10/21/24
Week 7: Polishing Shaders and Animating Ship
Veronica Ramirez- Composite, Bomin Kim- Smoke FX, Jenson Dantes- Lighting, Lookdev
Addressing Feedback
At this point in the quarter, much of our work is just polishing what we have already made. Like last week, the mentors still had great suggestions as to how to improve! The main points to address were:
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Adjusting dark points in shadows with low detail visibility
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Bringing out highlights on Sprite cans
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Adjusting fill light inside the treasure chest
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Subtle lighting fixes for continuity and emphasizing light direction
To address these points, I began by playing with the lighting in our main product shot. After increasing the fill lights and boosting the highlights, here is the before and after:
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Increasing the amount of light in the scene helped bring out the bright saturated green of the cans, as well as uplifted the mood conveyed by the shot itself.
Veronica Ramirez- Composite, Jenson Dantes- Lighting, Lookdev
Animating Ship
In addition to addressing the lighting of the chest and the consecutive product shot, I also began working on animating the swing of the ropes and the sails. In Blender, my approach to create the effect of wind was fairly straight-forward. Using vertex groups, I selected the parts of the rope/sail connected to the frame of the ship, created a group labeled "pin", then created a Soft Body simulation. I then set the goal to the pinned group, adjusted the strength of the simulation, then created a Wind force field. I keyframed the strength of the forcefield to a kind of sin-wave, hoping to achieve the look of wind.
What I learned is a few things- I need to either change the approach of the force field, or animate specific ropes at a time with varying winds. This week's tests came relatively unsuccessful with strange mesh artifacts/stretching and too uniform of wind, but I now have a better understanding of what the animation needs to look like in 3d. Next week I will have an actual animation, not just a still frame!
