Grass, Grass, Grass

At this point the grass has come to a point where me and Mikey are both pretty happy with it and in terms of look we could tweak it slightly and it'd look great. There are some things in the back of my head though that keep bugging me.

1) I had a suggestion from my tutor to make it more stylised, I'm unsure of this but thought I might as well give it a whack.

2) I DEFINITELY want to do all I can to reduce render times, currently the scene takes 12-15 minutes with grass to render a single shot. This might not SEEM like much, but when you consider that render times without the grass is approximately 1-2 minutes, something can definitely be done.

At the moment Mikey has set up the scene to use Final Gather and Raytracing on full on each asset of the scene, we also have plenty of mia shaders in play. Now I have been doing some research and it occurs to me that we haven't tried any of the 'tricks' that are in use with the industry for fur.

STYLISE ATTEMPTS

RENDER TIME SAVING TECHNIQUES

I turned off Raytracing + Final Gather and switched to Rasterizer. However Physical Sun and Sky requires Raytracing + Final Gather, the Render time for this shot was 5 mins. But as you can see the lighting has failed.

I switched the Fur Render settings from Hair Primitive to Volume Shader, this is a quicker technique and saves time. Whilst Hair Primitive is more accurate, Volume Shader merely attempts to recreate the fur look. However Volume Shading fur does not work well with Sun and Sky as there are issues with Raytracing.

NURBS INSTEAD OF POLYS

Realising that Maya's Fur feature and it's density is linked to the Polygons or Divisions of a model, I felt that maybe I was going about this the wrong way. What I decided to do is to duplicate my Polygon geometry Hill and convert that into a Subdiv then into NURBS. NURBS is much quicker for Maya to utilise and Fur is also able to be used with NURBS better than with Polygons. I assigned my Grass System to the NURBS Hill and because of this it meant I could substantially lower down the density of my grass.

500,000 Density, the white area is the NURBS. 

My Render time has come down SUBSTANTIALLY.

500,000 Density, this time the NURBS Hill is in a Transparent Layer.

However the Hilltop renders with grass weren't very promising.

After some Gamma Correction using the Gamma Correction node, I was able to solve this.

Initial Gamma Correction.

After some tweaks to colour and Density. (Density at 2,000,000 for Hilltop)

This Hilltop Render only took 6 minutes!

Animation Testing 02

Admittedly, Sofia was more difficult for me to animate, as she does have some weight (muscle?) on her, but at the same time she's a young active girl. I needed to animate a cycle that got the free spirit of the character, but also pushed the Dynamics technically speaking.

The animation is ok but I felt it was a bit too much and could use more appeal, especially in the arms. I think it needs to feel more natural.

I really, really like the skirt movement, but I know the hair is totally off and needs fixing. I think the best course of option will be to paint weights on the hair, and solve the hair for each scene Sofia is in, right down to the detail.

Bagboy's Hill Grass Set up and Problem Solving

Now that the process of setting up grass on the Ranch was well under way, it's time to get the ball rolling for Bagboy's Hill too! This was actually fairly difficult and I ran into some new challenges, which introduced me to "Baldness Maps", "Ramp Maps" and creative UV Maps FOR the Maya Fur.

So the initial grass application was a bit of a failure, it was due to the: Fur Settings, the Geometry Settings and the UV Settings

Adjusting the Fur Settings

A bit more, also added more subdivisions to geometry.

Further Fur Settings adjustments. Created UV Map for Fur.

Further Fur Settings adjustments. Adjusted UV Map for Fur.

Further Fur Settings adjustments. Applied the "Relax" command to all UV's to allow and even distribution of grass density. (See following image)

Amped up Grass Density.

Now that I have gotten this far it's time to get into the details, the grass is too perfect right now and will need some imperfections, dirtying up and fitting with the original concept of the grass being slightly worn out where Bagboy comes down from the hill everyday. For this I will need to create "MAPS" for my Baldness setting, Length setting and possibly even Scraggle Setting. Many further adjustments to be made.

Finalizing Sofia Rig and fixing errors

As a Director I felt that Sofia's design was still off. My tutors agreed and I decided that the adjustments Laura made to the Eleven rig needed serious ammendments.

Here is Laura's version:

I thought it was very unappealing, I can understand that Laura was trying to make the character look as much like her original design as possible, but at the end of the day an unappealing character is an unappealing character.

Here are my changes;

I toned almost everything down as it was just far TOO much, now it just looked a little creepy but I feel this is more to do with the pose and the teeth + eye positioning. So more ammendments...

I found some errors in the Sofia Rig when I was attempting to create test animation;

Here you can see how the FK AND IK controls are showing even though I only need one of them to show, this problem seemed to be unfixable and occured during my tampering of the rig, luckily I had created many backups and was able to fix the issue..

Like so.

I added a "Dyn" Control for the Rig to be able to turn all the dynamics On and Off at will as well as turn the skirt and hair visibility on and off. This just makes things much easier for the future.

The Boots also underwent a change where the laces were taken out, this was to simplify the geometry as 

1) The Laces were a very detailed feature in a Character style where simplicity was the aim.

2) The Laces were too heavy in geometry and slowing down the use of the rig substantially, me and Laura both agreed that taking the Laces out and adjusting the Boot model to look a little more scrappy would actually aid the character's look if anything.

Finally solving the Kite String Rig!

After  much deliberation I was able to figure out a clever way in which I could create an effective String Rig for the film.

Create a NURBS Curve using the CV Curve Tool

Rebuild the Curve, with 200 Spans (Vertex's)

Making the selected Curve Dynamic as an nHair

Result

Extruding a Nurbs Circle along the Nurbs Curve

Making the Nurbs Curve Self Collide, and then adjusting the collision thickness

Results

Now I need a method in which I can create a controller at the bottom of the rope so that if attached to an object (in my case Bagboy's Spindle), it will automatically follow along.

Using a Script downloaded from LesterBanks called SoftClusterEX, I created a Cluster with Soft Selection at the bottom of the rope, this will be where the Rope will be attached to the Spindle.

Tree and Tree Stump Bump Mapping

I decided that artistically both the Tree and the Tree Stump looked so much better when they had a straight Texture applied to them with a Bump Map rather than a Painted Texture and Displacement Map. 

I had to spend some time configuring and checking Bump Map Settings in Maya before I finally got to a stage that worked.

Voila! Lovely

Now for the Tree Stump, I decided to compare how the texture and displacement map worked compared to the texture with bump map...

Texture and Displacement Map

Painting Textures in Zbrush

Because Laura is uncomfortable with using Zbrush and I want to adhere to the strict Production Plan as we have done already, it's come to me to paint on the texture on to both the Tree and the Tree Stump in Zbrush.



Here is Zoe's Zbrushed Tree Ztool:

Here is Laura's Texture which she created:

I used Zbrush's "Spotlight" and "Polypaint" feature to paint the texture in 3D Space straight onto the model as the base model will use a displacement map in Maya and therefore it is so much easier to create and apply a texture with this method. The same goes for the Tree Stump Zoe created, below are my results;

I was really quite happy with the look of these objects, especially the Tree Stump, it looked very, very stylised yet gave the model a unique sort of detail at the same time.

However, Laura also produced some texturing + uv mapping tests for the tree herself, these did NOT use the displacement map created by Zoe and looked more simple.

You can see it here:

http://lauraknighton3rdyear.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/tree-texture-updates.html

It came down to me to make a directorial decision;

Should I use the version created by myself which uses Displacements and a Model by Zoe with a texture file by Laura,

or should I use the version created by Laura which uses the Base Model by Zoe?

I will update this section with my decision soon.

UPDATE: I opted for the version WITHOUT the Displacement Maps.