After a few texturing and modeling at the start of the semester, i carried on with my roles as the cinematographer and decided on how to light up the scenes.
The initial idea for the scene was to make the panning of the start to be in the night. I experimented with the lighting for the outdoors scene but it didn't look good enough. I seem to have used too much lights in the scene. After which, i moved on to experiment with the lighting for indoors. I wanted night light to fall through the windows so that the final scene where Aden falls, a more dramatic feel could be created. I tried to do so with the use of light fog. It did not look very attractive at all after a week of experimentation.
I consulted with Jim, the supervisor and he suggested that we do the panning scene in the afternoon. It would look much more attractive and light up the scene better. I agreed and went on to work on it.
Kalai, at that time, found a really good online video tutorial on how to use maya physical sun and sky. It was hugely beneficial for the whole group. With that tutorial, i was able to get the shadows and sun rays to hit exactly as i wanted it to. The lighting was as i wanted it to be. The outdoors scene had enough light and proper shadow casted in the right direction.
Some problems when i lighted the scene was that the shadow initially was too harsh and long and thus made the scene look really ugly. I adjusted the direction where the sunlight was supposed to be and toned down the light and shadows. I then realized that i have not turned on final gather in mental ray for rendering and thus it did not look as good. All these was then improved on.
Rendering took a really big part of our time to fix. It has come to our attention that whenever we use the 21inch macs, our files and scenes could not be opened without maya crashing. This problem however would not occur when we used the 27inch macs. Render farm was not of much help either as it kept getting errors. I followed the instructions provided by Melvin online, but to no avail. This dragged the time in rendering.
Another problem from rendering was that the renders tend to stop halfway through the night as we leave it to render over night.
The third problem was that after rendering a few scenes, other scenes seem to have created strange white light spots that appear at random location of the scene in every frame. The problem could not be solved in time.
After lighting and rendering, i was left with little time for animating act 5, where aden pulls out the tree piece and eventually falls off the clock. This scene was difficult to animate. Various problems occurred instantly at the start of animating.
1) The cane had to be passed to and fro and also turned around a lot in this scene but it could only be parented to the hand once.
2) I animated it frame by frame but the cane had it's pivot far from the centre. I could not centre pivot it again as it would cause the parent to have problems.
3) Aden's expressions could not be animated at all.
Due to these rig problems, i could not do a proper job for the animation, although i did finish the animation to a certain extent.
At the end of the week, we decided to playblast the remaining unrendered scenes as there was not enough time to finish rendering the other scenes with mental ray.
