Juniors had a pretty rough deadline, our Push Pull animation being due on the same day as our 1 minute animatic and our drama digital painting due a day later. We made it though!
It was really tough, 4 days before Push Pull was due I had just finished wrestling with all my renderman problems and my lighting was still crappy, the animation wasn't in spline yet and I knew I was going to have to invest a lot of time into concept over the weekend (at least 12 work hours). Luckily, things started to make sense when I found I could duplicate the shaders on my referenced objects and reapply them so they were in my lighting file and they wouldn't be overridden by upstream changes on my rig. That way I could bring my lighting and texturing up together without jumping around in files. I also got my feet wet with Nuke, which was the first time I really dug into composting a project. It turned out to really help my workflow- It allowed me to see it as a whole and decide what needed work both in lighting and texturing, but also in regards to animation (something became apparent that just weren't visible in a playblast and other things turn out to be not as big of a deal). Still a few things I'd like to do before adding it to the reel.
I should also mention this is the first time I've rendered Linearly and it really worked the way it should and allowed me to get much further along with my textures and light than I would have otherwise.
Here's a 15 minute LWF How To for rendering Linearly and outputting to an 8-bit format.
Enough talk, we're going to have to go through all these deadlines one more time before the semester's up.
Push/Pull
Until next month...
