day 20

Mr Ron helped me with the demon textures but it was all to no avail.

after much brainstorming and testing out, Mr Ron decided to do it non-procedurally. Meaning render in groups with different individual textures and render on e at a time which would take a long time. and i cant do it since im leaving for KL tommorow. Atiqah offered to help me with the rendering. Well see next week.

Till then.

PS: THX ATIQAH!

day 19

okay got the bgeos from the mocap team and the textures are all messed up.

i had to fix it but to no avail, i got 30 bgeos each from Priscilia, Avinash, Shalini, and Pamela but i only can use textures from Pamela. 

BIG PROBLEM!

the textures work individually but when i put the $SEED string, all the textures are gone!

Something is really wrong with the IFD files.

This is what i mean

I use an individual texture

I get the texture.

add $SEED

GONE!

ive testing all 30 IFD files individually, it all works. but when it comes to the seed string it doesnt.

my seed attribute node is fine as well.

Seed attribute

and im going to waste a weekend render by rendering without textures.

Hopefully its fixed by tuesday which is also the last day i must finish my part of the shot before i leave for KL on wednesday till friday.

Time check: 10pm

Goodnight everyone.

day 18

okay so i have shown Mr douglas the stuff yesterday and he likes it!

He wanted more bgeos for the demons, like three times more so we can get more variation.

He wanted to add in the dragon falling so i widened the tornado so the dragon can fit.

Too wide

slightly wider and chosen

orignal size

We had a meeting with the mocap team on how many demons i need for variation. Hope its all good before i leave for KL this Wednesday.

day 17

Okay so we got the textures into the demons of the tornado to show Mr Douglas on Thursday,
This is what i got.

I also managed to get the bgeos of the debris out and rendered all the frames.

ready to show Mr Douglas tommorow!

day 16

finally got the textures out,

In the end we have been editing the notepad on wrong file.

now to get them the textures into the the demon falling tornado.

day 15

today Had Dailies with Mr Ron.

Mr Ron thaught us how to do command line rendering so that we can render our houdini files without having to stop our houdini work.

Once Mr Douglas came and went through with us the things we have done so far Mr Ron helped me with sorting out the demon falling part of the tornado which is messed up because the textures were messy everywhere and what we got is this,

instead of the demons with the texture so Mr Ron is helping me sort everything out but still to no avail.

We'll try again tommorow hopefully everything goes out well so we can get the tornado (with the demons falling) out and working.

day 14

Today with the help of Mr Ron i managed to get the bgeo renders of the new tornado out. but to save times i only rendered the one which i cached which was cached out by tens. But it is enough to show Mr Douglas was i was working on.

Due to the limitations due to the connectivity being shut down i didnt manage to do much. We cant make overnight renders because of the NYP having to do whole campus shut down. So we planned on what to do on monday once the computers were back online.

This is what i got after the bgeo renders.

See you Monday!

day 13

Today i did full res renders of the terrain so i can comp it in nuke and render out so i can show Mr Douglas the terrains new position with the scaled up tornados.

These are the two renders i did.

Terrain moved to the left.

Terrain moved to the right.

Tommorow i shall work on the tornado. With Mr Rons help, hopefully.

day 12

Today i did rop the geometry of the tornado to see how to the new force loooks like.
it took me a whole 6 hours to cache it even after i rendered it by 10s.

This is what i got after 6 hours which i think is too long for a cache.

Im fairly new to houdini so i didnt know what was going on and what to do from here. Since the render took so long i didnt want to test it further. i wanted to ask Mr Ron about it but he was too busy with Raps smoke. so instead i am going to do an overnight render of the terrain moved to the right side so I can show Mr Douglas some variations of the new terrain.

day 11

Today i finally figure out renders to the Zdepth in the terrain. So i got a rendered sequence of the terrain pushed to the left side with the zDepth and all.

Then Mr Ron help me figure out the tornado's houdini file.
Mr Ron thought it would be nice if the tornado is going in opposite directions instead of spiral-ing in the same directions. We tried in out, now what im supposed to do is play with the force that scatters the debris to make it look like Harry Potter's Dementors kind of look.

day 10

today i continued tweaking the position of the terrain.

i moved it left and right and i felt that the left side looks nicer.

I scaled up the tornado closer in nuke to because the Mr Douglas wanted it closer to see more of the details but dont worry, i will re-render the tornado as well as the demons falling.

this is what i got.

terrain positioned to the left but with Joyces' tornado. position -40

took out the tornado and pushed it a little more to the left. So its -50

-45

-40

positioned to the right +40

I felt the -45 looks good so i began to render the whole sequence. took me 3hours and 45 minutes.

I could figure how wei jie or Ziyaad rendered the z depth because from what i learnt houdini's render and render all passes out in EXR format and taken out individually. but in Ziyaads nuke file he had a separate render for the zdepth so i was trying to figure out how to render z-depth. With Mr Ron's help i finally figured out. I left the render overnight. See you guys tommorow!

day 9

So after Mr Douglas came yesterday and i showed him what i did for shot 5 he came up with more points to improve shot 5;

- Move the terrain to the side
- Move tornado closer for more detail
- Show ALL demons
- throw in the Dragon
- Take away Joyces' tornado. So use only Ziyaads Tornado.


So today i worked on the first point which is move the terrain to the side to pull focus.
i came up with a few variations. I didnt have time to show sequences so for now ill just show Stills

 1

 2

 3

4

Ill continue on monday. Have a great weekend!

day 8

Today i enhance the elements of the tornado in Nuke.

First i tried to improve on joyces' tornado by adding another tornado and made it faster with re-time and tweaked the grading of the tornado abit brighter.

the original is this

in the end it looks like this.

it was just a small difference, i just made the tonado thicker and slightly faster.

Next up was i tweaked the demons. Mr douglas wanted more demons falling off the tornado and he wanted more demons than angels cause, demons lost in the end cause angels are, well, awesome. So i added another layer of demons and changed the color to more reddish because demons are usually red in color to give the impression of rage and fire. i scaled it up to give it depth and mixed with the original demons.

So there we have it.

what i wanted to ask Mr Douglas was that if i show the debris all thick it will not show the demons properly but if i lessen the opacity of the debris, it will lose detail.

 full opacity

 0.2 opacity

 0.4 opacity

 0.6 opacity

0.8 opacity

Mr Douglas said he wants to show the demons falling off more because the story is more about the characters. He also said it doesnt matter because once he starts matting the problem of lost detail will be solved because what we have been doing is massive layering which is not the way to do cg.

What is matting?

till then...

day 7

Continued working on the Ziyaad's nuke file.

This was the orignal shot.

i managed to move the tornado up front like how Mr Douglas wanted.
I lowered down the blur of the debris in to tornado to give it move detail.
Yesterday i smoothen the rotoscope and color corrected it so that the front clouds will be more focused to the centre.

This is what i got so far.

day 6

After much playing around with the houdini file of the tornado, given that its been awhile since i touched houdini, i didnt know what was going on in Ziyaad's tornado.

Then i realized that i did not need to re render the tornado as it has nothing wrong with it, so i used Ziyaad's nuke file to edit Shot 5.

With Atiqah's help i managed to find out what was going on in his file so i was able to tweak the elements and nodes.

For today i got to tweak some of the roto in the scene to make it look more natural.

Original Roto

 Editted roto, more smooth and natural.
Also managed to move the tornado infront.

Day 5

Today we got work distributed out.

I was assigned to do shot 5 in P3 with Taufiq.

Let me show you the shot :

So thats what im supposed to do. While Taufiq handles the Re-render of the clouds and speed up the lightning.

Mr Douglas came over to discuss with us about the shots, we clarified somethings about what we supposed to do, and Mr Douglas taught the mocap team how to use is master rig to be implemented into all the other characters.

Day 4

The first few days was just about sorting out the files the previous batch that worked on the previous project.
Since we have to re do or enhance some of the elements in the shot.

Today is Friday. i downloaded a few tutorial files for nuke. Since i never touched nuke in the whole 3 years of studying here i have to step up and learn some of the basics of nuke over the weekends since i will be doing the composition of the previous shots.

The Nuke Training CD cant be played so i tried to search the net for some useful Nuke tutorials to study during the weekend.

TGIF guys! Have fun during the weekend.

Next week; 'READY YOUR BREAKFAST AND EAT HEARTY! CAUSE TONIGHT, WE DINE IN HELL!' - Leonidas (Spartan 300)

Day 1

Hello world this is going to be fun!