Digital Reflective Journal #8

This week I finalised the scene and opening camera shot for my game trailer. For this I started out by gathering scene and lighting reference for my trailer. For this I specifically looked at antic libraries, as well as sleeping position for the two animals and lighting reference for a fire place. In regards to the animal reference I was still unsure if I would have time to rig and pose them for the animation. Never the less I tried to be optimistic and gathered the reference anyways. Much to my delight however the rigging process for the T-rex was far easier than what my experience with rigging Adam had led me to believe. This was because the automatic weight painting function worked much better this time round which leads me to believe that the reason I had so much problems with Adam was because his model was unknowingly scaled in the negative, which ended up costing me a lot of time. For the cat model that replaced the tiger however, I found that it was already rigged. Whilst it wasn’t as good as the rigging that I had done on the T-rex, it was still functional enough for me to pose it for the scene. This ended up saving me much more time than I was expecting, allowing me to include the T-rex in the early test renders that I showed of during the peer crit session.

For this first test render I noticed before hand that the T-rex’s original colours made it blend with the vintage wood aesthetic of the scene. Because of this I decided to change the colour to a green but I was unsure if it fit the scene. This was until it was pointed out during the feedback session that the problem was probably that the rest of the scene needed greens to balance it out.

After this I continued to work on my scene by creating book shelves using a mixture of third-party assets and my own modelling. I also played around with having a photo scan of a famous sculpture in the scene but ultimately couldn’t make it fit nicely in the composition. At this stage however I was starting to have concerns as the render time was at 30 min per frame which meant that I could only render 2 sec per every 24 hours. To fix this I researched blender tutorials on how to reduce render times and managed to get it down to under 8 min per frame without reducing quality. This means that if I did a 15 sec animation it would take under 2.5 days which would give me enough time to re-render it in the event that something goes wrong. Whilst at this stage I could still further reduce the render time by baking my procedural textures, I found that the baking time was extremely long which was costing me more time than it was saving.

At this stage I was nearing the completion of the scene, with the last stage being fine tuning the lighting to create the fire place glow effect. Before this point I was just using a basic light which was pointed out by people to not make sense and not light up Adam’s face. When making the final lighting schema I referred back to my lighting reference and gave the light an orange hue. To contrast this, I also cut out a window in the scene and shone a blueish purple light through it so that the light colours would complement each other. Whilst I did like this lighting set up, I did also feel like there was something missing. I showed it off during the Games group feedback session but no one seemed to point out anything wrong with it. As a result, I was going to leave it until I finished the animation and camera movements as this will most likely reveal any weaknesses in the current lighting set up. Based on my friend’s suggestion, what would most likely help the scene is if I found a way to animate the lighting so that it resembles the effect of a flickering flame. In principle I know how to do this, however as I couldn’t find a specific tutorial online it may not pan out and the light will just have to be static.

Moving into next week I need to start and finish all of my animation so that I have enough time to render the animation. For this I am quite optimistic as the trailer has very little dynamic animation and with the reduced render time I have much more time to do this then I had previously.