SCAD X Harbor: Week 5

2/11/23 - 2/12/23

Weekend Overview: Lots of Troubleshooting and Progress!

Render Passes

Render Issues

This past weekend we made a lot of process as a group and have been able to get some really pretty looking renders out, however, we also hit a lot of obstacles that we had to troubleshoot.

One of these issues that were probably the biggest setback was our render errors to the farm. Every time we would submit a job to the farm, it would begin to render however it would never finish and we would get this error.

To try to solve this problem I began running different tests, first locally and with command line render which both worked. However, still, the farm wasn't working. So I began slowly taking different aspects of the files out and kept running different iterations. With less geometry in the scene with different render nodes, I copied everything I needed into a new hip file and none of these worked finally I took out all materials and shaders and that ended up being able to go through so we knew that was the issue. Then I did a test with just shaders and no textures to see if it went through, so we now know it is the textures causing this error on the farm. Our next step is to figure out how to fix these errors.

When we thought we figured out the issue was that the textures were causing it I went to rerender but I added back all my AOVs and once again I got the same errors. So I took them away and it rendered again. We will need to troubleshoot why this is happening.

While this issue hasn't been solved are continuing rendering on the farm just without AOVs and without the background textures. We are rendering the background textures locally, and we will have to figure out the AOVs next week.

Plant and Leaf Issues

Another issue we ran into is that we wanted to be able to use quixel megascans on our animated leaves and plants, however because of the way they were made procedurally each leaf basically has to be remade. The leaves I made using curves would mess up the UVs of the megascans and create a really weird result. To be able to make them usable I began this process by going through my node graph and figuring out if I can salvage the animation from the original leaves. A lot of the groups I made to create the original leaves have to be reconfigured to the new ones to save the animations which will take some time and is a goal for nest week.

2/10/23:

After creating these layouts and sending them over to Hailey for a comp HaoXiang and I began discussing how to assure the flowers are of relative size to each other. I did some research and found some reference pictures of the rose lily and chrysanthemum all near each other so we can see how big they are in comparison to each other. As you can see the Lily and chrysanthemum are much larger than the rose. We will be fixing this for the final comp.

To better establish our color palette I was looking at some bouquet references featuring pink and peach pastel tones and we decided to stick to that for our palette.

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2/9/23:

We had a group meeting today that really gave everyone a better idea of what needs to be done to complete this project on time. Later today we all got to work. I specifically started with the flower arrangements. However, because the camera tracks kept needing to be updated the arrangements did too. Which was very tedious. We were here able to get some basic flipbooks done and sent to Hailey for a slap comp. Setting up the flowers was very difficult because of how heavy the flower simulations are even with a file cache.

Notes Regarding the Slap Comp:

- Post submitting this live-action comp the decision was made to switch to all CG because of the blurriness of the background and the shakiness of the tracks.

- In shot 1 the flowers and stems that seem misplaced in the beginning are supposed to be masked out and are actually under the ground plane.

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2/8/23:

I began editing the spray effect today to try to get a more accurate spray. I can't do too much editing because I don't have the tracked cameras so I cannot match the timing or movement of the camera to know how far the spray is supposed to go and how fast or slow it should be. Hao Xiang is working on the vellum pump effect for the bottle so I will also have to time the spray to this. Also for some reason I can't deactivate my spray or change the start time without getting weird stepping. I will work on all of these issues.

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02/07/23

In this week's presentation, we weren't able to get many notes from the mentors because of the lack of preparedness on our part, but they still gave us some great ideas and suggestions despite this.

- The Leaf texture on the flowers needs a lot of work, suggested using Quixel assets rather than trying to procedurally model it

- The flower petals feel a bit papery ( thicken for fix)

- Establish a better/ more cohesive color palette

Other Notes regarding future presentations from professors:

- Video Order: Team Pictures -> todo and accomplishments list -> video

- Show don't tell!!!

- Star Hero Shots

- Note stretch Goals and low priorities