I am really pleased with all the finished animation of the drones. I believe they all came out really nicely. I managed to finish off rendering all shots over the easter break which worked really well as the space was empty. This let me render all day and night on many computers.
The renders have mostly come out nicely, the textures really add a great amount of realism, roughness map especially. The main issue with these is that most shots are too shiny. Since I had rendered with AOV render passes, I thought this would be easily fixable. But when I started attempting to combine these renders passes, I found the results didn't come out as nice as the beauty pass. Dimming the amount of reflection also only changed how much reflectivity there was, not the diffusion. I experimented playing around with blurs and mattes to create the same effect, but it was quite a long winded way of making little difference.
In the end, what I have done most of the time is just dim the whites in colour correction to at least make the specularity less noticeable. The only AOV pass that I really used was the emission pass for create glows and lens flares from the lights on the drone. This has gone well and also grounds the drones into the scene.
I am happy with the composite of most shots, usually involving colour correction to bring down contrast and raise the blacks a bit. Then I slightly blur to match the footage, some shots have focus shifts where I have used camera lens blur to achieve this and match the anamorphic lens effect I achieved with the filter.
If I have time, I plan to swap out these renders for slightly more diffused renders. This is something I can do pretty easily but it is a shame that I have to.
I'm nearly finished on the drone animation now. It has been really fun animating all these shots, more-so than I expected. The shields have been one of the more satisfying parts in the way that I can make them react to each other and slam into each other (which the sound design should hopefully accentuate in a nice way). They can react to the many different needs and makes a good more visual interest to the drone, otherwise they would likely just look to static.
I am currently working on the final explosion of the mrk 4 drone. I am doing this in the same way as the first drone destruction because a dynamic simulation was proving more trouble than it was worth. This was much more fun than the first time because it was a much bigger explosion and the pieces scattered much farther. I made sure to keep the trajectory of the laser blast and the drone itself.
Since the pieces are falling from much higher, I thought it would be cool if some stuck into the ground instead of just landing and bouncing. I mainly kept this to anything that looked sharp or heavy.
I can then use this document, combined with the first explosion to create the leftover rubble on the ground the ending sequence. This should be fairly easy once I have finished animating all the parts of the mrk4 drone.
Also this week, I revisited the bricks from shot 53 when Liam shoots a hole in the wall. I had spent a lot of time trying to give these bricks dynamic physics which was just taking up too much of my time so I have again decided to manually animate these bricks. I am disappointed in myself that I haven't ended up using these kind of techniques, but they have just been causing me more trouble than they're worth. In most situations, I would keep persevering to figure it out, but as I am starting to get a bit more worried about the schedule, I feel that animating these elements manually was more time efficient for me at this time.
So after I gave Bach the brief of what I wanted from the city, he got to work very quickly. Starting first with a board of a few options. I wanted the cage idea to be irregular just like the drone body is. However it was rather tricky to strike the balance between keeping it in the same world as the city while also not making the city too intimidating as it is supposed to be a place to aspire to.
We eventually came to a design that we both really liked and so he started a detailed version. I gave him the background plate that the city would be placed into so he could match the lighting.
I really love the design he came back with, however when I was compositing it, I found that something about it was just not sitting right with me. Either it felt too flat, or the lighting wasn't realistic enough.
After some discussion with Bach, I decided that it would be best to create the city in maya as this would allow me much more freedom to manipulate the lighting and depth using lenses in maya. These kind of things would take considerably more work from Bach if he were to do it 2D still, so doing it 3D is definitely more efficient.
The model came along rather slowly, however I am pretty pleased with how it is developing, the buildings are taking a longer time as I keep deciding they feel too big in relation to the city. I want the city to feel really big and dense, so I keep scaling all the buildings down to add many more. I modelled a few buildings and then copied them, giving them a selection of different shaders.
Creating the shield effect in after effects should be a fun experience as it will be the main moving interest in the shot, but I am going to finish working on all drone shots before I work more on the city shots.
Continued on with more drone animation. These are going along much quicker than expected. As the drones are robotic, I have found the keyframing to be rather simple, often being happy with the result after just a few keys. I've been trying to focus on realistic motion and weight. The drones always have a bit of bobbing up and down from their propulsion engine. They also sway and twist based on their position and direction, as there is a single engine on their underside, this would create a rocking kind of movement.
The second drone destruction was much easier than the first but I found more satisfying. I didn't have everything fall apart since this was more of a glitch and shut down rather than full destruction. I really enjoy the way the ring and shields just fall as the idea is the electro magnets would turn off. I also keyframed the emission shader turning off as well which I am really happy with.
The moment in which the wanderer punches inside the drone's jet engine was a slightly more tricky part. I first thought of tracking Liam's hand to attach the drone to, but since there was already the 3D camera's movement, I ended up doing it by eye. This seems to work in the viewport, however I will have to review this once rendered and composited.
Speaking of rendering, I am starting to render the backlog of shots through the nights and during the easter holidays, I plan to render through day and night. This is the first time I have used AOV render passes for diffuse, emission, specular, and indirect. This should be very useful in compositing. I'm really happy with what Dan has done with the textures, I think they look incredible. I am again using HDRI images shot on location for the lighting to be as realistic as possible.
At my current pace I hope to get all drone animation done in the next 2 weeks. This is slightly over schedule but the time waiting for finished drone has pushed me back a bit. However I'm still confident I can get the film finished in time.
I recently received an email from a film producer based in LA. He is part of a team creating a low budget sci-fi action film called ROAM. He had seen my showreel on Vimeo and wanted to get me involved on the project. There are many VFX artists from the US and UK working on many shots. He sent me a sheets document for me to choose shots that I would take on. For now I am just taking on 4 shots containing bullet shots, muzzle flashes and blood hits and splatters.
This is a quite exciting opportunity and while I may not end up getting paid for it (based on how the film lands) it is still a good thing to be involved in and is still a credit. I will start working on these shots in the next few weeks on weekends and evenings. The producer is very understanding about the fact that I am also working on my own film at the same time.
Now that the textures are all completed, I can move on to finishing animation and rendering. The few shots that I had already animated before needed to have their animation copied onto the latest version of the model because the UV had changed. This was an extra hassle due to my haste to get onto animating while waiting for Dan to finish the drone. It wasted quite a bit of time, which was slightly irritating. There were only 5 shots where I had to do this so it wasn't too bad. The new animation on following shots is easy enough, as it is only the drones flying which involved just a handful of keyframes so it is going at a very quick pace at the moment.
The longest shot to complete so far has been 41 where the first drone explodes. I had experimented with some dynamic physics simulations but they weren't working well. The issue was that I wanted to be in control of where the pieces landed. Also, because all these piece on the body of the drone are so tightly packed, they weren't reacting naturally when becoming soft bodies, they just flew off in really unrealistic ways. In the end, while keyframing the pieces took a long time, I believe it gave me much more control and the fiddling I would have had to do to a simulation to get it how I wanted would have been just as much an effort. I am really happy with the result of this shot so I don't mind that it was a time consuming task.
Animating the pigs proved more complicated that I expected, not on a technical level, but for the creation of the loop. I had considered using a simulation technique to create a dynamic scene, however this would surrender the control of where the balloons landed and so I wouldn't be able to make everything loop as nicely, also it wouldn't really be animation.
So I worked one at a time, bouncing balloons of the walls and onto other walls. To start with I did a 2 balloon loop. This meant having balloon 1 end in the exact same place that balloon 2 started from, and balloon 2 would end where the 1st started.
However as I went on, this became much more complex to comprehend. As I created looped involving many more balloons, which then bounced off of other in midair, I had to plan much more meticulously where the balloons were going. There is a loop of 4 balloons which go around in the middle in a very complex loop. If you follow 1 of these balloons around, it actually takes 4 loops of the whole clip for it to end in the place it started, however there is also always another balloon starting in that same place on the first frame of every loop. So there are kind of 4 versions of the life of one balloon loop happening at once. This was what was getting very confusing. I was taking many notes while going through this process, trying to keep it all straight in my head.
Eventually, when happy with the animation, I started on rendering. I started with a AIStandardSurface balloon preset, however it wasn't giving me the translucency and light glowing through that I wanted. After a lot of fiddling with more presets and tweaking the settings a lot, I came up with something I was really happy with. It is actually somewhere in between balloon and glass materials, but it gives me a light glow on the walls and floor that I am really happy with.
After 9 computers rendering simultaneously overnight... this was the final result. I am very happy with it, and excited to play with more lighting and materials in my final film project.
https://vimeo.com/326158442
