Updated City

Before and after. More trials

Tuesday10:30-3:00






Adding basic textures to the maya model helped alot with creating a paint effect. The problem is I went overboard and its to detailed. In after effects i'm working on creating mask to adjust paint strokes and blur areas that need to be dimmed down. So far so good.

Skewed City

Monday 10:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Pulled a marathon session today and started work on a new city scape. Nikki drew up some fantastic images last week for visual reference and I stole one of them to build. I spent most of the day inside of maya creating the buildings etc. and getting some basic lighting in. I'm still having trouble figureing out render layers inside of maya. I know how to use them, but I'm not sure how to seperate out the scene so that everything comes together inside of after effects. My biggest problem is with just a shadow pass. I'll have to figure that out soon. Also I've found that it may not be neccesarry to put everything onto its own layer i.e. each individual building, bush, road whatever. With just three layers, shadow, full scene and ambient occ. you have a pretty decent amount of control in post. These are some early experiments, more to come later today.



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Two Layers Only
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Render without Post Manipulation
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Wed. Meeting with Vita and Nikki

I spent 2.5 hrs this morning (7:30-10:00) setting up a simple city scape in maya. I rendered out all of the objects in different render layers as well as a separate shadow map to give me as much control in after effects as possible. The goal was to create a mock Cezanne painting with 3D images etc. At first I was unsure if it made more sense to do so inside of Maya with textures and materials or in Post and I discovered the Post production makes much more sense. It is quicker and easier to control. Also I think that adding slightly more detail (windows, doors etc) will help suggest buildings instead of just cubes. And maybe toying with adding different solid color materials to separate sides of the same geometry as well as creating more objects in general and seeing how that can play a roll in the post production process. Next step is to continue experimenting and maybe animating a short clip of changing light angles or slow pan around the landscape to see what the "painted" style will look like when moving.



Met this morning from 10a.m till about noon and stayed till 1:30 afterword messing with projector setup in Emma ( need to build a rack for next week). Most of today was spent talking about visual style and how to incorporate art styles (Cezanne/Picasso/Braque) into our camo theme and transitions. How can specific art styles assist the notion of camouflage? Try and figure out how painting techniques, brush strokes and composition can transition into 3D imagery.

6hrs. total




Individual Layers (minus shadow pass)

Silver paint and More Cloth

Thrusday 3-hours rendering compositing, Friday 3 hours testing with Vita


Met with Vita on Friday for about three hours to test our projections on some curved objects sprayed with silver paint. I re-rendered three a few old scenes at 1920x1080 to see how our new projectors handled it (tank in door, grandpa/landscape still, tracks entering door). The tank in the doorway was the only one that kind of worked. The curved surfaces cause lots of alignment issues with multiple projectors. It is more probable to use anaglyph 3d as opposed to a dual projector setup.

Monday-4hours with cloth simulation. 3 hrs concept development for transitions.

So the parachute has been giving me monumental problems as well. I started from the beginning because the old scene was to complex to calculate ncloth simulations. I am taking a simpler approach to the scene setup and hopefully whatever i discover will translate smoothly back to the more complicated setup. As of now, ive changed the "man" into a cloth object as well, instead of a rigid body, to see if i can gain anymore control. The problem that is getting to me most is the lack of control of everything ha. If you make the chute flexible and dynamic, you loose control in the air but making it to rigid caused un realistice interaction when it lands. Ive tried animating attributes seperately and trying to fake it but I need to figure out how give that push and pull feel between parachute and parachuter. I rendered a play-blast and posted it with questions on Creative Crash so hopefully someone will have some good Ideas on how to go about solving some of my issues.
In the meantime I'm going to start roughing in geometry in Maya and seeing if I can't mimic a Cezanne painting with render layers and after effects.