Ravine: Animation Sequence

Final Animation: Playblast Preview

   A preview animation is underway. For now here is a screenshot of what has been developed so far.

The Fish

Rendered using MILA Shader networks and every sort of map under the sun.
In the scene itself, there are two directional lights parented to the fish so as the fish moves the lights follow and then can be rotated accordingly with the shot needed. 4k Maps.  Normal, Displacement, Height, AO is baked onto the texture.

Narrative - Making Of Ravine

Reworking the environment

   With a few hours to go before the deadline there was a little discussion on the development of at least some kind of animation. This was set back however with a disagreement over the scene that had been produced. The discussion was resolved with a look into adding to an earlier environemnt model

  With two and a half hours before the deadline, creating new textures was a tall order. Instead focus was made on adding the constructed assets into the version 2 environment.

  When complete two render sets were made: The first set above are ambient occlusion passes while the set below are the objects with a default shader but illuminated with an ambient light.

 There was some discussion on how upward travel was being conveyed. In the scene presented in preview render passes with this matter was resolved with a dead end. Exploration was made using geography to imply the only way is up in an alternative direction to the use of a dead-end style barrier of rock to imply the fish could not go further.

Scene Renders

Deadline Approaching: Wednesday Progress

  Today has proven very productive one as there has been plenty of finishing up keeping me busy. The group has just about everything to progress with a cohesive animation.

   The coral is finished. The skeleton within allows for the coral branches to be posed, which will be useful when the coral is needed to pursue and surround our fish characters. As well as room to give some perception of variance when lots of these are used.

  There was a little refinement to do with the skin weights as there was a sizable spread especially further up. This was cleaned up rather promptly as the coral has plenty of large, uniform surfaces.

  The stage after this was to set up a control network to position the coral branches, which took some experimentation to strike the right balance between amount of control and number of control nodes to use.

  Each control unit controls between three and five joints each. Where there was a split, the joints were labelled "-A and -B" in the channel box.

  It was high time that the scales had their own texture maps. A workable texture was created, kept small for rendering purposes, and a blinn shader that included a reddish specular light and an ambient occlusion node for effect.

  With many of our assets completed I looked into a few of the models I had contributed for and looked into creating occlusion sets for them. This helps give an idea of these models in their purest form with only a basic shader and a good sense of depth.