Animation and Shading

This week after talking with the Mill I set off to animate the car and get some cameras in the scene. I at first had one long timeline with three different camera moves in it, however we ran into a problem with the FX side. The car moves in different ways and in different parts at different speeds. Thus making it impossible for our FX member of the team to properly sim it. I roughed out the animation using the rigging tools and setting key frames where needed. After a while I finally reached a point for the Pre-Vis that showed us the rough idea of where we are going.

Go_Anywhere_Previs_001 from Casey Seabolt on Vimeo.

I also took the HDRI from before and painted out the tripod and shadow of myself. This was much easier than I originally thought it would be. I simply just threw it into Photoshop and Clone Stamped myself out.

I might have changed the levels a bit too much, depending on what feedback I am given tomorrow in the meeting.

The final thing I did this week was more shader work.

These are just strait shading materials no textures. I will move into more detail as time moves on however for right now the main goal was to not have the grey Lambert shader on the car. I am struggling with the displacement on the tires right now. It is not creating a deep enough cut into the tire, however when I bump the displacement up to get the effect I want it leaves a gap in the sidewall. This will be the first hing on my list next week to get working properly.

Light_Rig_TurnTable_003 from Casey Seabolt on Vimeo.

I also need to separate my quilt into different categories. Telling the difference between brushed aluminum, chrome, and reflective metal. This will be fixed for the next turntables coming up.

I’m excited for the work coming up. Shading work is about to get real.

Bond...Team Bond

Day two was a bit less stressful than the rest however this is where we found out our teams! I was placed with an amazing compositor, Katie Veneman, and a brilliant FX artist, Dale Bunten. We were dubbed Team Bond, and decided that we liked the ring to it. So we are Bond…Team Bond.

We sat down together and started to rack our brains to find out something that could be done that would be both challenging and fun at the same time. Dale was very interested in the idea of having water in the scene wanting to push his skills of the FLIP Fluid solver in Houdini. It was on this path that we found an amazing video that inspired this entire project for us.

The Range Rover’s Taming the Tide video was exactly what we pictured and was an amazing reference to have going into this. But with only an idea on what to do we quickly broke down and decided to take the weekend to fully get ideas going and ready to go.

That weekend I was tasked with figuring out what lighting and mood we were going for with this project. While in the reference video it is overcast, I wanted this to go another way. Bright white beach, bright blue sky, and the warmth of glow from the setting sun to round the entire composition together.

We also have picked out the model that we want to use and will purchase it when we get the okay from The Mill!

We got our reference material together and will be pitching this Wednesday. After that, there is no going back, it is going to be pedal to the metal to finish this project in only 9 weeks.