Over the summer I've been practising my drawing skills. I know that character drawing is one of my weaker areas so I have been creating splotches and random shapes and attempting to fit character faces into those shapes. I feel this has helped to create slightly more expressive characters.
Some modelling and rendering practise using Maya and Pixar's Renderman over summer. I know this needs a lot more work to appear realistic so I will continue to play around with the textures and shaders.
A selection of drawings and a painting from my last two lessons.
We used the technique of boxes and sketching out through using the edge of a piece of charcoal again which I found really helpful to get back into drawing. I think I might keep using this technique when posing characters.
Some longer poses which I preferred as I had the time to add detail. I also enjoyed working on coloured paper to work with contrasting tones.
One of our life drawing lessons gave us the change to practise painting in acrylics. I haven't painted in a really long time and found it quite difficult to get the grips of it, however I'm quite pleased with the result. I think it needs some work to improve my painting skills and my painting speed by blocking out the different shades really quickly.
After testing how long it would take to render out a shot without fog we realised it would take too long to render if we were to use it throughout the whole animation. As well as not having enough time the fog seems to be creating more noise and although there is a way to reduce this it would increase the render time even more.
Using the technique of drawing in boxes was quite helpful as it made sure we could keep the full figure within the area. We then had to make the figure touch two sides of the box which I think helped to prevent from drawing too small.
We then applied this drawing technique to a full page drawing as well as a new technique of using the edge of a piece of charcoal to capture the overall position of the figure. We then went in and added detail once we had rough markings outlining the figure. I found this really helpful as it allowed me to lightly sketch up the form and position before I began drawing.
We then applied both these techniques to portraits of each other later on. I don't think it worked as well as it did when drawing the figure, but I also think I need to work portraits more.
After noticing a problem with the floor, I attempted to create a curved plane to hide the wall. This still showed a clear line on the horizon which wouldn't disappear when batch rendering.
I then created a loft using the CV curve tool which created a gradient backdrop so the wall or floor is not at all visible.
There is still a lot of noise in these renders which is hopefully the last problem I need to solve before I can begin animating.
After testing glass, metal and diffuse on spheres under a spotlight we realized we needed fog to show the cone of light (volumetric lighting). I tested some spotlights using fog but the render seemed to be taking a while. I had another attempt at creating fog with the robot character imported into the scene to see how long one frame would take. Using maya fluids to create a 3D container I filled it with a gradient and decreased it in density to show a subtle cone.
I tried a second test using a cube and Rendermans Pixar volume and decreased density float to again show a subtle outline of light. This took about the same length of time however when a camera move intersected the Pixar volume, the fog was no longer visible which is shown in the second clip below.
Camera move rendered with renderman moving through the fog using maya fluids.
Camera move rendered with renderman moving through the fog using Pixar volume.
This would prevent us from creating close up shots of the character.
As well as this we noticed that the edge of the floor was visible in batch renders but not single frame renders. There was also a noise problem when rendering out a batch render which I need to try and fix before we reach the rendering stage of production for this project.
