I have been fiddling with the book-form animation sequence in Maya, applying a toon shader and adding lighting to bring it closer to a polished quality that I would use in the short film.
I have trouble recreating the light flare that I made with one of my lights in the bedroom scene. I have fiddled with various values and elements and even tried importing the same light into the scene but it wouldn’t work.
My solution to this was creating a box for lights to be contained in and be more visible. I created a transparent sphere during my efforts to recreate the effect, but successfully accomplished it by accident in a different way. Creating a transparent sphere and adjusting the exposure, intensity and aiRadius value of the point light results in the middle and bottom image.
Interestingly enough, the top image has ‘glitter’/’stars’ by making use of the noise that comes from rendering, resulting in this cool visual.
Progress Pics
In the meanwhile, I have been working on visually planning out how the 2D animated sequence of my film would develop- what are the actions specifically, how the camera would move, what ideas to incorporate and how to incorporate them.
This part of the process was difficult as I had to consider the overall narrative, story beats and structure, and also make it fit within the limiting time limit. This puts my storytelling skills to the test. I need to show creativity while keeping it simple in concept and execution. I wanted to give my film some sort of depth to it is simplicity.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the story which made me doubt my skills and narrative. I had a lot of ideas and this experience made me aware of my limitations, of my lacking experience using these skills.
Today, I had a talk a one-on-one with Hossein. I had troubles with working out the lighting to create the atmosphere/environment that I need through lighting and colour. I wanted to make my bedroom scenes feel like they are in nighttime or daytime. Hossein informed me that this can be done in post-production color grating. He showed me some basic color grating tips to use in Premiere Pro:
Lumetri presets
Functions with the prefix RG.
I have also asked for some advice from a peer of mine who is familiar with color grating, Aries, and he recommends to use the simple method of using After effects, creating an adjustment layer and fiddling with the Hue values.
Comments