Jet Trail Particles

We started rendering today. A slow start but we managed to get rolling which is great news. We finally got the textures for the medium alien which has pushed us behind somewhat. I have rendered the puddle shot today as well as the jet trails which are below. Im very pleased with the results, having not known much about maya particles I was able to develop on top of a particle effect found in the maya visor. I also did some lighting and texture tests with the medium alien.

Alien in Maya

With the small alien rig finished I set up the textures in maya which was a mission due to the amount of textures i used for the subsurface scattering as well as using a combination of normal maps and bump maps. The dirt of the textures actually came through a lot more than max. I'm pleased with the results and now the animators can start animating the small alien.

Filming and Rendering

This week we failed to film again due to matters out of our controll. I'm hoping not much more can go wrong with this project. We are hoping to film on monday but the weather keeps getting nicer (fingers crossed). I have been working on getting my textures correct in maya which has been a struggle due to the blinn in max being different to the blinn in maya. I think I mostly have it sorted now. I got my alien to put it which is going to be a little harder as I'm using SSS fast skin.

Our friend ryan from Dynamo came in on thursday to give us the basics of rendering. It fried our brains but for the better. I have done some practices with render passes and am going to create a render template in which to apply to all our scenes.

Unfortunatly the server room at uni is down due to over heating and means the renderfarm and all autodesk liscences are down for the entire weekend! but will hopefully be fixed by monday, as this is a great hinderence.

Progress

Recently we have been getting an edit for the film for timing and have been distributing the shots to people on the project. The medium alien has been rigged so the animators can begin animating, we are just waiting on some textures before we can begin to render. We have moved down to the media lab to harness the render farm. I have been moving the assests into maya and have set up the hdri which after a long time working out how to do it has come out quite successfully.
We were supposed to film on thursday but it was to sunny again, so we are hoping for a bit of bad weather to film on thursday. we will then have all the footage filmed.

Finally Filmed

This week we finally filmed in Treorchy a large majority of the film. After delays due to getting permission from the land owner and going to film on the sunniest day wales had seen causing us to call it off we finally filmed on tuesday. It went reasonably well, with the weather being miserable (perfect) and only a bit of rain which didn't delay us. We couldn't get all the cadets down but we did manage to get all the kit so we got a load of friends from uni to dress up and they did a fantastic job. The shoot only took around 5-6 hours which was pretty fast for the amount of shots. The footage has come out really nice and we can finally start seeing the finished piece.

Particle Tests

Last week i spent the large majority of the time experimenting with particles while trying to sort out filming in Treorchy. i was doing tests with plasma, Smoke, and the jets exploding. I learnt a lot and have a good basic knowledge of particles with max. I later learnt about particles with maya of a much higher standard however I find them a lot harder to get my head round. The test were to see if I could help the motion design guys with getting a good effect for the shots. Here are some of the tests...

Plasma Trail Test 03 from Joe O'Connor on Vimeo.

Plasma Test for Film

Plasma Missile Test 03 from Joe O'Connor on Vimeo.

Jet Explode Test 02 from Joe O'Connor on Vimeo.