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!

Comp Update

Here's a video rendered overnight from yesterday. The swimming pattern comes from the refraction, which, while looking really good in a still frame, looks plain weird when moving. Tried smoothing the refraction out so it wouldn't be so noticeable, yet retain the complex patterns caused by the refraction. Hopefully I'll have a pleasant surprise tomorrow!

Updates

Updated render with some refraction going. I actually plugged the output of the pattern into the attenuation colour  of the refraction, giving the head a nice folded look. Hopefully it'll hold up when it's moving.

Also working on a particle sim for floating debris now!

Yet another slapcomp!

Here's the flipbook of the background jellyfish ropped out yesterday night

And another slapcomp! Experimented a little with the Godrays node (no I didn't make that up) and the iDistort node with noise to lend an underwater feel to the shot. In order to get the iDistort to work, the data must be shuffled into the uv channels of the main image. I also used a constant, a ramp, a radial and some noise nodes to create a background for the shot.

Latest render test

Latest render! 

PBR!

Created a repeating pattern around the head of the jellyfish the same way I created the frills, only in SHOPs this time. Rendered with PBR.

DOPs challenge in Houdini!

Jellyfishhhh test comp

Here's a test composite with a gradient background

Spent the most of today tweaking the shaders... And finally copied my kelp onto the proxy curves.. And a test composite.