Archive for March, 2007
…is a real pain in the arse. I’ve been flying through the lighting, doing a shot a day and sometimes more. It is strange to be working on one for so long now. This is day #2 and I’m still not done. I guess I can thank Maya’s crappy fur implementations for my headaches. In order to get around the shortcomings of the hairs, you have to be tricky in how you composite things. By using a few weird layer techniques during render and funky compositing, you can hide some of these issues (to an extent). It just so happens that this shot is awfully difficult. I’d like to explain more, but it would give away quite a bit to the story.
The good news is, no matter how difficult it is – it is my last shot and I don’t have more to worry about.
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Late this afternoon, I’ve begun lighting the final shot (#111) of my short. It just so happens that this one and the one that I just finished up in the last few minutes may be two of the more difficult (actually, the lighting is rather simple, it is the comp that is complex) in the entire film. Even so, I’m happy to be at the end! There are a few “clean up” shots that I need to do some work on. However, those will hopefully go rather quickly and I will move on to sound effects.
I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, but there is a chance I can put this together before Siggraph’s deadline. Fingers crossed!
This morning brought quite a scare as I picked up a new shot to light. It had a similar setup to one I had done early last week, I copied the file and used it as a starting place. After loading the thing up, I realized something wasn’t right. The cache’d out character geometry wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t moving as I scrolled through the timeline! About two seconds later, panic set in as I wondered if what I did yesterday (mass fix of some 29 shots) backfired and corrupted all of those shots. It only got worse as I realized that I didn’t do a backup (stupid, stupid mistake) prior to running that mass fix.
While lighting a shot today, I realized that one of the characters had something broken in their rig. Somehow, I hadn’t noticed this problem earlier. After debugging what the issue was, I wrote a melscript to fix it. This screwup was affecting 29 shot files, which required some additional scripting that would load each of those files, correct the problem, re-save it and then move on to the next file. What was a pain in the backside to develop the methodolgy to make it work, went rather quickly once it was time to implement.
Those 15 shots that I brought up a few days ago have been re-lit and re-comped. Time to get back to lighting the last few. Here is one that I lit a few days ago (click for a larger image). A couple of people have asked me in the past, so I’ll say it here for everyone… There are actually two characters in the short. The reason why I haven’t released any images of the second character is that I want it to keep a few things about the story a mystery. You’ll just have to wait. :D
