Reflection

Camera Mapping

This shot is definitely my least favourite part of the showreel, while it does work, it doesn’t do well to show off the textures since it wasn’t properly rendered and is just a recording of my viewport, which also prevented me from adding any post processing effects such as depth of field, which would have greatly improved the scene. The improvements to this scene that I would make would obviously be to figure out the method of getting my renders to work, either by trying a different standalone rendering engine, or updating my version of Arnold / Maya.

Tracking

Very pleased with how this one turned out, since I managed to get my solve down to 0.18 as well as accurately lighting the scene and correctly applying my textures on the signpost. To improve this scene I would definitely consider adding more models and doing further work in texturing to make it look more realistic, but for the purposes of showing off the accuracy of my track I think the shot works quite well.

Modelling

Incredibly proud of this shot, whilst the topology of my model isn’t very clean, the final render and textures do very well to sell the realism and enable to model to retain a lot of detail in close up, I’m especially happy with my edge work around the analogue sticks, as I think they do a good job of reflecting the light in the scene. To improve I would first clean up the geometry, making sure to get rid of any triangles or ngons, and also I would do some more texturing work, such as adding some more normal detail to create a groove around the base of the controller.

Problems Encountered

The main problem I found for this scene was that when rendering none of the rendering engines for Maya were working properly for my scene, either the render came out as a completely black screen or alternatively looked fine within the render view but got ridiculously dark when saving the image sequence. To remedy this I first attempted to google the problem to see if any other users were encountering the same problem as me, as I found, there were multiple posts about this exact problem, solutions ranged from changing the gamma settings to reconfiguring the lighting of the scene, I tried most of the solutions given but none seemed to work on my machine. I then took the files and attempted to render on my housemate’s PC, only to find upon pressing the render still button, Maya crashed multiple times. I was very frustrated during this process as I had made a few test renders of previous camera maps which had worked fine.

I then contacted my tutor to see if he could help me in remedying the problem, after looking for more solutions he found a forum post stating that a user with the same problem had contacted Solid Angle who informed him that it was a known bug with Arnold renderer and that a future update will fix the problem. My tutor then recommend that I look into screen capturing my scene and animation as a workaround.

After some messing around within the software I found that I could just use the playblast feature within Maya, which renders out an image sequence using the standard viewport, while the sequence was obviously not as high quality as an actual render, it worked quite well and was sufficient enough to be placed in my final showreel.

Reflecting on this, I have to take responsibility for leaving my render so close to the deadline, as well as not properly researching render engines in Maya, in the future I must remember to look into this at a much earlier point. Whilst it was a very hard lesson to learn, it has definitely affected how I will approach future projects.

My final model can be found on sketchfab here.

Problems Encountered.

Upon rendering my textured model in Maya, I found that certain edges, especially those around the handles of the controller, were not rendering properly. I had anticipated this problem upon reaching the end of my modelling process as my topology was quite messy, with a lot of triangles in the geometry of the mesh. I wasn’t sure if this was what was causing my lighting problem, so I first attempted to relight my scene multiple times to see if I could remedy this to no avail, I then exported my mesh into blender to attempt to light it there, where I encountered the same problems. I could safely assume at this point that it was my mesh that was causing the problem, but since I had already modelled, smoothed and UV’d the controller, it was too late to start it all over again, as the entire process had taken me around 15 hours in total.

To work around this I decided to use Sketchfab to display my model, as the lighting in sketchfab was working correctly, so I exported my model from Maya as an .fbx so that the animation applied to it would also be contained in the export, I then manually plugged in all my textures into sketchfab, fullscreened the preview and screen recorded the wireframe view, UV view and the final render.

Reflecting upon these problems, my workaround was both a negative and a positive. Negative because it prevented me from compositing my model into a still image, but positive as it was much simpler and of a higher quality when placed into Sketchfab. Overall, the lesson learned from these problems is that the topology of a model is very important when it comes to rendering, and that triangles and ngons will negatively effect any rendering engine.

For this post I want to briefly analyse some other showreels created by either students or those in the VFX industry, the purpose of this being that to take inspiration and generate ideas when creating my own final showreel.

This first showreel is mainly based around 3D modelling & animation, I will mainly be analysing the modelling section, as I do not plan on doing any complex animations for my own showreel.

One of the first things I noticed about this showreel was that he does not list the software used for creating these models, aside from this the showreel itself is relatively simple, the way he displays is models is by having them do a 360 spin with a plain background and one light source directly over the top of the model, he then goes through the wireframe, shaded and textured views. I think this is a very effective way of showing off the models, as there is no other distracting elements to the scene, so the viewer can purely focus on the technical ability on display. This fits in with what I was told by my point of contact at Escape Studios, who also said that a simple rotation of the model would suffice when creating my showreel.

This next showreel is based around compositing, but I will be focusing on the camera projection section so I can get some ideas for displaying my own camera projection in my showreel. The software used for this shot is Maya.

The first section is the final render of the scene, the camera does a quick pan and rotate around the scene and is quite effective in showing the 3D element of the scene. For the breakdown it goes through the original image, the 3D mesh and a pan around the viewport of the projection to show off the areas not visible in the render. For my own final showreel I plan on heavily using photoshop to display the work that goes into my projection, so as well potentially including some of the shots used in the above showreel, I will also try to transition through the different layers I make in photoshop.

This showreel is based around matchmoving, something that I also plan on displaying in my own showreel. The software used for this showreel is 3D equaliser and Maya, slightly different to my own plans for matchmoving, as I plan on using blender for compatibility reasons.

The way the shots are displayed in the reel are by first using cones to show where the tracking markers are in the scene, then using a checker pattern to cover any objects or surfaces within the scene, I think this is a very effective way of displaying the tracks as it can show off the accuracy of a track very well. One downside to this showreel is that the tracks themselves are not very good, you can plainly see the tracked 3D text towards the end is lifting up from the floor and generally just not following the cameras movement.

Overall, briefly analysing these showreels has helped to get a better picture in my head of what shots I should use when taking all of my final exports and placing them into premiere for my final output this semester.