Bake Off/Trade Off - Light Maps

Trying to reduce render times.

The static elements in the scene (lighting and geometry) allow for "baking" lighting effects into textures. The UV layouts are expensive in time but worth it. Not only do they reduce render times hugely, but the resulting images can be quite intriguing in their own right.

Shooting Craps

As the models, textures and lighting come together, we're starting to get a real idea of the final look.

From the opening pedestal camera move in the lift car....

 
... to the drama of the Doctor's office interior...

Render times remain a problem and we'll look at that next.

The New Shot List Was Missing.....

I'd been following this revised shot list but hadn't posted it. This was created using proxy models for environment and character. A loose shot tempo is represented by the heart beat graphic.

Click on an image to view more detail.

This set of shots for the doctor's office remain unresolved. Options are still being considered while working on technical elements.

A Real Rig-marole

Choosing an "auto-rigging" solution over a manual build was meant to save me some time, grief and mental fatigue.

Advanced Skeleton (www.animationstudios.com.au/advanced-skeleton) is a fantastic tool but the basic process requires a model to have specific attributes and the steps to be followed. Mistakes while learning were plentiful.

Perseverance was key. The facial rigging scripts, once parameters were defined, were amazing to watch in action.

The Model Protagonist in Summary

Here's our man.

Ready to go.

Rigging up next followed by a serious look at scene optimisation. Render times are killing me

Hair-dos, Hair-Don'ts

There were some positive aspects to Maya's MASH networking in placing David's hair-cards.

• It was fast
• There was the ability to add randomness in scale, tangent angle and placement
• Many cards could be placed automatically, covering the entire surface of the scalp

Hair-cards applied using MASH

The results initially looked promising but did reveal a number of problems.

• It was unpredictable
• Many cards became clumped at peculiar angles
• The process removed the individual pivot point of each card making adjustments from the root and manipulation difficult.
• While visually effective from frontal angles, other angles proved much less satisfactory.
• This would require a lot of time consuming manual adjustment made more difficult by the heavily overlaid geometry and pivot placement

I made the decision to go "fully manual" and restarted the process. The new set of cards were created, pivot points adjusted and the geometry manually placed. 

Manually created hair-cards, textured (colour and transmission maps) 

Initial placement of border cards

Further work in placement

The Clothes Horse

New haircut, new boots, new pants. David has also finally got some clothes

The shorts need some more work, all need texturing but I feel that he's finally coming together as a character.

Hair Tomorrow

This is David's new haircut. I experimented with a few tools for applying the hair-card geometry to the head and settled on Maya's MASH network.

The Arnold shader caused a lot of problems in set up and I'm still not entirely sure why. there is a simple combination of colour, specular and transmission maps but they initially refused to work.

The hair requires more styling but the silhouette is starting to work.

Hare Today

I've decided to try hair-cards for David's character. This approach looks reasonably effective, efficient and controllable with, hopefully, low overheads at render time.

Tests required