Major Project: Rendering Process 11

 Today I continued rendering the final part of the animation. Due to the lighting used as well as how close the camera gets to the characters, the following scenes took the longest to render compared to the rest of the animation. This threw me off a bit as the time I wanted to use for the art of was slightly taken up by rendering. 

For this shot I made use of the Dutch angle to frame both the character in the scene. I could also use the Shinto shrine and bridge to frame both the characters in the shot. 

I really like this shot as it neatly shows both characters actions, without overloading the audience with information. This is something I definitely had to learn to overcome since animating the beginning of the animation. When two objects move at the exact time it looks unnatural. Its good to have characters move one by one at their own pace. 

I added in this shot after the initial stages of the animation were completed as It seemed like the Samurai just teleported to a new position. This shot instead shows his reaction to the Cyberpunks actions which the Samurai then uses to his advantage in the next shot. 

The shot below was probably one of the harder ones I had to show off as the actions the character was performing were hard to achieve with the rig in a realistic way. The idea of the shot is that the Samurai has thrown the object high into the air in order to distract the Cyberpunk character. The Cyberpunk character falls for the trap as it is obsessed with obtaining power and does not see the Samurai as a threat. While the Cyberpunk character is wall jumping, the Samurai gets into position to do a fatal blow by stabbing the Cyberpunk characters eye. 

This was hard to show in a realistic looking way as the naginata (Samurai's weapon) was hard to position in a way where it fit in the characters hand but also reached the Cyberpunk character eye. As well as this it looked strange for the weapon to just disappear into the eye and it didn't really have time to model anything new to fix this.  After attempting to animate this shot several times, I decided to experiment with a different camera angle which would show the events in a different way. 

That's when I managed to find this shot. This is one of my favourite shots in the animation as I feel it depicts one of the biggest moments of the animation in an interesting way. Instead of just showing the weapon going through the characters eye it is instead heavily implied through the characters body language. I also like how the shot frames the Samurai between the characters legs to that you get both characters reaction to the event. 

The final few shots of the animation shows the twist that the Samurai in fact does not win the battle over technology (nature looses). I tried to make this shot look as dramatic as possible and look forward to editing it further in the post production part. 

Throughout the animation I found that there were very little opportunity to actually use the eye rig, however for shots like this I took advantage of the fact I had made one to make the characters eyes roll up before closing his eyes. This was done to show the character loosing consciousness. 

The item finally shows its use in the final parts of the animation. The Cyberpunk character can now replace the eye that was broken with the new one which will grant him eternal life. 

I wanted to add in a shot to show that the Samurai had lost the battle and wasn't going to suddenly get up and win. This shows the consequences of the characters actions. 

Overall the rendering section of the animation was a very interesting addition to the project. Up until this point I had only rendered in one other project, which did not take advantage of intense lighting or high render settings. For this reason most of this section of the project was very new to me. Once I had come to the decision to use a spotlight to highlight the characters, I really enjoyed seeing what tone I could give a shot through its lighting. It was really cool to see the character I created looking good with all of their textures and weapons in the light. 

The render settings used throughout the project were, 4, 3, 3, 0, 0. I went with higher settings as I new that there was very little in my scenes apart for my characters, which I wanted to look good in the animation. I also used TIF file for all of the shots in order to get the best colour range. These settings proved good up until the second half of the animation where the Japanese castle was introduced. Scenes began taking 3 - 5 hours to render, rather than 40min - 2 hours. This was quite a big difference, however as I had been going at a good pace with the project, it allowed me to continue to render on the settings I had chose. The only scene I rendered on low settings was the one in which the palace is first seen to be on fire. I was aware that by making the fire effect so big it would significantly impact the render times. However I liked the shot so much that I wanted to still include it in the animation. I ended up setting the render up for 100 frames at a time wit its settings on 2, 2, 2, 0, 0. Each frame would still take 3 - 6 minutes and there were 300 frames. I just left it on overnight where I wasn't using my pc. If the scene was not limited to 100 frames it would just stop rendering. It did not crash it just stayed still on a single frame. 

By adding the rendering on to the end of the project, it made the project very stressful throughout its completion. All the way back to when I was rigging the characters, I was constantly aware of the time as I was unsure how long it would take to render. I did however managed to complete the animation in time so this did not prove to be as bad as I had initially thought, however it did take a large amount of time.