Final Video

My final output, finally!

Finishing touches!

Presentation went by swimmingly! :D

Here's the link for my slides: Presentation

Here's the very last part of my network: All the bells and whistles! After reading in the 15 hour render, I use some shuffles and transforms to apply chromatic aberration to the image. Motion blur, lens distortion, camera shake, grain and vignetting are also applied to the image sequence. Separating this from the main compositing allows me to tweak the settings n almost realtime, which is important especially for grain and camera shake.

Final video coming soon!

Tweak twig

Low res test render of final composite with camera shake and motion blur.

Spent the whole of today tweaking my comp to give the scene a greater sense of depth via color correction and saturation, using the depth pass as a mask. The render of the kelp and jellyfish were also duplicated, transformed and color corrected to create more layers in the scene. This way, together with adjusting the values in their respective depth passes, I could have the kelp fade into the distance. A color lookup was also used on the merged depth passes to create a sort of exponential falloff that gives the feeling of a medium like water instead of air.

Also, lots of tweaking to get the comp to look right.

Rerendering again..

And so I'm re-rendering all my elements, again. The reason for this was that I had to change my animation and simulation attributes so the tentacles would not look really stiff near the head. That was caused when I unknowingly edited the gluetoanimation attribute while trying to solve another problem.
And since I had to re-render anyway, I took the opportunity to tweak my animation for the hero jellyfish.

The background jellyfish were also re-simmed, however, only 5 were simulated this time, instead of 20 in order to save ROPing time. The 5 were then duplicated, rotated and translated to populate the scene. The kelp were also scaled down as I found that they filled up too much of the screen and were taking the focus away from the jellyfish. Another problem I found was with generating a zdepth pass from semi-opaque objects where the information was inaccurate. To solve this, another mantra node was created to render the objects with matte shading and the micropolygon engine to speed things up. The zdepth passes were rendered out separately for each element to be merged in Nuke. This was done so that I could duplicate the renders of the kelp and background jellyfish to create the illusion of even more jellyfish further away without the extra render time. By keeping the zdepth passes of each element separate, I can then duplicate the required one and increase the value so the ZBlur would work on the duplicated element as well.

I also ended up using the light emission pass as the main pass for one of the hero jellyfish as there was some nice transparency going on there which was lost in the beauty pass. The other pass were then graded and added on top of it. Render times from Nuke also seem to be going up, at about 4 hours for 400 frames now.

Nuke Network

Comp Render Test

Here's a quick render. It's really compressed, so ignore the sparklies, they won't be in the full res render!

Almost there..

Test composite, render going solid for a few days now

Also, tested out the motion blur 3d node in nuke to get some camera motion blur going in comp.. and camera shake in Nuke!

Some methods I’ve tried and determined to be useful were: 1) F_MotionBlur, which analyses the image sequence and generates motion vectors which are used to blur the image sequence accordingly, 2) MotionBlur 3D, which accepts an input camera from Houdini and uses the information to generate motion vectors, which are then used by the VectorBlur node to blur the image sequence during a camera move. Lastly, there is the CameraShake node which is insanely useful for, you guessed it, camera shake. The frequency jitters the image left, right, up and down to simulate camera shake. As a bonus feature, motion blur is also included!

Everyday I'm Rendering...

Did render optimisation for the whole of today, adjusting the pixel and ray samples to have a decent yet fast render.

Also tweaked the width attribute used in the wire sim so the oral arms would not fly off to the side. An interpenetration problem with the tentacles and head geometry was also solved by including more points in the gluetoanimation attribute. This way, I could get away with not simming the head geometry as an RBD collision object.