Latest MAV concept art!

We've been working on locking down the storyline for the film, and I'm happy to say that we're pretty much there. I've started putting together some concept art to get the creative juices flowing again, as well as preparing other material for a peer review next week. I'll share that as soon as I can!

Motion Track Test

Done my first motion tracking test this week, and it was quite succesful! The quality on my camera isn't the greatest, so the track isn't completely solid... but I'm happy with the results.

The shot hasn't been composited at all in terms of lighting/shading, I was focusing mostly on the actual matchmoving. I painted out 2 of the track markers, and couldn't be bothered doing the rest.

I've also been working on several Nuke tutorials over the past 2 weeks, and I'm definitely getting there. Should have some updates for that in the new year.

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. 

Research Poster.

The final assessment hand in for the research module is a research poster, shown below. 

Project Schedule

In an effort to motivate/terrify both myself and my team, I put together a rough schedule for the production. It'll most definitely change and become more refined as we move forward, but it's good to have a base timeline to assess. 

It's a lot of work to cram into such a short time, particularly given the fact that Jan-Apr is going to be extremely busy with the Going Live project, but I'm confident that with the right amount of dedication it'll be successful. I've never let ambitious amounts of work get the best of me in the past, and I don't plan on it any time soon. 

Some deadlines might be rather naive, so if anybody can suggest some changes/optimisations that would be much appreciated.