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Our video at the beginning of this week To-do: Balance the background between all shots Wood grain direction and emphasize the bump/normal map more Shot 4 lighting is too flat Add a fill light to shot 3 inside the printer before particles come in This week, we are focusing on small finishing touches before we meet the mentors in person to show off our final video. The main focus is to maintain consistency between each of the shots. To do that, the background in our final sho

Our video at the beginning of this week Our feedback for this week once again focused mostly on the lighting and the particles. We need to push our spill lighting in shot 1 a bit further so that there is more spill on the ground too. We decided to tackle this on the compositing side, as some of our particles are already slightly overexposed. This was another critique. We are going to lower the maximum emission level for the particles. They thought the dramatic lighting in sh

This week, the lighting was being updated by Charlie, our lighting artist. We also began render tests, and I was able to see how the materials looked fully rendered. As expected, the base color was too dark. Unexpectedly, it was WAY too dark, even in the much brighter updated lighting. There was also black shapes all over the trees that did not feel intentional. With the help of Mia, our environment artist, we realized that something was happening with the normal map, causing

Our video at the beginning of this week This week, our video was extremely well-received by the mentors. Most of our critique was on either the FX or the lighting. Last week we spent our time improving mostly shot 3/4 and a little bit of shot 1/2, so our goal for this week was to give a bit more love to the final shot. Our critiques encouraged this as well. They thought our new lighting in shot 1 was a great improvement, but that the color spill from the particles could stil

Over the past two weeks, I focused on creating textures for the trees in Adobe Substance Painter. The tree models we received did not have any UVs yet, so I began by creating UVs and arranging them in Maya. The un-textured trees in Maya a snapshot of the layers in Substance I used various layers of colors and noise maps in Substance Painter to create a unique bark texture. I used a combination of tri-planar projection, spherical projection, and UV fill to apply these proced

Our video from the beginning of this week The mentor feedback primarily focused on shot 3,4 and 5. They mentioned that those three shots were too repetitive and to consider cutting one out. They had a lot of feedback about the various FX, and continued to give feedback on our shot 1 and 2 lighting, as well as new feedback on our shot 3 lighting. They also mentioned the specularity of the particle material was off, mentioning it looked like glitter, which I also agreed with a

The video we received feedback on this week. This week, we received more feedback from the mentors about our shot 1 lighting. The emissive material didn't cast as much light onto the environment as we hoped it would. We also showed two versions of our updated shot 1 lighting based on last week's feedback. We had version 1 stay darker for the duration of the shot to emphasize the ink colors and version 2 gets brighter to see the features of the printer more. The mentors prefe

This week I worked on creating a plan for the environment texturing. I put together two callouts-- one for winter (the majority of the film) and one for spring (the transition at the end, where less of the environment is shown). I then gathered various references to use in my process of creating the textures in Adobe Substance Painter. I tried to focus on close-up, high-definition images. For the material variation, I wanted to stress the cold of winter and the new inviting w

To do: Finish shaders and create a quilt to display them UV the printer model Begin generating designs to go on objects in shot 5 (Nano Banana or DALL-E) Updated shader list (some changes since last week): Wood Stone Reflective black plastic (front cover of printer) Matte grey plastic (main material of printer) Black Plastic with textured design (printer tray) Printed ink (with slight emissive) Stainless steel Phone case (soft silicone) Table At the beginning of this week, I

Our pitch video submitted for review on Tuesday. To Do for WEEK 2: Create shader list Choose textures for objects that have gone through the printer Close-up texture selection-- exact texture that will be printed on the close-up object Set up neutral lighting for shader creation Begin shader quilt and lookdev turntables Our video had quite a few critiques from the mentors surrounding clarity, shot length, and camera angles. The mentors recommended we compile a list of shader

Winter quarter week 1 / 2 update for Metamorphosis

An intro into my collaborative project for this quarter, and our week 1 pitch

I have begun working on the alterations. The waist has been taken in, and I have finished hemming the dress. The fabric needs to be hemmed twice to lay flat, so it took a bit longer than I initially expected. The next step is to add the first layer of colored fabric. This layer will be multiple strips of fabric attached at the waist, draped in the same shape as the hem of the white dress. I've started arranging it to see how I want to attach it, and I think the easiest way fo

What's been going on with shedding velvet?

Things are moving right along!

An update on the costuming for Metamorphosis.

A rundown of the events during Roots Of Evanescence shoot weekend.

An update on Roots Of Evanescence before heading into shoot weekend.

Week 2 Update of progress on the Metamorphosis project.

Week 1 progress on the Metamorphosis project.