Started match moving the primary plates. It’s my first time so it’s been interesting. I got stuck on a couple pretty stupid problems, but now it appears to be moving along smoother. So far the circuit breaker shot and the crab shot is done. The crab shot still has some subtle slipping, but I think it’s due to the model not being placed properly yet. The school of fish shot is close but I’m still having some focal range issues due to not generating enough feature tracks in certain areas for a proper camera solve. Either way, here’s the new crab shot (raw) that Jesse shot with the model slapped on.

Also thought I would go ahead and append my current texturing progress.  Still just displacement, bump and color maps, spec/reflectivity and diffuse maps have yet to be done.  The legs shouldn’t take too long, then all I have to do is get them all to sit together properly.  This is probably my favorite part of the whole process.

This weekend I made a custom VEX shader that will hopefully suit the fish shot nicely. Since I’ve never done much rendering with mantra, much less composited Houdini elements onto live action, I wanted to make sure I had basic controls for diffuse, specular, and reflection passes.

The other thing I wanted early on was the shimmering properties fish have, which is especially apparent when they swim in a group. While it’s not very obvious in the smaller compressed video, you can see it happening in HIGH RES. This render is with 1 area light and occlusion, no shadows or color correction or optimization. I’ve got a few more things I want to do with the shader, but more importantly, a lot of the big question marks about our workflow have been eliminated. Hopefully now we’ll be able to do several different types of fish in smaller auxiliary schools.

Here’s a screenshot of the VEX being used in the shader. It’s pretty messy despite the simplicity.

The grunion are running, there are definitely issues but I’ve made a lot of progress and seeing these guys in action has given me a much better idea of what needs to be tweaked than just a particle sim did. Ignore the tails, they’re annoying right now but that’s just because of the default lighting, they’re stealing the fish bodies’ thunder but once we have spec maps and alpha on these babies we’re going to see that school-wide flash that we want.

I’ve optimized the way particle velocity controls the animation. I started with the ol’ bgeo sequence coming into a file node and then run through a timewarp to vary the speed. I dumped this because it was slow and didn’t allow me to copy-stamp anything on to the fish. Now I’ve hooked both the animated and un-animated geometry into a blend shape node with the blend position being controlled by speed through a copy stamp; it’s like changing the amplitude of the sine wave rather than the frequency. Much better results this way because instead of just changing the speed of the animation the fish actually appear to be swimming harder as they speed up.

Next up I want to try to fix the animation so the heads wiggle and the fulcrum sits at the base of the fish skull rather than at the end of the nose, there are some penetration issues that I need to fix too and I may overhaul the particles to get better movement. I’m pretty pumped to see Kurt’s shader on this though.

Haven’t been very verbal on the blog in a while, so here it is.

Finally got into texturing, I would say the head’s just about done as far as the color map is considered. Still gotta paint in the reflectivity maps and so on. The displacements and shaders could still use a considerable amount of tweaking and there’s a few things I need to go in and fix in zbrush. However, tomorrow I plan on moving onto the color maps for the claws and legs. Patrick Warner and Sam Ortiz have both offered to help with the crab, Patrick to rig and Sam to animate. Still have to setup all the little details (like the antennae, little shrimp finger things, algae, and some tiny hairs randomly dispersed).

In other news, tomorrow we’ll be re shooting a few of the plates (primarily the crab shot), and Max Bickley has offered to shoot our HDR’s for us. Once we have all the plates then we’ll go ahead and get a match move so we can start modeling the proxy geometry.

Here’s where the crab head is at right now:

And here’s some of the saved progress:

We sat down today and edited what we got with Scott and Jason. The shots look fantastic, we’re very fortunate those guys found the time to help us out. Saying it was a relaxed set is an understatement, but they were nonetheless professional and committed. Hopefully we end up adding to what we have and can do these shots justice.

Matchmoving is next, and will come sooner rather than later. We’re right on schedule, so the quicker we can start seeing composites, the more time we have to make them look awesome. This weekend we hope to get some HDR’s of our locations and maybe pick up a shot or two at Hutchinson, but other than that the rest of our work will be COMPUTER GENERATED.