Project #3 - “Talking Animal”
Week 9-2 3/11/2024
Due to unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to get much progress done before final turn in. This is an updated version after I was able to get my renders through the farm. I will still be working on this and turning in an updated version by Wednesday.
Week 9-1 3/5/2024
Now that I have figured out my composition it wanted to work on building out the inside and figuring out how everything was going to look. I wanted to have a tomb inside however I wanted to go for more of a sci-fi. My main inspiration is from the John Carter (2012) movie mausoleum/grave scene. I went with more blue lights instead of red though. Below is a comp I did that is low quality for text rendering purposes. My main thing now I think is getting a stone texture on everything inside the tomb. I’d also like to possibly have someone/thing walking behind the casket or the casket opening so there’s more to look at as the wall opens.
My texture reference for the sliding door just decided to not work when I rendered this but it looks fine in my playblasts. I’m not sure why that is but I will be trying to figure that out. I also would like to improve how fast it feels like the door is moving as well as make it to where you can see the door stuttering at the beginning of the animation since right now its just all int he ceiling.
Render Time: 10 sec/frame
UVs
Elements needed:
stone texture on inside
animated light flickers
fix texture reference on wall
improve door animation
light interaction outside of tomb
improve atmosphere inside of tomb
possible person walking inside
fix mask lines
Week 8-2 3/3/2024
My goal over the weekend was to establish my composition and decide finally how I would be opening the wall of the tomb. I decided to ditch the wall swinging open like a door because I just couldn’t wrap my head around how it was interacting with the space so I moved to the door sliding into the ground. I also used this time to clean up my track some because I still felt like I had some slipping when the camera pans.
I also established my key light and made my HDR for my geo dome fill light, so I could start rendering out accurate test renders with my lighting.
HDR Test
Bright whites go to almost 8 and my darks get to 0.003.
Week 8-1 2/27/2024
I have been struggling to get a track to actually work on my footage. At first all the tracks were being picked up on the trees instead of the tomb since those were areas of high contrast. So I tried masking off the area I wanted the camera to track, but then it was like the mask was offset but I could clearly see it wasn’t. I put the image of the track below just to see it. I then messed with some color correction to create something like a mask and that did work! However when trying to put a cube in there to see if I could get it to fit, the focal length of the track was just so wrong. So I took it into maya with a frame from the video to try and get a cube and experiment with what focal length matches. From this I discovered that a 32 mm focal length matches the best.
Track Fails
Track Success
I finally got a good track this time by using a 32 mm focal length. However I was only able to 2.23 before I started losing some key tracks for the edges of my building. I was able to match a cube in nuke and then I exported the nuke camera to maya and lined it up. Below is playblast of the track in maya. There’s only some slight slipping on the top corners which I am really happy with and think I can fix it easily in maya now.
From this I then worked on getting some geo in there so I could animate the wall opening so I also have a playblast of that. I just projected the tomb on to the sides of the other geo to try and make it look like the outside. I don’t know If this will be my final way of opening the door just due to the plants on the side. I also want to play with the wall falling down, possibly crumbling but that sounds intimidating.
I wanted to better visualize by direction for this so I took it into nuke and did a slap comp with the animation, clean plate, and some smoke assets. I really liked the sunlight smoke one since the doors on the tomb have some glass on there so I wanted to see how it would look with a godray coming through them. I still want to play with the ground smoke and make it less dense and slower. I’m really excited to create the inside of this tomb though!!
Week 7-2 2/25/2024
Project 3 Photoshoot
I decided to go with my idea number 3 and shoot at Bonaventure Cemetery. I went closer to the middle of the day because that is when I had time, so I struggled trying to get things not looking over exposed. Below are some of the images I gathered as well as the ball and cube photos. The tomb itself was like a giant cube so I didn’t bother too much with making sure I had those photos for every position change.
This was the first position I played with, but I don’t think I’ll use it just due to the shadows and if I wanted to open the door I’d need to also move the rocks and I don’t feel comfortable in my skills to do that right now.
I swapped to taking images to the side of the tomb like Andrew and Professor Gaynor talked about in class. I did like this version better since it would give me more room to play with. I don’t think I’ll do a shatter effect though, just a simple sliding door moment with the wall sliding down into the floor with some 2D comp smoke coming out slowly. I still want to see if I can make this a day to night edit but that’s not at my top priority. I took still photos, static videos, and a pan video so if my camera track just fails, I won’t be stuck with just a still image.
This is my static video. It does move slightly so if I use it, I’ll defiantly stabilize it.
There’s some jumps in the pan movement just due to my tripod being on uneven ground, so for the final video clip I’d cut it down to about 4 second and hopefully not show the stutters.
Below is the HDR photos I got for this position. I was filming mid day so they feel overexposed, but I’m going to combine them in photoshop and see how it looks.
Week 7-1 2/21/2024
I wanted to shot my photos for project 3 last weekend, but there was a time confusion on my end so that was not possible. I have a reservation with the cage for this weekend though! So I took some test videos of my ideas shown below,
Idea #1:
I liked the idea of using my PS5 for this project since the shape is interesting and the panels come off so I’d be able to get good reference for the object without the top. I really liked the contrast of the lighting color with the orange and the cyan being cast on the console. I also thought it would be really cool to make it similar to a product ad with a matte painting on the inside to represent a game played on the console. My issues are I’d like my inside to be light driven but I don’t think I can get my surrounding environment dark enough for it to be impactful, at least when I tested this on my phone, the videos and photos became really grainy if I got much darker than what I have below. I also don’t know how problematic the reflective black part of the box would be since that is not the moving part?
Idea #2:
My other idea as I was looking around my room (and realizing I don’t have many interesting items that aren’t reflective or translucent) was to us my Keurig. I think the way it opens could be an interesting video but the opening is small so I don’t know how compelling what’s inside it could be. Below is the set up I was thinking of using, but I would not have the tea bags or fork there when I film!
Idea #3:
My third idea was to actually film at the Bonaventure Cemetery using one of the tombs. I think the space is really pretty and lends itself to good photography however the weather may not let me do that this weekend. I’d like to open a tomb and possibly do a matte painting projection of what the inside would look like, whether that be dark and creepy, or elegant, or maybe even a picnic type setting for contrast. I was also playing with the idea of doing a “day for night” edit on it as well since I don’t have something like that in my portfolio yet, and making the inside also have some creative lighting with candles or lanterns.
The image below was taken from: https://www.adastraexplorer.com/post/bonaventure-a-visit-to-savannah-famous-cemetery
