16/8/2011 (Day 02) Tuesday
Today we came up with various ideas for our two shots and decided to go for a cardboard city as our first shot and spaceship flying through a futuristic city as our second shot. We also spliced the work among ourselves and planned on how some of the effects in the shot could be achieved. I planned the schedule for my team and started gathering some textures for the first shot. I planned it so that we should be able to finish modeling latest by Wednesday of the second week and start Texturing and lighting our shot by Thursday. We also went location scouting in school and we had a hard time finding a suitable location for the first shot so we used Google Earth's Street View to scout some parks near our area. We deemed the Lower Seletar Reservoir to be somewhat suitable. For the second shot we found that the bridge area on level 4 might be suitable for our shot and we would be taking a test shot tomorrow to confirm the suitability of the location and take the final shot later in the afternoon. We would probably be using a portable blue screen for our shots to key out the actor so that we wont need to rotoscope him later on.
17/8/2011(Day 03) Wednesday
Today I split the team in 2 and I went location scouting again with Vincent and Han Jie for the first shot as I managed to find a suitable location for the second shot yesterday and decided to leave the filming of the shot to Shahril and Chun Wei. The rest of us managed to find a place for our first shot at Lower Seletar Reservoir and we took some test shots so that we would be prepared and finish shooting our shot as soon as possible when we get our hands on the blue screen tomorrow. I also helped Vincent to put together a cardboard controller by cutting and pasting various cardboard pieces together with masking tape. After we got back we found out that they the other half of the team did not manage to shoot their footage because it was drizzling or something so we helped them to shoot their footage. Hopefully we can get all our footage out by tomorrow so that can can focus more on modeling and blending our CG elements into our environments and leave sufficient time for tweaking and refining our shots.
18/8/2011(Day 04) Thursday
Me, Vincent and Han Jie went to shoot our shot today and managed to do so without much problems as we had proper planning done yesterday. I wanted to get the other two to come along and help out but they were taking a while to get to school and did not reply to the SMS so we decided to leave on our own for the shooting while leaving them to continue working on their modeling. After we got back I keyed out the footage to make sure there were no problems and I continued my work on the cardboard city. I also sourced for even more cardboard textures to make use of later on and by tomorrow I plan to place it on the live action plate and start texturing, lighting and perspective matching.
19/8/2011(Day 05) Friday
I was having trouble matching the perspective but I decided to continue modeling the city out as I could always adjust their positions and scale later to match the perspective of my scene. Modeling the city is slowly becoming a tedious task as I have to extrude, delete faces and adjust vertices over and over again. However I managed to finish modeling 2 buildings today and assigned some rough materials.
22/8/2011(Day 06) Monday
Today I modelled a few more buildings and tried to help Chun Wei out with his problem but it seemed beyond reapairable and I suggested that he should model again from scratch. Vincent managed to finish his plane model today and he started helping out with the population of buildings as well. I hope to finish the City by tomorrow if possible.
23/8/2011(Day 07) Tuesday
Today I managed to get the perspective right with the help of Mr Leong and I started recreating the major elements in my scene in CG. I created a plane and used the soft select tool and tried my best to match the depressions and rises of the golf course based on memory and the footage we had. I made rough models of the trees and scaled and positioned them into place. Unfortunately we were not able to get all the elements in by today.
24/8/2011(Day 08) Wednesday
Today We managed to get some of the buildings in and made a rough layout for their placement. I also started on lighting and used a really huge area light to cast sky light from the top and used some more area lights on the floor to simulate bounce lighting. I was having a hard time getting the lights to affect the areas I wanted and I spent a lot of time tweaking the settings and adding other lights.I also had trouble getting the shadows to appear(Depth map) and I tried tweaking the angle of my Sun light and messing with various settings but to no avail. At the end of the day I still did not manage to get the results I desired and I hope to be able to get the lighting right by tomorrow.
25/8/2011(Day09) Thursday
I managed to get the shadows to appear when I switched to raytraced shadows. I was surprised as our shot did not have any transparent or translucent materials the light had to pass through and luckily the render time shot up only by 2 seconds.I managed to get the lighting done today thanks to Mr Leong's suggestion of using directional lights instead of area lights. He explained that the drop off of area lights are hard to control and after tweaking the directional lights a lot, the first shot was finally going in the right direction. However it still looked very Cartoon-like.
26/8/2011(Day 10)Friday
We got much better results today after listening to Mr Leong's suggestion and rescaling some of the buildings. Han Jie also readjusted some of the textures as they were of the wrong scale. I tweaked the lights further and at the end of the day we got much better results.
29/8/2011(Day11)Monday
We got more suggestions from Mr Leong today and Im thankful that he went through the trouble of teaching me how to do render passes again despite already having gone through it once in class. I took down notes and this time I was very clear on how to do render passes and to pay back his trouble I went to other groups and helped them out with some of their render passes and taught some of them how to do them as well. Meanwhile Han Jie adjusted the textures yet again and the scale of some of the buildings. Unfortunately I am falling sick and I hope I can pull through for the next few days.
30/8/2011(Day 12)Tuesday ( Hari Raya)
I went down with fever today but I managed to set up the different render passes and render the scene out before I went to rest.
31/8/2011(Day 13)Wednesday
We started doing Compositing today and we managed to get most of the elements in and we are just left with lots of tweaking and colour correction. I connected all the basic nodes and layered in all the render passes and Vincent built a lot upon them and readjusted a couple of nodes to fit the shot. I helped Shahril and Chun Wei to do their render passes and told them to adjust some of their lighting set up as some of the areas did not have enough bounced lighting. I also helped them to set up all the nodes in Nuke so that they wont have problems when they import in their renders and animation sequences. They were just left with minor tweaks such as colour correction and grading. We noticed that the background looked dead for the first shot so we added moving elements such as the crane and the Ferris Wheel and we had to re-render the beauty, shadow and occlusion passes of the city
1/9/2011(day 14)Thursday
We continued working on the tweaking and blending of our shot today. I also told and showed shahril how to further improve his shot. I told him to add a spot light to the tail fin of the spaceship and parent it to the geometry of the space ship so that it would follow along as the fin area was really dark and I did not wish to add anymore lights that would affect the overall scene. Along the way we noticed lots of mistakes in the first shot such as different shades appearing due to our Roto work. Also the area where the trees and the buildings were meeting were not blending properly and Mr Leong suggested using photoshop to fix that part as the trees were not really moving in that area and it would be easy to replace. After we did that the shot looked way better but this created a new problem for us as we had to roto the area around Vincents hand and we did not really have much time. We tried doing a rough roto and it was not looking good at all so we decided to erase that area and try our best to blend it as much as possible. I also managed to get the turntables done today. After the lab closed we went over to mac cafeteria and continued our work on Vincents laptop.
