16 – 21 March 2021
This week I focused to finish my remaining animation tasks for shot 06, 08 and 09.
Action for shot 08 was quite long, so I decided to separate the action into 4 shots to have better angles to deliver all the actions of the scene. While doing these shots, I also made some adjustments to the Space Colony model since the character has some interactions within the area. The original space colony I made several week before was a bit large for the character so I scaled it down about 10% smaller to make it look more proper and realistic for the character to interact to. All of the shots took a bit longer to finish than expected because a lot of things going on at the same time.
Playblast
Below are still renders (without VFX) from all animation shots that I finished this week.
While doing the test render for shot 08d with the character’s helmet off, I noticed that her eyes are black in render, but not in viewport. I proceed to repair the problem and thinking it would be a very quick fix, but it turned out to be a 2 hours work. There are 2 layers of material for each eye and there is one material that was not shared for both eyes. It was a bit weird. I did a lot of back-and-forth changing settings and doing renders again and again to get it right. I even imported the character into new file to check if the problem persists. Almost every setting was changed from reflection to specular, roughness etc and I was still unable to fix it.
There are 2 materials for the eyes and each has 1 unique and 1 shared material.
It was quite frustrating when the eyes sometimes turned into completely white, or completely black with the space colony reflection in it. I also do some lookup to forum discussions to solve the problem. At the end, I cracked it by a straightforward method by just ignoring the settings and replaced both material layers with just a pure texture. I think it is not a correct solution if we want to have a very close-up shot to have realistic look and reflection of the eyes, but it will do for now especially for shot 08d.
After everything ready, I sent the Maya files to the visual effect department for lighting and effects so that they can be sent for render. I also sent the playblasts to the sound department so they can compose and arrange the sound effects needed.