As I mentioned before these past couple of weeks have been devoted to compositing my shots and editing them together with the audio track into a final film. I’ve intentionally been rushing to finish it by the start of the week (the actual deadline is 11th September 2006) due to reasons I’m not at liberty to explain for the moment but what it means is that I’m now at a point where I’ve to decide if I want to continue tweaking and possibly incur a large amount of extra work or just leave it as it is, kick back and enjoy the rest of my time here in Bournemouth. The perfectionist part of me prefers the former. I do have a bit of time to mess about with it so I’ll probably do it. Worse case scenario my adjustments don’t get incorporated in time (or ends up damaging the film) and I just hand in what I already have. Anyways here’s the situation so far:

I found a more interesting and appropriate font for the title and credits.

Just for the sake of it, I’ll go into a bit more detail about how I composite the various passes in Shake. A typical shot requires that I render out 1 pass of the sky, another pass with just the background elements and another with the foreground elements (Mr. Knox, Kid and the bench usually) then finally an ambient occlusion pass (sometimes I render the ambient occlusion pass separately for background and foreground). When the bus is in the shot it might require an additional pass specifically for the bus. I usually only utilise the Blur (or Defocus), ContrastLum and iMult nodes to end up with the final look. I only had to render out Depth passes for the first and last shots mainly because I had camera moves in them. I also had to tone down the ambient occlusion effect (20% mult) otherwise the darkened areas just make the shot look like it’s indoors. I didn’t eliminate it entirely because it does give the shot more depth even though it’s very subtle. Here’s a sample breakdown for Shot06:

Hopefully I’ll have some more interesting news concerning the project next week. See you then!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 12:23 am and is filed under "Wait Mister!" 3D Film Plog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.