Here is the final thing

Compositing

Color changing animation in After effect for the wheel



The shadow can not be rendered because the grass is not in the same layer with the music machine.

Compositing! As this is the last week of this project, I have been working in the college most of the time from 10am-8pm. It feels good when I see the work getting closer to the end. BUT, even more stressful when it comes to teamwork. I have waited for Leonard's promise until the last day, then I had to redo his airchair modeling (took me 5min) and do the texturing myself. The worst thing is, when sombody is so far behind at this point, he now finally want to catch up and start to ask me to give him 'things' to do. Like in the final stage everything is rendering in renderfarm, (btw, I spend 2 days on Render farm with Alex to finally get it working prefectly), he came to me and ask for a copy of the 'renderfarm'. I tried to explain to him what render farm is and the reason why I can not 'share' my job with him at this stage, but he kept saying 'yeahbut....'. Then later on since he hasn't got anything to do, he just kept giving me his 'suggestions'. I listened with patience, and tried harder and harder to be more patient. Then finally, everything is finished without a major break down of teamwork.

I'm sorry if my word offenced anybody, but it is true at the end there is a real tension in the team that I don't want to see. This is due to two main reasons.
1. the pressure from the work itself, espeically when it come closer to the deadline. Everyone get stress, it is important to learn how to fight or live with it.
2. the lack of understanding of teamworking: what if people know exactlly what their job is during the whole production pipeline... it would help the workflow, make the communication less argument and.. most importantly, gain an understanding of the work from the group's point of view instead of just their own.
And again...I meant no offence at all!

Back to the work...so compositing went pretty smoothly except from the grass problem still exsit. To add shading on the background, the easiest way to fix it i think is to rerender all the machine as in one scene. Because we are running out of time, we decided just to leave it and keep it dark.

It is worth mention the size of all the clips inported into after effect is around 10 GB. It made after effect run slow hence slowed down the compositing process big time. Must say if I knew this, I would have changed the layer design, reduce the size...maybe decided to render everything as a whole.

The background music is added. Credit goes to Paul, he found a lovely HUGE collection of sound track from LRC. I also suggested to use 'Canon D' for the music machine, it would create a sence of 'Legendary' and quite feeling the same time, suitable for our empty midnight funfair. I composed those two with the video in Premiere and also added the title and the end credit.

rendering

I have CUT the project into pieces as I have planed for rendering. It's a bit tricky how the layers can be rejoined. The grass can be a problem as it must be the bottom layer, but the same time it has to carry all the shadings. I cut the grass into two, foreground and background as the foreground need to carry the shadow cast from the gate, the first thing you see in the movie.

Global Lighting and Rendering Layers

I'm trying to create a global lighting in the big scene. Hopefully without interfering, all the layers can apply the global lighting. But again...this has to be done with discussion of the team.

At this point, I'm thinking about how this project can be rendered out. It won't work just in one piece, there are few reasons...
1 Teamwork problem: This few weeks we really had some terrible teamworking. Mainly just because people not turning up and not doing work. This caused a delay in modeling and texturing for some machines. But I can not wait for it to death, it is time to move on.
2.Data transfer: NEXT TIME i do a project...I WILL make sure that everything is in one project folder, so if one scene is transfered from one PC to another it won't lost texturing on it. and yeah for this project, the reason why it cant be done in one piece is because I'm not be able to import all the machines together with texturings on, they just in chaos.
3.Lighting: My plan is to animate all the light in After Effect. So everything has to be done in different layers.
4.Size: some of the machine is just way too big. It crashs my laptop servel times when trying to load them together even without texturing.

SO basically the number of layers can be counted as...

1. Gate
2. Front Tent
3. Music Machine
4. Bottle
5. Minigame
6. Arcadia
7. Spinride
8. Air Chair
9. Tower
10. Wheel (including 7 layers)
11. Back Tents
12. Funhouse

Some of the elements can be combined...like the front tent and the gate. etc.

All the layers will be filmed by one camera and a global lighting(moonlight). So they can be combined with no 'scare' in After effect.

The button

Just got the button's model from Paul. and...as usually the hypergragh is in chaos. need to clean up before this can be inported.


My main job here is to positioning the model and add lighting. The lighting design comes from my storyboard.

The Wheel's animation develpment

The wheel is the main part of animation work of this project. I have been starting to think about how it cound be done weeks ago and came with a solution by just animate 50 frames of the animation and repeat. The wheel would turn 20 degree then instantly go back to the starting piont where it looks exactly the same,so it would tricks your eye so you get the feeling that it's acturally turning 360 degree.

The whole point of this...is to make sure that all cariages always point down by gravity while the frame moves. I can rotate them one by one but that's not a 'production way' to do it. I was looking for a more efficient way so that's why i developed the 20 degree solution.



The disadvantage of this is that if i want to make it loop in the film, I will need to repeat the clip but not the movement. So there is a compositing problem.


Rob came to college yesterday and helped me soloving this problem. Basically I resetted all the cariages' raletion in the hypergragh, instead group them as a whole then rotate them seperatly with the frame, this time I tried to use the Set Driven Key tool. So now when the frame moves whatever degree, all cariages will rotate indepently to counter the frame's movement. For example if the frame moves 180, cariages move -180. The result works perfectly.

Music machine animation and lighting

This is my work for the music machine. I recieved the model from Leonard few days ago and..the textures didn't come up prefectly at first, so i have to fix them in UV mapping.
The animation is fit to the camera with right timing.
As this machine isn't in the original plan, it only has 2 sec's shot in the movie. So I didn't pay too much time on it.


This is the lighting I did for it. I also added BMP map on the red texturing.