Two Shots

As a group we have been working on getting two shots done for this project. The first, we decided, should be an establishing shot. The environment was pretty much complete so it just needed a slow zoom into it. This is how it came out:
(if video does not work, it can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/38626556)

For this shot, James modelled the environment which was then tweaked by me (I added the flat surface to the top of the hill). I modelled and added the stairs and pavilion. The textures were mainly basic textures which I simply added but the stairs texture, I got an image of beige stone texture of the internet and then added it to make it look a bit better and a bit more like stone. I added the trees using paint effects but they came out much better than expected when rendered in Vray. I also changed the settings of the ocean shader to get a nice river effect than flowed in the direction we wanted.

I rendered all the main environment using Vray but the river would not render unless I was using mental ray. I made everything a bright green colour (except the water) and then rendered this so it could just be keyed out in After Effects. Once both parts had been rendered, I used After Effects to key out the green but there were still some parts visible. To get around this I used a mask and it worked perfectly. Once the keyed shot was layered over the environment shot, t was hard to tell they were not rendered together.

I created a slow zoom using After Effects because then all the footage would stay perfectly composited. I rendered it in After Effects and uploaded it to my Vimeo account.

The second shot has some character animation in. We didn't just want the scene where they are sleeping to be a static image so Lily posed the characters and added the breathing animation. We had real trouble with this shot because the animated characters would not import into the environment scene correctly. When we tried to import the environment into the animated characters, the rig stopped working so the characters no longer moved. We had problems with rendering too. The animated cat had eyes which would not render using Vray. I tried to use a static image but it looked very poor (https://vimeo.com/38626617) and I was not happy with it.

I had tried several different ways to get the eye to render but the only way was to delete the eyes and start again. It took my a long time because once I had recreated the eyes, they would not move with the head so they kept coming out of its body. In the end, it was getting too late to keep messing around so I animated the eyes so that they moved when the head moved.

Now I had a working animation but I could not get it into the environment without the rig not working or the animation not being carried across. All of the group tried to make suggestions but because I was the only one that had both the animation file and the environment file, the others couldn't do it. My and James Tomkins are the only ones with Vray as well so it was either me or him who needed to render it.

In the end James suggesting that we composite the scene. I spent a one time adding lights to make sure that it matched as closely as possible. It took a long time to render the animation in Vray eventhough it didn't have any environment. I then took a static image of a small part of the environment. Using After Effects again, I keyed out the green background of the animation and added the environment image so it looks like they are sleeping on the grass. I then rendered this and uploaded to Vimeo. Here is the shot:
(if the video cannot be viewed properly, you can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/38635102)

The video quality is quite poor because of limited upload sizes on Vimeo but the final film is in much better quality.

I think this shot is better than it was and I prefer it with animation than just a static image.