The Keyboard

This is pretty much all my team has accomplished this semester, courtesy of texture artist, Austin Goddard. We're really going to have to pick up the pace.

Lefty's Room with Dark Light Textures

Kelly let me use some Beary Scary shaders from the 2012 Summer Course. While the texture team is applying those to Boomer's props, I decided to use some of Rachel's textures from or own Summer Course Project, Dark Light, in Lefty's room.


Before

After 

It looks... really freaking good.

localRender by Krista Murphy

Alrighty! This video MAY not look like much, but it's actually the first step towards doubling the momentum of Lefty & Boomer's production. Krista Murphy made this localRender script that renders all the scenes with a single command, using a lot of the same script she wrote for Kelly's Wake. This takes HOURS out of rendering each frame individually and editing them together so that the team is pretty much guaranteed an updated video each week.

Obviously, it's got a few issues; the most obvious being that the renders are almost entirely black. This is because the script renders from the animation files using the hardware, which renders any lights in the scene, and resorts to the default if there are none. This is what it does for Wake, as there aren't any lights in the animation files. However, my animation shots feature assets with linked lights that project other scenes onto the surface, making them and the incandescent textures the only surfaces that the script will render.

I briefly considered removing these lights from the assets, and letting the lighters set them up on a scene-by-scene basis. However, since they've already got so much on their plate, and the layout and animation doesn't make sense without the story present in the projections, I've instead decided to place rough lights into the animation and group them together so that the lighters can easily hide them before placing the proper lights.

So yeah, I've got my work cut out for me, but at least it's cut very nicely. I'm also redoing the light rigs for the texture artists, so I can just reference them and knock two birds out with one stone.

Screen Lighting

It's looking like playing the footage on the screens via lights with an animated color map is going to be our best option, as it saves us the tedium of compositing and the hard drive eating tex files of animated textures. However, there are a few issues to work out.

Mental ray renders them just fine.

Renderman, on the other hand, leaves rather distracting pixelations on surrounding surfaces.

 Same thing in Lefty's room for Mental Ray

Some of the slim shaders in Renderman, however, seem to be looking for objects which don't exist in the renderq.

// Warning: (10/22 13:44) rfm Warning: T16001 Texture "/u/renderq/cjj9640/textures/0263/pov.263.tif.tex" accessed in shader "renderq/cjj9640/leye/shaders/back_LIGHTShape_rfm" with out-of-range t width (5182827545689323933462724203249664.000000). [<Shading> Object: leye:eyeScreen_GEOShape Shader: renderq/cjj9640/leye/shaders/back_LIGHTShape_rfm] //

EDIT: Ope! Nevermind, it was just a warning and the render just took while.

Cleaning Up the Project Space

So my project manager has extracted from my team that the reason they haven't gotten a desirable amount of work done is that the files are FULL of extra cameras, lights, and other objects that made the file look too messy for anyone to deal with. So I set out to strip my maya files down to their bare essentials. 

This is the first and sixteenth scene file after the clean up. It's looking far more structured and manageable. However, I realized that I didn't have any screen shots of the before, so I tried backing it up.

 

THIS is what happened to 010_lighting after the aforementioned backup. My last backup wasn't since 2013, so yesterday's state of the project wasn't QUITE this bad, but you get the general idea. It's all good now, so don't worry.

 

Unfortunately, some extra nodes are still refusing to delete, like scene 4's fx:side and bcam:hide (neither of which appear in the referenced file). Sure, two undeletable cameras may seem harmless, but the last time I ignored a 'side' duplicate, it ended up duplicating itself 200 times and took hours to clean up.

But I am making progress, and soon, working on this project will no longer feel like looking for needles in haystacks.

Lighting Key

 

Here's the first lighting key.

And here's the current state of the lighting.

Live-Action Location Scouting