Overhall reflection

Finally the end of the year i think for me this year was the most stressful and exiting at the same time i had the opportunity to work on different group projects, one did not go well but i was able to definitely develop my skill further and i am feeling more comfortable with production workflows having had the chance to try different technique of approach for the same problem i am more able to chose which workflow will be more suitable to my need and i definitely gained more understanding of industry stendars. In terms of my work i fell that i have been able to achieve what was expected of me for each task and i was able to manage my time more efficiently. Through the year also learned new skill  like lighting during the advance skill unit ended up been a great help and allowed me to have more understanding of the relation between each process of the production pipeline and finally i was also able to develop my people skill and time management to better standard while working with each group.

30 Second

For my 30 second piece i decided to experiment with £D compositing with live action and create a final piece with the experience a get unfortunately i found myself enable to show my Final piece as i corrupted my computer data and still don't know how did i get that virus and came to the realisation that the only way to repair it was to restore the system to factory setting . Fortunately i I am lucky enough to have saved one of the outdoor experiment that worked but lack the amount of time necessary to cover the £30 second requirement anyway this is what i have done

Idea the main idea was to create a basic flying saucer and compose it with a live action footage that i had tracked

Modelling

i did not go into a high level of detail for this model as its original purpose was to experiment with but the modelling was mostly inspired from the hollywood movie Mars attack

model Pic

Texturing for the texturing i outputted a UV snapshot of the model and used a metal texture made in photoshop and a normal map made in Crazy bump

Final render pic

i aslo added a couple of glow effect to the saucer 

Animation i decided to animate the saucer to make it revolve on itself as it should

using basic key frame animation

Match-moving to track my footage i used Mach-mover and applied an automating tracking to the shot again i did not think about outputting any shot or video of that process as it was an experiment but for that i only have myself to blame.

rendering 

i decided to render  4 different passes a diffuse pass an ambient occlusion pass a specularity pass and beauty pass

after rendering those passes i exported them in after effect for compositing and after blending each pass i used adjustment layer to get the look that i wanted

this is a shot of shot showing the compositing process that i did

those are some of the adjustment layer setting that i did

Film Final output  and again a big thanks to young shane my friend nephew that agreed to let me shoot him on my camera

their nothing much positive technique  that i can say about my 30 second piece as i was not able to output my final version again  i am very frustrated about the outcome but have only myself to blame if only  i had backed up my file on an external drive none of this would have happen  but i still had the chance to learn new techniques while experimenting i can now use manual mapping on match-mover and anderstand the process compositing to a greater degree.

 

Time management

how did i managed my time



Personal time management


i decided to use a progressive approach with a weekly rotation when i came to managing my time. As show on the calendar i dedicated on day to each of the projects i was working on while feeling gaps of finished project with unfinished one this allowed me to balance my workload and y think make my time management more efficient this way of working allowed me to respect deadlines and assured that i had progressed in every area no matter any the individual project difficulty

Group time management Ikalx

we also created a group time management where deadline were set so that could manage our time more efficiently
so how did i do ?
 on the calendar the red line refer to me

for the second term i had to finish my work before the 15 march (deadline) to give enough time to get the 2 shots rendered I was able to meet the target and finisher my work by the 3 of March.

for the third term again i was supposed to finish my work early enough to give time to render the 20 shots of the film which is due for the 31 MAY i was able to finish early enough to texture extra shots and help another group all the shots were done by the 2 May.

Growing planet
for growing planet i was also able to finish all my work during the required time the temple and particle test where done 3 weeks before the deadline and during the second term  i finished all my task on the 13 february one month before the actual deadline

Finally the For the Morph Movie the textures were done in one week soon enough for the group to be able to render their shots

Communication with group members

to comunicate between us we used first Facebook to send update on each other progrees, second we used drop-box and emailing  to transfer data to each other and organised frequent group meeting to discuss any issues last but not least we used our mobile phone to communicate when credits were available.

Planning and other involvement

 in terms of planning i decided to invite all the member f Ikalx to my house during the easter break to discuss how we were going to organise ourself to make sure that the job is bone efficiently pointing some of the problem we had during term 2. one of the thing that i asked Nathanael the other member of the group working on the 3D development of the film to do was to create a separate scene for each shop this would allow me first to create a better quality shot as i would only have to add foliage to the area in front of the camera, second it will save on rendering time and third it will allow me to pass over the shots that i have done to render while working on the rest of the of the shots.

also i was able to get in contact with a sound engineer from Uni  Danny Draper who agreed to work on the soundscape of our film.

May

Finally almost to the end of the line my texturing work is finished but they was another issue that i think needed to be addressed about our film, the first 2 shots that we rendered were to dark and the texture looked to monochromatic and the audience had not centre of interest to look at so, i proposed to the group to add a light inside the glowing sphere traveling around the environment to add more light information and give the audience a point to focus on. To create the light i used a point light and attached a  mental ray mib_light_point node which allow me to control the decay and intensity of the light

light intensity and colour setting

Decay setting

 Test showing the diference before and after the light was applied

The new light worked well and allowed us to have more colour information in our render after finishing the test i exported the light as a maya file and gave it to Nathanael and explained to him how to used it so that he can parent it to the sphere on each shot and do any final adjustment.


Extra shots

 As we finished the texturing quiet early we decided to render some extra shots
for this i had to texture the inside of the pyramid and texture a structure inside the pyramid

new texture created

Those texture were created for the structure inside the temple the director wanted the structure to be bloody as it was supose to be an area for sacchrifices.

This is the
 first render after more consideration and advise from my tutor i decided to drop down the amount of blood i guess that is what happen after watching too many episode of Spartacus.

Retextured version

In April my tutor Dan Dalli mentioned that a group needed some texturing done for them and i agreed to help.
Their film is a character base animation called Morph and they needed four of their characters to be textured they needed the work to be done as soon as possible and because they are going to shoot their film in black and white they did not need to much details in terms of texturing.

Those are the textures that i made for each character i decided to use basic colour to texture the character, one of the issue that i had was with the UV snapshot some of them were very bad and were using such a small area of the snapshot that i had to work on 4K size image to be able to get  no pixelation  when doing close up render test of the character and has all the character were already rigged i could not adjust any all of them. All concept arts were given to me by Jeremy to work with.

textured UV

Skins

 I tried to create nuances on each character skin changing the tone and anding freckles to some characters skins.

  Closing

final rendered character

 for the shaders i used MIA material X passes shaders for all textures as requested by the Group

Hair texture were created using hair picture found on internet that i ofseted and tiled as a seamless texture

on this render the character hands did not want to show up i could not find out why maybe a problem with the rig but what do i know i never rigged any character yet but it the problem was mentioned to the group when i was handing over the textured characters

some of the other image textures that i used for the characters

the Morph film group was happy with the work i wish i had more time to work on them but for the few days that i had to finish the work i am satisfied with the result