Week 8: Harbor x SCAD

03/06/2023:

Week 9 video Submission:

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03/04/2023:

Lighting Updates:

• When I received the lighting setup, I imported it into my scene, and it lit my particles well, so I didn't need to have any additional lights as I did before.

• I also made sure I didn't have any visible intersections.

  • There was one leaf from a flower that was intersecting the particles and another flower, so I decided to turn that flower's leaves off because the one that was intersecting the other flowers only had one visible leaf, so deleting them didn't cause it to look weird.

• I was then able to render my particles to send to comp.

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03/02/2023:

Flower Animation Retiming:

• I began working on retiming the flowers in shot three to have some finishing blooming movement as the camera passes through the shot. As recommended by the mentors

• To do this, I used a retime node to have the start frame be closer to the end frame, and then I clamped the last frame so the flower wouldn't disappear when the cache ends.

• This gave us the subtle blooming effect we were looking for in this shot

Particle updates/troubleshooting:

Lighting Issues:

• An issue mentioned during the critique was that my particles had such a weird condensed bright look to them.

• I realized when looking through my file that when I was positioning the flowers and creating the layout, I had turned on all the lights that were originally lighting the flowers and forgot to turn them off.

• This is what was making my particles look as if they were glowing when they didn't have any emission on them at all. After I turned this off, my result looked so much better.

Particle Count Updates

• To make my particles less thick next I looked at my particle count.

• When I saw how high I had it, I was not surprised my simulation looked so incredibly thick. I accidentally typed an extra 0 in my point count. Where I thought I only had 200,000 particles, I had 2 million.

• I changed the particle amount to 900,000, lowering it by 1.1 million particles, and my result looked so much better than before and sped up my simulation a ton which was great.

• My next step is to make sure I am not getting any intersections with my particles in the simulation

• when Zach delivers the lighting setup, I can adjust the colors accordingly.

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03/01/2023:

This week we got to meet our mentors in person, and this gave every group a lot more time to go over the different aspects of the project, and it was a lot easier to understand the critiques they were giving when they were right in front of us. A majority of the comments we received this week were focused on the lighting, which was expected by us as the lighting has had a bunch of major changes over the past couple of weeks. I some of the critiques and suggestions they gave us I noted below:

Note: Although shot one is cut, we are still retaining the same shot numbers, so although shot 2 is the first shot in the sequence, it is still referred to as shot 2

- Shot 2:

- The eucalyptus is having a retiming issue causing the growth to appear as if it is skipping frames in between movements

- The key-to-fill ratio is too high

- Shot 3:

- cut the 1st five frames and the last five frames because it feels like there is an abrupt stop it will make the movement much smoother.

- In this shot, add just the ending frames of the blooms for a little bit of extra movement in the flowers; this will connect the two shots

- Have the rack focus in the next presentation

- Shot 4:

- Particles are a little too thick

- Liked the more pinkish color

- Extend the ending, so the particles fully travel off-screen; then is when the cut to the title screen will be.

Overall:

- Keep key lighting at a 10 - 1 ratio

- Single-directional lighting (like from a window)

- Take a look at the flower petal edges and the subsurface edges

- Everything is individually too well lit