Dof pulling focus

This is a new technique i am trying out for the pulling focus of the depth of field. I have rendered out a clump of moving grass on a seperate layer:



And then I rendered a still of the rest of the scene which already included the depth of field.



After this i composited the two together and started by blurring the background and keeping the grass in the foreground in focus. I then incresed and keyframed a blur on the foreground grass and systematically reduced the blur of the background scene. This is the result:

grass test

I had a quick go at positioning some grass in front of the camera for the opening shot. This grass will not be animated but we were thinking to have this static grass more in the background and have only a small clump of swaying animated grass directly in front of the camera.

this isnt looking too bad at all but large chunks of grass may affect render time. At the moment this scene is only taking approximately 33 seconds per frame to render (excluding depth pass)

farmer NOW finished

I thought I had the paint weighting of the farmer completed but today me and Luke looked at it and there were a few problems, namely the jaw. For some reason it didn't seem to be connected to the rest of the rig. Also the tongue wasn't following the head. I have now fixed these problems and have also set a limiter to the mouth so it now has a limit to how much it can open and how much it can close.




As soon as we sort out where the camera will be in the establishing shot i believe i am ready to animate the farmer - finally

paint weighting farmer

I have finally finished paint weighting the farmer that Luke modelled, textured and rigged. This model was extremely hard to paint weight because it had a very complex array of joints. Also the model was quite low res so I couldn't achieve much detail or control when painting the weights onto the vertices. In the end I found a way to duplicate the model and smooth it - I then assigned this to it's own layer. This enables us to switch between the high poly and low poly versions of the model.

Motion blur

I have been looking at incorporating motionblur into the opening shot of the film. Here is an early test I done:

(Environment and truck modelled by Rey and Luke)

The affect is too blurry I think so I reduced the affect of the motionblur. I also changed the colours a bit so that it matched the original concept by Luke more solidly. This is a test render of a section from the opening shot with a touch of motionblur and no DOF (will add dof at a later stage)




we still have yet to add the other elements of the scene such as the electric pylons ian has modelled and also a few more things such as grass.

more dof

I seem to have found a solution in my search for efficient dof (depth of field). I have found a way to render out just the depth map of a scene (the Z-channel) which looks like this:


(environment and truck modelled by rey and luke)

Objects closest to the camera appear white and furthest are dark. The plan was to then use this channel as a guide for the depth of field affect in After Effects so that the whiter objects are less blurry than the darker ones. However I had major problems with the compatibility in after effects because in maya the only formats that can output a z channel are mayas native "iff" format and RLA. Unfortunately after effects does not recognise z or depth channels from "iff" images so I was forced to use RLA. This is bad because our custom renderer we are using does not export RLA images. I then tried to export a depth pass just using the maya software renderer in RLA format but after effects couldnt handle the file properly and refused to recognise the Z channel!

I then came across a very good compositing package. I found out that this software has much more compatibility than after effects in terms of the z channel so I began playing about with it and eventually achieved a natural looking depth of field affect in an amazingly fast render time (literally 1 sec per frame). This is the result:

Depth of Field

I have continued to work on the rendered look of the establishing environment scene modelled by Rey (Truck) and Luke (Environment). I have been experimenting with getting a decent looking depth of field focus affect on the camera and keeping the render time as low as possible without sacrificing any quality. This is a result of some early playing about, I haven't worried about the lighting just yet but will begin working on it after I get a good focus affect