Shot 16
Moving onto shot 16, the animation involves the ‘lack’ of gravity, so to speak, so the character is floating in mid-air.
The main thing I wanted to get right before starting the animation process was getting the environmental set-up and lighting correct since this is the key feature of the shot. My initial step was to create an Arnold area light that would act as a spotlight. As similarly utilised in my skeleton project last academic term, I adjusted the exposure and the spread to make it have a smaller focal point on the character. However, due to the lack of flooring and mesh for the light to fall on, this effect does not appear very obviously like a ‘spotlight’ therefore, I returned to the process I had created earlier in paring this light with a cylindrical cone that has heavy transmission applied to it.
Putting this cone in, paired with the light, created exactly the effect I was looking for and that I used in the previous shot. While I want it to look stark against the background, I feel the lack of anything in the back does not add to the effect and will need an additional AI skydome and directional light to create a strong rim lighting effect. I also wish to add stars as mesh lights similar to that of shot 11.
When Initially using a ‘transparent’ aistandard surface, it created a warping effect which made the house look like it was in a cylinder of water rather than a beam. Therefore I changed the material to a lambert as this proves more simple and effective as a ‘light’ beam.
When previewing the test render, I noticed that the strong directional light was casting a shadow onto the cylindrical shape, which is supposed to represent a strong beam of light. I feel this effect would bring viewers out of this perception slightly and ruins the overall look. In the cone meshes attribute editor, I was able to untick cast and show shadows in render, which removed this effect quite simply. During the render process with the shots that contain the “alien abduction” sequences, I will be sure to look carefully and bare this in mind.
In order to get the area light to follow the cylindrical shape when panning across the screen, I used a parental constraint so that it would not get left behind and ruin the lighting in the render.
The next most essential step was making the whole environment look convincing as a night sky, with layers of clouds and stars that would add an overall depth to the shot. In order to get the mesh lights to reduce noise, I had to ensure that the samples for each individual light were up to about 5-7, so that render glitch discrepancies didn’t happen.
When modelling the stars, I wanted to add a little bit of variety once again to the purely round spherical mesh lights, so I created a ‘North Star’ Style of the model to help stylise the background further. I also feel with the addition of extra lighting will add reflections and additional lighting that will aesthetically enhance the render.
As previously mentioned, since this shot did not have much gravitational weight for the character, I had room to work with how I would stylistically make the character move. To get the feeling that they had a slight lack of control, I wanted their legs to hover in the air, almost as if they were swimming. I also wanted them to float up and down as if the ‘laser beam’ was fighting to work with gravity.
Improved render
Revisiting the first shot, I noticed there were several aspects of the render that needed improvement. First of all, during this render, I did not add rim lighting to the AI toon textures, which caused them to look bland and not blend into the overall scene. As you can see in the image below, on the right is the older render, and on the left is the newer render, which I feel fits much more cohesively together as a film. I also removed the secular from the roof as I felt that unless wet, roof tiles do not generally glisten to that extent, and It proved to be quite distracting from the rest of the animation.
Shot 17
The last Shot I did this week was shot 17, which is the second to last shot of the whole film. In this shot, one of the characters who were previously down the hole uses a ladder to climb to the other side of the cliffs, in which the two characters stare at each other across the gap.
Since this section relies on somewhat comedic timing, I felt that getting the camera pan correct was the initial step, as the camera needs to move in sync when the dialogue says “from a distance” to help exemplify said distance between people.
Below is the finished shot, which I feel works successfully in achieving the comedic timing of the additional character reveal. However, I feel if I had additional time, I would work more on the motion itself, as I did not have a lot of time to clean the animation in the graph editor, so for the most part, it appears very jerky and rushed. Going forward with the animation in future, I will rely less on Maya interpolative feature to create smooth animation, even under time constraints.