Rendering

When it came to rendering I made sure that the quality was set to production. This made it take longer to render but I think the results were worth it. I only rendered out a master layer and an occlusion pass as I already set up my lights, I didn't think the shadows would need much more adjustment when it came to post production. Below you can see the different passes and the outcome of when combined. The occlusion pass creates self shadowing which produces a more realistic effect, adding more depth to the shot. To create an occlusion pass, you need to select all the objects in your scene and create a new render layer, then under the attributes you can create an occlusion preset. The preset itself will always need adjusting depending on your shot. The more samples you have, the less grainy the pass will be, however this will also increase render time. I pushed mine from 16 to 128 as I wanted the best possible outcome. I'm quite happy with how it's turned out so far, from here I will be compositing the shots in After Effects and possibly colour grading them.

I noticed that with the renders, the ground texture was somewhat lost in some shots. When up close to the camera, the normal map was not visible. I'm not sure if this was because of the physical sun and sky causing this or if the ground plane was too close to the camera, or if depth of field was affecting it in some way. I didn't adjust any of the original settings so this is something I may come back to and look at in more depth to see if I can figure out the cause of this.

Occlusion Pass

Master Layer

Master and Occlusion Pass

Render Tests

I didn't think I would get to the stage where all my shots were ready to be rendered, however this is the case. The animation is some areas aren't as polished as I would have liked but the main 'storytelling' shots are the best I could of got it in the time given. To show my understanding of the whole process I needed to have at least some shots fully rendered out. I'm aiming to get it all rendered but with only 2 days left I'll have to see how far I get.

The image below is a test render I did for one of the shots (the cabin texture my friend created for me still needs to be added in, hence the black object). I changed the colour of the camera environment - this can affect the objects within the scene by adding a subtle colour tint onto them. Even though I'll be rendering each image out with an alpha, I thought I would put this on each camera as it gave me a good idea when I did test renders. I will be rendering out with mental ray as with the Morpheus rig, the skin textures are only visible using mental ray. This also allows me to have a higher polished shot, set on production quality. I have also turned on final gathering, keeping it at it's default setting in order to add in softer shadows and an all round good illumination to the scene. With the lighting, there is just one directional light in each scene with shadow rays turned on. Initially I had kept it on it's default settings, however I found the shadows to be too harsh so I increased the light angle and shadow rays to make them softer.

I really like how the test renders are turning out, the tree assets that my friend has created are great. They really fit well in the scene and the way he has textured them makes them seem soft and works well with the shadows and the style of the environment.