The beginning of this week, we focused on our pitches to present to our mentors, which is posted in my Week 1 review. We are now cleaning up our previs and implementing some of the ideas that the mentor's have suggested.
Here is Team Lighting:
Thalia Valencia-Murphy: FX Artist
Phirada Kanjanangkulpunt: FX Artist
Thomas Green: Lighting / LookDev. Artist
Drew Daly: Compositor
Our task list for the next week is as follows
Cleanup previs
prelim materials
FX R&D
REFERENCE REFERENCE REFERENCE!!!
Pipeline
Another thing we were asked with was looking into our pipeline for our commercial. Our main decision is what the right tool will be for job: Houdini, Unreal, or a mix a both. Thomas and Nuke will try to look into that pipeline of Houdini/Nuke to Unreal and what the challenges will be with our concept. I have started looking into Niagara to try to see what are options are. I was worried about getting good reflections with the FX if it were just rendered in Houdini and comped.
This is an interesting resource:
Reference
For this week I am looking for different references for lightning fx and dust.
Dust:
Rigging Update
After buying the model, the UVs needed to be reworked. Phirada had fixed a lot of the issues and it was passed to our Rigger, Amanda Rabade before handing off to our animator:
Lightning:
Lightning tests:
I created a lightning FX test with proxy geometry. I focused on the best approach for the surface lightning. I found this approach from this layout on Youtube, courtesy of Stefan:
This approach takes the wireframe of the mesh, creates points off the mesh and pushes them out from their normals and created point jitter off of them. Then blast the lines based on the UVs.