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Rendering Error

A NOTE

I didn’t realise we still had so much to render, and Uni computers were being reeeally slow, so whilst Isa and Cat are at Annecy this week I’m left to look after the renders on Isa’s computer and put them together for the film. 

Maya has already crashed on me twice, meaning we lost the first render and I had to have Isa walk me through re-creating half of the save file, but I managed to re-do the second scene, so we have that rendered - I just need to figure out how to sort it through after effects, because that didn’t work for me yesterday. 

The computer seems to have bugged out, so I’m hoping it sorts itself out soon so I don’t have to restart and set maya up again. I don’t want to have to take it into uni to sort out, because I wasn’t aware I would be having to babysit the renders this week (or have to put the renders through after effects and edit them too, for that matter) and have a lot of stuff to do myself, but beings as everything that could go wrong IS going wrong, we’ll have to see.

In all honesty I only came back from my holiday because it was agreed that I needed to do more textures, only to find out that plans had been changed last minute and I had to animate and help edit instead because apparently the texturing was all done; it isn’t, and at least two textures I spent a good amount of time painting (for the Drone and Robot) haven’t even been applied because of it not being sorted soon enough to be able to deal with any issues, so that’s a good few days worth of my work that isn’t even being shown. 

But hey, at least I know how to something to render, now. 

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The credit page for the degree show zine! Amy and El are at Annecy this week, so Ruth and I are helping to finish putting the zine together.

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Another page I helped with for the degree show zine, this one was for the marketing ‘chapter’! 

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A few covers I did for the Zine El and Amy are putting together for the degree show! They were fun to do - nice and simple! 

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The version of the Robot water effects without the background, ready for compositing.

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The finished version! I quite like how this worked out - the steam at the beginning is still my favourite bit, though. 

The water itself took forever to colour, and then i went back over it so the puddle grew continuously instead of flickering back and forth.

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The WIP for the effects in the Robot scene - I thought this would be faster than the Smoke for the crash scene, but there’s actually more frames to colour! 

I really like how the steam looks at the beginning 

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This one is a bit more helpful! I’m animating from a different angle, but this helps with the the actual movement of the liquid.

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A useful tutorial for water splashes, though it’s not exactly what I need for the robot scene - it should help with the little droplets and initial impact, though.

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The final smoke for the crash scene - I exported two versions, one at 80% opacity and the other at 100% (this is the latter) because i wasn’t sure which one worked better, or whether the opacity would work once exported. 

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A version of the smoke with lighter lines - there’s one with darker lines too, but i think I prefer this one. 

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And the smoke is done - I have a few versions with and without lines, so I’ll post one with the lighter lines - I couldn’t decide which to use, so I’ll see what the others think.

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A WIP for the crash smoke - I’m going to try and colour it so the actual lines aren’t too visible, because I’m not too sure how realistic/stylised people want it. I quite like it so far, though!

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This was also a helpful tutorial for animating the smoke from the space platform crash - And i’m pretty sure she’s an NUA alumni! 

I needed more of an explosion, but this was useful for the movement of the smoke after the initial crash.

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This was a great reference for animating the crash for the space platform! I used it as a base, them improvised.

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Another big inspiration for the textures and environments was Portal 2, for the same simple, larger surface texturing, with details used fairly sparingly but to greater effect.

The lighting isn’t as stark in this game, so the textures don’t rely on it so much, but it definitely helps to enhance them - closer to what Error will be.

The character textures are also similar to what we wanted for Error - especially the drone, which is reminiscent of the Cores!

Our drone’s appearance is a bit more colourful, with a slightly cleaner-looking texture rather than dirty, but for the optic, I took inspiration from the Space Core: mostly for the colour.

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One of the biggest inspirations and references for Error’s textures was Alien: Isolation, because they were all simple, large surface textures which were then enhanced with some contrasting lighting (and the environments are quite similar to what we have!)

We were hoping to recreate a similar effect, using ole of two smart materials for the larger environment textures and only creating detailed ‘hand-painted’ textures for characters and important objects, to save time.