Faster Rendering in Command Line

Using command line rendering is a faster alternative to rendering within maya. The result will be up to about 50% faster. The reason for this is you are rendering without maya open which frees up the computers resources that can be used for rendering calculations. I have used this while helping to render out the scenes. In a production of a larger scale a renderfarm will be the best alternative.

Heat wave effects

What I have done here is added a heatwave effect to the scenes to show how arid the place is without water. I did a test on a single frame for faster test results to see what it will look like. I followed this tutorial http://creativemac.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=34773-2 to create the heatwave but changed it to suit the films look. It gives additional movement to the scene which will look appealing to the viewer.

I have tried uploading a video on the blog but the video seems to be too small to notice any difference.

Carara Aspect Ratio

In this film we will be using a CinemaScope aspect ratio. Why? The reason is that at the moment the television screens are currently using 16:9 ratio as a standard and some cinemas are screening movies in 2.35:1 ratio aka CinemaScope. Recently there were announcements from top television manufacturers that in the future 2.34:1 will replace 16:9 in homes. The experience is a super wide vision of the movie which gives more information to the viewer. For these reasons we went with CinemaScope to be in touch with the possible future.

More shots to digitise

This shot is pain stakingly to do as I had to rub out all the construction lines that were scanned in with the final lines. It is the best I can do quickly without going through drawing everyframe with the pen tool myself.

More Digitizing!

More shots im doing. In this one I didnt really know how to do properly as some frames were missing the Professors and Morts body. Also the I did not know what colour the cup was. I have finished all the long and hard part and given this to Simon to finish off as he is in charge of it all.

Two extra shots!

After I have done digitising the two shots that I had. Simon gave me two more shots to do and here is the finished product. Same process as the first but these have more unclean lines as all the blue drawn lines were grey scaled and line trace were picking them up. I have mentioned this to Darryl who scans them in to not grey scale them.

Taking out midtones for better result.

When using the livetrace in illustrator I realised that the live trace picks up everything on the frames. This makes the lines more fuzzy and unclean which has to be tidied up in flash. However before starting the livetrace in illustrator the frames should be taken to photoshop. You can take away the midtones using the level adjustments and bring up the darkness which are causing the defects. Then you continue the process through illustrator and flash. The result is that you will have cleaner lines.

Since there are lots of frames I created an action that will automatically go through all the frame removing the midtones. If you want a copy of the action file give me a message

Digitize progress

So fars its going quite well. I did have teething problems at first when things wasnt working the way I wanted to. Its a process that took longer than expected indiviually working on every single frame.

Flash settings

These are the settings that should be used when digitising the frames in flash. it is the PAL size and frame rate.

Frames, Frames, Frames... Frames

Apparently Simon who is digitalising all of darryls hand drawn frames has alot off work to do individually converting them in illustrator, moving it in flash, adjusting them and colouring every single frame. He needed help and asked me to help him in the process. I am then assigned to two shots. They are the Fascinating and Starting shots.

UV Mapping the Truck

To Uv the terrorist truck I prefer to use UVLayout. How I this is I export the truck from Maya as an .obj format and then load the file into UVlayout. From here I determined where the cuts are made (shown in the screenshot) and then it was placed into a UV grid. The magic of the program is the unfolding of the shapes. It flattens the objects and tries to reduce the stretching as much as possible. After the truck is saved again as a .obj file and loaded back into Maya. Here I make the final adjustments in the UV editor before I begin texturing.

Water test in Realflow

For the water animation I did a simple water test in Realflow

Lighting for blockouts

These are the lighting I have done for the blockout. I will be modeling the environment and lighting the project. I studied studio lighting quickly and applied it to maya to get this result.







I have added 3 Spot lights - one from each side and one in front at the satge facing towards the centre to make the stage a focus point. I have added shadows from each of the light to create an unrealistic lighting environment. For the audience I added a large area light to give a dim glow to show their existance but in the background. There is a good chance to I will be using the same setup for the final stage.

Rubbish pile tests

Some tests for populating the alleyway with rubbish. The rockets represents the rubbish as I used Realflow dynamics to quickly simulate the pile. I probably use this way as its easier than placing the objects individually and it avoids the intersection with the objects.