Going Live: Final Render Passes.

I've completed the final render passes for the film which are listed below. Some may show up better than others and might be best viewed full size. Shot 3 (the one shown) probbaly has the most, but shot 2 also has some unique challenges which I'll need to address.

For simplicity some of the passes (e.g. Fire) have been composited and merged as it's made of up several individual layers/effects. 

I've also been given access to the render farm, which allows me to set off the renders at will. It's a really great asset to have, and I'm picking it up pretty quickly! 

Going Live: Final Paper Shader.

I've finished tweaking the paper shaders and textures for the dragon, really pleased with the look. I could have spent a lot longer messing around with it but I need to move on to finalising the compositing!

I thought it would be cool to add in a glowing fire from inside the dragon to really show off the translucency of the materials. I achieved this by parenting a light to one of the joints inside which I will render out as an individual pass allowing me to toggle/flicker it when he breathes fire.

Polygon Boots Final Render

So my boot project is finished, and I'm very happy with the results. The lighting, rendering and compositing took a lot of fiddling around but I got there in the end. 

The model topology (which has since been refined slightly) is viewable here.

The initial texturing and shading (which has also been refined slightly) is viewable here.

There's a screenshot of my Maya setup below, showing the outliner, render layers and boot topology. 

The lights were just a basic 3 point lighting rig, all with physically correct attributes, but with pure white colour in order to avoid any additional gamma correction. As for render passes, I rendered everything in full 16/32bit .EXR files with full Linear workflow to get the most flexibility in compositing. 

The render layer/pass setup is listed below:

- Rim light

     - Diffuse 

     - Specular

- Fill Light

     - Diffuse

     - Specular

- Key Light

     - Diffuse

     - Specular

- Ambient Occlusion

- Master Layer

     - Depth

     - Indirect

     - Master Beauty 

I imported all the .EXR files into NukeX for compositing, manipulating almost all of the sections slightly. Obvious changes include camera blur, lighting tweaks and colour correction.  Here's a screencap of my node tree:

Finally, below is the final output. It's a shame we weren't givent the opportunity to track/composite the project into a live action shot as intended, as those are my primary interests on the course. However it did give me the chance to have a quick run through of most production roles in the pipeline.