Seemless Texture Development

I have been working on the edges and corners of the environment. After speaking to supervisor Dr Jin Zhi, due to the fact that the edges are far away from the camera, one can opt for dealing with the jarring edges through simply texturing. I was going to be doing this synchronising anyway, but it really does work. No need for compositing elements and tracking it anymore!

Here is the latest:

Direct your eyes toward the righthand side of the frame where the edge of the platform meets the wall.

More on this elsewhere, and then I am wanting to perfect the light fog and feeling through lighting and render passes. I think it needs some spotlights, then I'll deal with depth and compositing a 'thick' feeling of fog/atmosphere.

Also, in the alleyway scenes, it was suggested to make some of the fog thicker. Jin says this should keep with the original concept and feeling of the piece where atmosphere and mystery is key. So, going to revitalise this soon. And, make sure these two scene sync up nicely...

Shader Development

I have been working on the textures, shaders (mental ray mia material x presets and values) and the UVs.

Here is a comp test:

The next step, after completion of this, is the lighting and render setup (using passes and layers to aid lighting in the comp to create the best depth and light fog effects) and the final camera positions and animations...

Different lighting idea:

Factory/Station Progress

I have added more details to the factory/station interior and played with basic camera setups and the scale.

One of the main additions I wanted to make were thinner details - such as pipes. I have played with the pipes which were there, however wires and circuitry would also add to the large wall areas. Such details were present in the old mills I visited. I will use some photographed elements from the mills by compositing them, but for those which don't work this way, I may discuss with the team in regard to helping modelling them.

Well before

Latest (comp test with fog as suggested at the last peer review)

POV - look to the left

 POV - look to the right

I have now received the textures from Michal Zagorski, so that's the next job whilst tweaking the UVs. I really want to make this look as good as possible in the time I have. I am also toying with the thought of dirtying things up more and adding rubble features using Mudbox or ZBrush, especially if the help is available. But, we will have to see how the texturing goes first, and with the comp it may look fine, but it is definitely a process which will bring more detail and, hopefully, realism. I have scheduled an intense week on this particular process, with miscellaneous jobs intermittently fending for attention. However, this factory interior with the extreme long shot and Tyler's POVs have overriding priority in the project at this moment.

The stage after that is to discuss and develop the lighting to a higher standard. For me,