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

This is what I had yesterday from this angle:

Here is an update from today:

I have used the same composited photographed elements (slightly rotated to fit better) with the new textures, as well as testing some depth and grading. These shots also have a lens distortion and grain applied from one of the lenses we shot the live action on.

For extra details in this shot (as well as some textures), I have used this reference material:

Taking from this reference material adds extra details to the modelling and makes me question the previous shapes and how the structure in fact works in reality.

For example, the extrusions added make the shape along the top of the wall a metal gurder - which then holds up the wooden rafters, to which the windows and window frames sit.

This was not the case previously. And, for me, I don't want it to be made of cuboids in the general area that it should be to look okay - it's my job to make sure these are real objects. I want the feeling of a place which doesn't exist, but obviously one which may.

I look forward to the tweaks to the environments to be made and the textures blocked out. This will be succeeded by adding extra details into textures and hopefully getting newly modeled elements introduced to create more realism through detail. After the final lighting, rendering and camera angles, I will be at my homely helm of compositing different elements together and tweaking the final outcome for the shots.

Warehouse For Test Progress

This is Lina Ivanova's environment so far for the test (which we shall shoot for next week.)

The lighting will be a little different, based on film noir, and the textures shall be touched up in terms of resolution.

I will do a multi-pass render and create an atmosphere in the place in the composite. Then, I might composite the beautiful Alona Kiricenko into the the environment after the live action (green screen) shoot next Wednesday with Michal Zagorski (if the chroma keying goes well enough...), and follow the storyboard presented in a previous post.