Here’s a number of renders of the first and last frame of each scene with the lighting link broken between the light and the mountains
Once I'd writtern the part at the top I had a change of heart and decided to spend the night re-editing my final piece and I did.
(Yes I've been slowly writing this all night)
It's much better now:)
Only problem is that all the hours of me cutting the footage in Premier to fade to the music small seem to have been offset slightly so the frames do not change and fade with the music but there's nothing i can do about that and it might even just be windows media player doing it, but other than that I'm happy!
*Just realised didn't acredit the music on the actually video...
So the music is: Vangelis - Rachel's Song*
The rendering process went less than smooth to say the least and I feel that I wasted time as rendering a large file with low quality textures which I then followed up by sorting out the file, upping the texture maps and downing the screen resolution. This then brought about much nicer results and I rendered out an ambient occlusion pass to give the piece a more defined real world look, as well as a Z-Depth pass and master beauty pass. I finished off with a wire frame vector render which was also somewhat drawn out by the loss of the Maya licence at uni for a few hours.
I also went and got myself 2 DVD’s printed onto with a design with which to present my work on as well as printing CD cases, however getting the DVD’s printed onto turned into a bit of an effort due to a spelling mistake on my part then when I went back to reprint them the technicians made a couple of mistakes firstly printing 2 of the same CD’s then printing one of the old ones with a spelling mistake on it...
But there all good and done now:
When I came to editing the piece I had previously made up the rest of the sequence using the stills I created via digital painting. So I went into After Effects after watching various tutorials on compositing and began compositing my renders. I hit a number of bumps along the way due to lack of experience with the software such as not being able to import an image sequence at 25 fps which took me some time to decipher how to change it and not being able to input the Z-Depth for my piece so I ended up creating the final movie without depth of field applied.
Editing went smoothly but one large problem has occurred with my final piece which just keeps staring me in the face every time I watch it. I ended up editing it all in 4:3 as oppose to 16:9 so therefore my final movie has nice huge boarders surrounding it. What’s more due to this and it not being edited at the size I created it for the quality has been reduced greatly and I’m frustrated to find that whilst toying with after effects as editing out my clips in 4:3 I found I had a copy of 2 of them in their original size. I must admit when I started this project I setup my work from Maya’s 70mm projection film gate (roughly 15:6.5) thinking it gives a nice wide low picture which is what I wanted from my work to enhance the filmic aspects. However I now just wish I’d gone with 16:9 as due to various errors in my editing process I ended up editing the entire piece and creating a movie in 4:3. With regards to the editing in terms of sound and cuts with the music etc I feel it has been successful but where I just feel that the quality of the picture lets it down so dramatically.
I’m please with the overall results but feel that my work is brought down by being of slightly lower resolution which in all honesty has left me a little disappointed.
But other than that I’m pleased with what I’ve created.
If I was to change anything I think I’d like to see spares snow on parts of the buildings as I feel that with the concept sketches of snow on the buildings it feels like there’s another bit of each little scene to go where the audience gets to see the snow on it which leaves it feeling a little incomplete as well as break the lighting link between the mountains and the light to stop the top of the city having shadow cast over it.
Here’s some progress screen shots:
Here's a few software renders of the city:
Post Render shots of the city
From here down are a few shots of the altered lighting which is sadly not present in the final render
Here’s a number of renders of the first and last frame of each scene with the lighting link broken between the light and the mountains
Once I'd writtern the part at the top I had a change of heart and decided to spend the night re-editing my final piece and I did.
(Yes I've been slowly writing this all night)
It's much better now:)
Only problem is that all the hours of me cutting the footage in Premier to fade to the music small seem to have been offset slightly so the frames do not change and fade with the music but there's nothing i can do about that and it might even just be windows media player doing it, but other than that I'm happy!
*Just realised didn't acredit the music on the actually video...
So the music is: Vangelis - Rachel's Song*