Type endplates

Particular dust

Frames from final render

Compositing

Renders brought into After Effects with 3D camera data. Split cameras coinciding with visual edits. It's now possible to add in after effects 3D layers which will be picked up by those cameras. Obviously the 2D background plates are unaffected by the cameras so any additional elements sit within the scene.

The main reason for this 3D data being brought in for this scene is adding steam coming out of the machine with particular. Aswell as the camera I brought in a null object attached to the top of the funnel. See the image above for the workflow...



Colour correction stages

Screen material dev

Depth Of Field

Using depth passes (z-depth buffer) and Frischluft Lenscare I can create realistic depth of field to add realism to the shots and give the overall image a depth and richness, while drawing the eye to the point of interest. (Click images to read descriptions and view detail).

Machine animated wireframe

Static camera view. Need a few tweaks and to ramp down the vibrate tag on the base towards the end but I think with a few cuts and closeups this should be interesting enough to take everything in with multiple views of 15secs.

Machine on floor 5

Hanging leads test

Wireframe - dangling dynamic leads hanging from spinning boards.

Machine Build

Dirt Layer

Before I put together the machine with the created and textured assets there was something worrying me about the clean look of everything. Although ambient occlusion shadows add a slightly dirty look (used to be called the dirt shader), I really wanted the models to sit well within the context of the Mill and pick up the slightly gritty dirty aesthetic, especially as it is situated on the 5th floor which isn't used as studios and has a lot of great old texture.

I found out by adding an extra material over the top of everything with an alpha channel and the diffusion channel (dark/light picking up shadows) with a quickly created dirt map I could make everything look a lot more worn and old. I made the texture with a few photoshop brushes and just added it to everything with a texture already applied, randomising the scale and offset so everything looks more realistic.

Also I didnt mention in the previous post - the monitors are all textured with a noisy video screen that animates. This is taken from video-copilots Riot Gear FX as a stock video element. I'm leaving the colour as the blue/teal as a contrasting colour to the warm brown/orange look of a lot of the models. I thought this would add a sense of the machine being powered as well as the physical animation of the elements. The sound design for this will also be very important and I have collected a wide range of sfx/recordings from freesound.org

Fabric Room Wireframe

Style frame

Peripheral fabric dev

Simple texture creation in photoshop with photos and brushes - inspired by the hanging Eva Hesse sculpture.
Colour channel:
Bump channel - Black and white
Transparency map - top and bottom will be slightly translucent and middle will be solid

Fabric Dev

Fabric CC test

Seeing how the fabric textures look in context with colour correction and depth of field. Look quite realistic so far. All that is left to do is set up a few simulations and compose the scene. I like these tube shapes aswell as the sheets to give a bit of depth and body. I'm looking a lot at the mood boards and fabric sculptures research to construct this one so the variation in the forms should come through in final shots (this test is a very sparse example, there will be a lot more going on).

Cloth topology

I watched a quick tip tutorial on cineversity yesterday showing how to get a more realistic deformation from the cloth module. The main thing is mixing up the way the polygons face and adding more edges by triangulating while keeping the geometry fairly low - less triangles gives a better visual result than more quads.

Start with a plane with a mid range subdivision (12x12 here to keep a centre cut) and make it editable.
select a range of random polygons and 'move down sequence' function. This changes the way they face so the triangle cuts face different directions...

When hypernurbs are added to smooth it, curves are added to the new geometry to reform everything back into quads, and the pattern is not uniform.

Setup a quick collision test with a sphere..

moves in a random way, folds are realistic

Using the original square polygons it's clear that the deformation is very uniform and unrealistic

Because of the hard edges it also causes a lot of problems with the self collision and glitching occurs.