Website Complete

I have handed in my website today. I'm quite pleased with how it looks and I'm glad to get it out of the way to focus on the film. I tried to keep it to the same style as this blog.
My website is www.wix.com/oconnorjoe/joeoconnor

I also thought I'd post the development of shot 08 with the planes exploding. Josh from motion design has done a really good job of making the explosion. Here is a still of it so far. Very exciting.

Aled and myself started work on shot 11 on wednesday. Its the most complicated shot in terms of animation, rendering, and comping due to the huge number of aliens. I think we have around 12+ in there so far. Rendering the passes how the motion design guys want is time consuming and I not experience enough with maya to know a quicker way, almost done though. I found that the SSS fast skin on my alien doesnt support passes very easily so I have had to change my alien textures back to standard ones which took up some time. I've just got to sort out the shadows of the aliens then i'm pretty much finished.

We've got one week left so we got tons of work to do to get something for the deadline. The motion design guys have given us deadlines for when they need certain shots in order to finish on friday. the deadlines are too far out of reach. Fingers crossed.

Shot 01 Completed

Shot 01 is completed! I had to re-render the foot as the diffuse had a shadow on it that was too sharp, also the reflection wasn't going to be needed as we were going to use Led's relfection as he ran over, but Josh, the motion design guy managed to get aled out of the shot and replace him with the alien shadow. I also rendered a shot of the spaceship as the reflection. I'm really pleased with the results.

Shot 08 Rendered

I have rendered out the planes exploding with a background to see how it looks. I used a backgorund from the poster i did just to get a feel for how it will look. I didn't add motion blur to the render pass as it would take considerably longer to render. I added a velocity pass in the hope that this could assist the motion design guy in making realistic motion blur. I'm really looking forward to seeing what motion design produce from this shot.

Shot 08 Explosion Test

Today I have been trying to sort out the jets exploding in shot 08. It went quite well. Now all i need to do is light and render the scene. I have posted to videos, One of the Jets and one of the jets with blue drawn on to illustrate the explosion. After talking to my lecturer Guy he discussed how it is a good idea to have an object get thrown into the camera in order to catch the eye and draw the attention from the explosion which is hard to pull off. So I have added a overall explosion of geometry on the planes but then added bigger shapes like the wings and engines and animated them to come more at the camera to add more appeal and a cinematic feel.

Ultimate Image

I made my final touches to my ultimate image today. I'm really pleased with the results. I decided to do a poster for the film for my ultimate image and composed it in the style of a traditional action film. I rendered out the Cg assest, keyed out the hero and created a background destroyed city. I actually really enjoyed making it and it was a good break from rendering. Its also got me more motivated for the film. Doing the background and the comping gave me a taste of what the motion design guys are doing which also helped.

I did a full page poster then I put in some white borders down the side with a texture to them which I think works well. I also added a checky title to see how it looked.

Rendering Shots

I have been rendering quite a few shots and more things are starting to come together. Yesturday I did a render of the space ship for the puddle shot and put it into photoshop to see how it would look. I'm really plaesed with the results for just spending 10 minutes in photoshop.

1st Submittal

Today has been a busy day of getting renders together to hand in. We've managed to put together a rough film edit with a lot of the animation shown which is really promising. We had to get our model turnarounds together and do some nice close up still renders. I only managed to do some still renders of my alien rifle.
Due to uni beeing closed for a long weekend i have been focusing on my website which is going along quite well. I have been rendering out my work and composing it nicely to put up in the gallery on my website. Now easter is finished its time to work 'hardcore' and get the film rolling.

peaks and troughs