Animation!

So we’re finally at the animation stage. Or have been for the past few days. To get the most out of the remaining time, Andreas, Aleksander and Jamie are chipping away on the shots while I render them out and take them through compositing.

As I’m the last person to touch the footage before editing, I’ve spent the past few days trying out different “looks” for the final film, screened them for the rest of the team and adjusted things based on the feedback. We finally decided on the look in the video above. I then created a Nuke template that I can use to quickly apply the same look to the rest of the shots.

The only thing remaining for actually pushing out finished shots is to work out the wind direction and position of the sun for each clip so that the clouds move properly etc.

To stay sane, we’ve created an Excel document to keep track of what everyone is doing.

We’re also planning to have a bit more convincing smoke and fire effects this time around, so I will add smoke and fire to certain shots when they come in. For this reason, I’m currently spending my time learning the 3ds max plugin FumeFX so we’ll be able to produce convincing fireballs, smoke trails and explosions. Allan McKay has some good tutorials on the subject, so I’m looking through those. Here’s hoping V-Ray and FumeFX will play nice when it comes to render passes…