Day 66 -- 17/8/2011 Wednesday

I went to tie up the loose end of shot2. For the past 2 days, I've been working on combining 2 shots into 1. There was a slight jerk in the middle and I thought it was the camera graph but after seeing the shot with Evan, he see that the camera was smooth instead, the cube movement was the one who causes the jerk. He suggested that rather the cube to pick up speed immediately, I could make it gain speed gradually so it will not have a sudden movement. For that, instead of using a vopforce, I apply a windforce sop and removed the point velocity assign to them.

Also, I added 3 more exploding cube to enhance the number of mini cubes. It's to make it more believable as the next 2 shots will show many cubes. Adding more exploding cube means I got to re-rop the geometry out and play with its timing of trigger.

Untitled from Tanner Caelum on Vimeo.

Also, I did some test lighting while waiting for the roping to complete. I try different colors on the wall. I wanted the wall to be white but due to the reflections, it was overly-exposed. For the lighting, I used 2 lights. One environment light and an area light at the side. As the room is enclose, the environment light cant pass through so I got to shadow-link, not to cast shadow on the room, using the light linker. The area light do not cast shadow on the cubes. Also, I showed Zack a render sequence and give me some advice on improving the renders. For example, the reflection on the wall got to be less sharp, the reflection on the floor got to gradually fall off, lessen the reflection on the hatch area and to widen/darken the hatch lines.

Untitled from Tanner Caelum on Vimeo.

Today, we also had a hour lesson on nuke. A basic Nuke lesson by a fellow intern. The lesson was on basic navigating, interface parameter and compositing layers with the help of Houdini. A simple yet enriching lesson.