Monday, December 8, 2014

More Texture Adjustments/Issues

12/8
We found out the fingernails have crazy reflections - need to come up with a better long-term solution, but for now I just gave them a diffuse color.
reflecting the notecards


diffuse is too bright without subsurface

  I just darkened the color until there is a better solution....

Cassie has been working hard testing out different lighting
Earlier experiments: The spotlight is in the correct place, but the shadows get a little long and distracting.

Tried moving light to another angle: direction doesn't make sense, the light needs to be more frontal

Same as above.  However the contrast and the background are looking really nice.


11/13
The material in the occlusion pass suddenly started acting weird - now she looks like metal

Also the eyebrow/eyelash textures/geometry keeps detaching/disappearing

Eyebrow textures were an easy fix - still working on the eyelashes - but Cassie got the spotlight looking really nice



11/6/14
The eye is being weird again......I feel like we have fixed the same pieces of geometry over and over and over and it never ends......


Out of ideas...I have deleted and replaced her right eye.  We will see if that solves the problem.

11/2/14
In lighting, Cassie noticed the eyes turning strangely dark.

The eye geometry has 2 clear outer layers to create the refraction needed, so we thought the problem might be the direction the normals were facing (the normals were spontaneously reversing anyway, which was strange).  We tried different combinations and kept getting weird results.


This picture wasn't an error, I just included it because it looks cool


After hours of troubleshooting, I thought to look at the render stats.  It turns out that the settings don't necessarily transfer though referencing, so the layers that were supposed to be transparent were casting/receiving shadows (among other issues), which was causing the darkness.  Problem solved!


THE STAGE:
Trying to add more texture to the floor - it was looking too smooth before.










Saturday, December 6, 2014

Trailer Prep

We weren't sure how many shots we would be able to render by the deadline, so I planned for 2 scenarios:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAU5u2oJ6uI&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o0fUs-s4ZA&feature=youtu.be

The above videos are just to get the timing down.  Sound and more developed visuals are in process and will hopefully be ready by the fall show.

I'm still trying to pick a title, but here are some tests I made for the trailer....





I spent some time researching handwriting analysis and how it relates to personality.  *Supposedly*.....according to my findings......:
left slant, small and delicate letters - shows reserve
a 'cradle' on the lower stroke of letters g, y, p, etc. - avoidance of aggression and confrontation
a full loop on the lower stroke of letters g, y, p, etc. - need for security
narrow left margin, wide right margin - caution, wanting to avoid being pushed, fear of the unknown
high dot over the letter "i" - great imagination

I experimented with some "character inspired" handwriting.  I like the concept, but in the interest of having an eye-catching, legible title, I may not use them:




For the final animation, however, I'd like something with a little more impact.  I plan on making a painting with the text incorporated somehow.  Caleb showed me some "Adventure Time" title cards, which look great and are kind of what I have in mind. EXAMPLES HERE

Friday, December 5, 2014

Boyfriend Animation


The leg-popping is definitely caused by the IK pole vectors, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to fix it!

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Pants on the Ground!

11/13
Texture for the underwear finished



10/30
Lookin' like a fool with your pants on the ground.





Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Finishing Facial Rigging

12/2/2014

More blendshapes!





10/29/2014

It's not quite done, but we're starting to get blendshapes and rigging set up for the faces!


Also there was an interesting episode where her face was disappearing (something about double transformations) but Wei fixed it up with the updated rig.



Friday, September 26, 2014

Texturing problems - solved and unsolved

Textures for the caruncles, tongue, and gums spontaneously reset back to default gray textures.  I have no idea what caused this - so I just made new ones.  Solved!



Gretchen made these beautiful textures....




....but the shoes would turn gray further down in the pipeline.




After digging around, we found the shoe shader network nodes all detached from one another (don't know when that happened) which was why it was turning gray.  I reattached/rebuilt the textures, and that seems to have solved the leather issue.  However, part of the buckle decided to not recognize the metal shader attached to it, and it is turning red.  The problem has still not been solved.




Cassie has been having a nightmare of a time trying to troubleshoot bugs in lighting.
1. There is a mysterious glowing spot that she can't get rid of (in subsurface and the final render:

except when out of nowhere it renders correctly (happens once, never happens again, no explanation)

When she takes measures to try to fix it, it messes up the rendering of the eyes:

Solved! - Cassie: I FIXED IT! Had to make sure the cull backfacing was coming through on subsurface. So I had to do a little file clean up in the passes. There was extra SS passes made back from when the file was first referenced in. Despite them being disabled those passes didn't have cull backfacing checked and were somehow overriding the default. So I just deleted all the passes made and cleaned it up in the files that they were being referenced in. **Edit** Reading more on it I believe cull backfacing should be off, I turned it off and it's rendering fine now too. I think what the issue was too many SS passes were in the file.


2. Also the nose spot, which disappeared with no explanation, is back: