Promotion: Promotional Renders

Just a couple of promotional renders from our animation so far.


Shots in this video include: a revised walk; an over-the-shoulder shot; Kinnaree looking for a sunspot (figuratively speaking) to dance in. Shots needed to conclude act one are: Kinnaree entering the sunlight and her walk cycle coming to a halt, to roll on some dance. All versions can be pushed for one more output and also depending on the final film camera transitions.

Hello again,
I tried to stick to the advice you gave me and made sure Kinnaree was within the shot and this time with more establishing shots and a few close ups. Hope it's better now and more linear :)



*Updated version after the feedback*

Hey Phil! :)
So this is our edit on the dance so far. There are three main dances taking place in the whole dance sequence which we tried to combine with edits. We are pleased with it till  0:23, but there is something about the shots and the combination of music which doesn't work after that point. We'll try and get the editing done this weekend so we can set up the render at the beginning of next week.

One of the things that has been a major concern to me was render time of the environment when using fog and how that would add up to our To Do List. It would be too risky to rely on entirely one layer in Maya so I went into After Effects and experimented using separate layers for each object in the scene. It was a big relief for me to see the experiment working and especially the fog which caused me a lot of trouble in Maya. At the moment, the CC Particle World Effect which creates the fog is way too fast but there are plenty of controls in the effect to make it look more 'fog-like'. The layers will enable us to gain control over their color, the blurriness to 'fake' focal length and the ability to keep adding up to it.  A the moment the shadows are missing which were not rendered out.



New W.I.P. walk and dynamics testing. The settings for the hair system and nuclei will have to be revised at some point to control the level of bounciness and for the flat geometry movements to be convincing. I've used a combination of joints and rivets; I was unsure at first whether rivets would retain their world-space position with all the scrubbing back and forth with my animation clips. I have tested this will the new W.I.P. walk and many worries have been lifted for the moment. To support the annotation in the video, the top-half of the body's dynamics (waist and back mainly, not any of the head hair-planes) have been setup using mainly joints and no rivets, and the bottom-half (back-leg feathers) with rivets. They will probably be stable enough to use and rely on for what I am after to do, but I will have to confirm this by experimenting with other rhythmic animations on the dynamics rig.

Hello Phil!
I took in your advice and playblasted the whole sequence through different camera angles such as shoulder shots, Point of View Shots, establishing shots etc. I combined shots in 3 different takes. So far I like take 2. I must admit the ones I parented on the characters didn't work as well due to shakiness so I relied mainly on the more static shots and the cameras I manually controlled. I am a bit too attached to the back shot but I tried to stitch other shots together to make a better sense of where the viewer and the characters are. I am going to continue refining the animation during the weekend (as it's very rough in places right now for the sake of the shots) and again experiment with cameras. Be honest  with my progress, please! :D 





Starting to finalise progress with this dance segment. Please ignore bending deformations (main areas of concern are the shoulders and knees) as necessary poseDeformers have not yet been optimised for them. Also, ignore the hand colliding with the hip alpha-planes. This is still very technically stripped down/ base of the cake: having some fake-wing/ hair dynamics and motion blur will help make the character more alluring and with an environment to place her in.