Week 14 | Final

EXTRANEUS FINAL LINK!

Scene optimization worked! We were very, very relieved to be paying a substantially lower price than the original quote.

After we got back the renders, Dhairya and I worked on compositng. I assisted him with the overall comp, working primarily on the title and endcards as well as music and sound effects.

Week 13 | Final Playblast and Render Rocket

FINAL PLAYBLAST

Final Playblast of EXTRANEUS

Our first quote from Render Rocket! ... we definitely needed to rework a lot in the scene, so Dhairya and I went back and tweaked material settings, make the cables less dense, and other tweaks to better optimize the scene for the render farm.

Having all the tests come back rendered was always a good. albeit rare case. Up until the very end, even with calls to customer support, we couldn't figure out why the atmosphere wouldn't render on their end. So we took as many of the school computers as we could to render out the last 100 frames of the shot. 

A visual representation of our rocky relationship with Render Rocket. 

Week 12 | Finishing the Scene

RENDER TEST AND KEYFRAME

Dhairiya and I spent many a late night in the labs and finally finished the scene. We managed to render out a couple of frames with the school computers, but it took over nine and a half hours for one of the frames and most of them never finished rendering! We continued to attempt to upload our scene to Render Rocket and the renders continued to fail.

We did a bit of compositing to achieve the look we wanted and went back and continued to optimize our scene for rendering.

Week 11 | Quixel

This week we were introduced to Quixel, an easy to use substitute for Substance or MARI. Dhairya and I spent many an hour resurfacing all the assets in the scene.

Week 10 | Render Rocket

We finally called and set up a student account with Render Rocket. 

Week 9 | Initial Surfacing and Adjustments

SURFACING

ADJUSTMENTS

Week 8 | Initial Render

Week 6 | Scene Adjustments

As per suggestion, I changed the species of tree and pushed them way into the background.

Week 5 | Shader Balls and Camera

SHADER BALLS

CAMERA

Worked together with Dhairiya on refining the camera and blocking out the scene. This was one of our early camera blocks.

Week 4 | Environment Work and Timeline

Blocking in environment geometry. No shaders or texture work yet.

We also created a rough timeline for the work we would be doing over the semester.

Week 3 | Third Concept Pass and Diagnostic Spheres

 

Third pass. We focused on mood and lighting for the concept, and to refine the shape in the background. It was also suggested we make the wires out of a material similar to fiber optics, and have lights travel through the cables.

The new concept was to have the lights travel into the background shape to reveal the silhouette of the shape similar to a lighting strike.

DIAGNOSTIC SPHERES

Week 2 | Second Concept Pass

A second go at the concept. We were told to narrow the focus and connect the object in the background to the hole in the RV, so we changed it to a mess of wires in the background, and a few stray wires in the midground leading up to the hole in the RV.

Week 1 | Logotype and Pitch

TITLE

INITIAL PITCH

Martin is a facility manager who works and lives in a salvage yard with his dog Spud. The scene opens with a static shot, with a close up on a rear view mirror of a scrap car. The camera moves through the abandoned vehicles, towards Martin’s R.V. As the camera moves we the RV, the door unhinged, dog bowl, the inside of the RV, increasingly disheveled as the camera progresses. The camera slows down as the dog cage comes into the frame. It is mangled, showing signs of struggle; Blood seeping in from off frame, soaking on the fabric which is hanging on the cage. The camera slightly closes in on the fabric, as the blood spreads through the fabric, directing the camera to the edge of the fabric, unveiling, a colossal mysterious structure, with its top piercing the clouds.