Atom Pancakes - The Final Stages

Rendering, setting up files for rendering, and animating is all I have been doing these past few weeks. I'm kind of reluctant to show much of it when the main article will be finished in just under two weeks time, but as usual, here are a few tasters of whats to come!

If only rendering could be simple. Some might consider this to be overkill, but in order to maximise control in post production, I've been splitting up my renders. Most notably, the character, which is set to be split up into its various body parts so that I can adjust the colours of say, the skin, or the cardigan.

This is one of the master renders of the characters in one of the scenes.

And if you are wondering, the side characters purposely have a completely different light setup! You'll just have to wait for the final animation to see why!

Then there is the facial hair of the middle character rendered into its own image.

To illustrate just what kinds of things can be done to a render, this is what the face looked like before...

...and now after.

Perhaps it would be better to just get the colours looking more or less correct in Maya, but it just as fast if not, quicker to do realtime colour adjusting in post.

Interesting facts and figures! (well I think so!)
I've spent the last few days working on a scene with three characters to animate. This has of course meant that the amount of images I'm getting at rendering triples as all their parts have been split up individually! For just one frame of animation, I'm getting over 25 images. Thats well over 10,000 images for just 17 seconds approximately, which if you are wondering is the length of one of the scenes I'm working on. Luckily I'm not short of space, and thankfully the images will compress well afterwards. And the really cool thing is this has not increased render time in any way, as it is still only rendering each frame once, and would take exactly the same time to render just the master image.

Of course someone still has to manage all these images when compositing :(
Oh well.

So that was a little insight into the rendering process for the animation, 'The Final Chapter'. Visit AtomPancakes for more on the animation.

A Flock of Pixels