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Week 7 / Refinements
- hankim28
- Feb 17
- 4 min read
Organized by newest to oldest
Team Members:
Hannah Kim - FX
Yiyi Long - FX
Deja Smith - Compositing
Emma Wei - LookDev & Texturing
Fanchen Xing - Lighting
Week 8 To-Do:
Render Pipeline
Shot04 vine faceting
Overall FX touch-ups
Mentor / Professor Feedback:
CG needs refinement
Grass is sparse and not connected to the ground
LargeVine and WallVine timing corrections
Faceting and UV issue on LargeVine needs fixed
2/22
The group ran into a lot of render issues this weekend. It took a lot of long hours and troubleshooting, but we managed out alright and sent in our renders to comp by Sunday morning!
The newest project USDs were maxing out on the render farm. The computers that did render out shots were missing textures, but the scene was glossy black instead of pink. We came to conclusion that it was from all of our textures being 4k. LookDev quickly compressed them into 1k resolution, re-uploaded, and things looked more promising.
Our MasterLayout and USD renders sped up 2x as fast. Our new renders were still missing frames and some textures. I checked our crash logs and found out the updated texture paths were incompatible with the farm. Through a lot of reworking file structures and re-rendering, we fixed the issues and got out correct render layers. Super busy weekend for all of us, I feel like I learned so much from this experience.
(3/4 still shot renders)
2/20
Today the group is working through setting up our correct render layers. We've struggled with this together for a while now, but by setting them up as a team today we can get our renders out to comp Saturday!
While we were setting this up, I made sure to go back into my FX and fix a couple hiccups I had with some ferns in shot03. The first iteraction is too consistent and the rotations are all the same. I went back in and added randomness to their rotations and thinned out branches based on age.
(Right: Old variation / Left: New variation)
Ferns are today's big focus apparently, because we're doing more corrections! The ferns in shot02 have had underlining grouping issues from the beginning. I suspect the difficult comes from the 'Simple Tree Tools' I'm using to create them. The tool is finicky and does not react well to outside nodes.
I managed to call back my group naming attributes into the final cache. I set up a 'pack' node to achieve this, but it weirdly increased the simulations GB in it's USD. The ferns were slowing down in our MasterLayout file and crashed test renders.
Instead I included 'attributetransfer' nodes and made sure to register the group naming as primitives. Thankfully this worked out well! Reduced ferns from 10 GB to 2 GB.
2/19
After getting our new plant layout approved, I focused on messing around with the LargeVine speed based on critique.
The vine starts already in frame now. Left is the old timing and right is the new.
Not too fond of the faster vine. The speed was re-timed based on a cache, and changing the speed means the vines end on a different position. I think if I had
more time to work on key framing and making sure the vine follows the camera movement I would go with the newer speed, but for now I decided to keep to the original tempo.
Baby ferns are on the way! Ferns are the best to play around with on this project since there are hundreds and thousands of different variations to choose from. For this round, I'd like to reference a taller shape like the images below:
This is the rough idea of the shape I'm going for. Still trying to copy the same growth animation as the large ferns for continuity purposes. I'm going to fix a lot for the baby ferns this week:
Dispersing in the leafs is too rough
Rotations in the leaf patterns need slightly tweaked
Some leaves stand up (need to sit down)
Started plugging in Yiyi and I's new assets into Shot03! I'm super happy with how awesome this looks.
2/17
Today the group reflected on our goals for this week as a team. A lot of this week's critique was focused towards lighting- so FX used this as an opportunity to continue adding more to our hero shot while the LookDev team refined the living room.
The team thought things looked sparse, so Yiyi and I teamed up and drew out a quick concept of the new plants we wanted to add. We all agreed that we strayed away from our original idea of having the plants consume the space, so we went backwards to deliver:
More passion flowers in shot03
More queen of the night flowers in shot02
Small fern variations in the background
Passion and queen of the night flowers in shot04
Vines were changed to a pink/ fuchsia shader
(Pardon the iphone pictures)
Medium res still of our plant layout concept (future Hannah edited this on 2/22 as a good example!):
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