Mikayla Fuehrer - The King and the Pawn

Lighting continues to move onward. Right now a lot of the team is pitching in to help with rendering so that we will be able to meet our deadlines. We are fortunate to have a lot of team members to help out, but we have faced technical difficulties so all we can do is keep working and hope that the technology will hold out.  For me, I'm continuing to get my shots done, and help out where I can with paint-overs or trying to fix render errors (caused by technical issues) with compositing. There are some inconsistencies we are dealing with between rendering on our computers locally, rendering on the school computers remotely, and rendering with the school's renderfarm. We split this stuff up to help save time, so putting this stuff back in would not help with doing things efficiently. I have a lot of experience with adobe products so I wanted to try to step up to help see if there was some fixes we could make in aftereffects (or photoshop, I honestly found it very powerfu

And lighting is continuing, as always! For this Unit, I have taken on some additional shots as I have finaled almost all the ones from my schedule. Some of our team members are falling behind due to technical difficulties with the render farm, so I really wanted to help out where I can. I am doing more chess world shots as I have a lot of experience with those. I am both nervous and excited to be lighting my personal favorite part of the film. This part is what has always gotten me to tear up, so I really want to try my absolute best. It's still in early stages, but I feel as though I'm in a good starting place. Below the lighting videos are some images of some technical difficulties of my own. Our pillars unfortunately weren't UV'd in the best way before they were rigged. As I went shot by shot, I just adjust the UVs to give the pillars the look we want. It appeared fine in the file, and I rendered my shot to turn in. I was so startled to find that when I open

Lighting is carrying on for this next unit. I am working hard to address all the notes given to me and achieve what I can with the limitations of these methods as well as the short time. I believe that I am making progress. I have particularly spent time experimenting on sq200s120, and 140. We wanted to try incooporating glowing effects into other shots along the film to help make the chess world more imaginary and other worldly. This has come with some successes and some failures, but there was a lot of learning as always.  I'm really enjoying working in the death world, the effect is so powerful. It is also so challenging. I say that with a smile on my face of course. I find it a challenge to not have the luxury of light linking. I was taught to utilize this to attain the most control in the appearance of lighting. This allows for a lot of refinement. Without that, it takes a lot of time to position lights where a falling pillar doesn't fall towards a spotlight, as i

Lighting is going well this week! I'm working on my next batch of shots. It's fun because they all have different challenges. But I think it's off to a good start! Right now what I am spending most of my time on is sq200s120 and sq400s060. In 120, we are experimenting with adding a glow behind the queen chess piece that way we did in the green chess world. We really liked the effect that had so we want to try making something like that work for emphasis in the yellow chess world too. Also in s060, we have a pillar that is coming down and falling on David, so we really want a shadow to fall over his face to clue in the audience about like what is to come. It's almost like a foreshadowing thing. This one is definitely a bit of a challenge for me because I am animating and block come in front of a light to 'cast the shadow' but I also need to be matching it up to the pillar that is shown falling in the next shot. I actually haven't animated something in ov

This unit I had a lot of shots due for final. It was a bit of a crunch with midterms going on, but I'm proud to say that I got all my shots worked on and submitted on time. I had some fixes to make towards the end, but I think overall it really helped the work look much better.  The backgrounds were getting a bit too grey and the pillar's visibility was getting lost. So for each shot I went in and adjusted the gradient of the background sphere so that even if the camera is ''lower' in the environment, the viewer can still see the full range of the gradient. It was a bit hard to keep everything consistent, so I did have to go back and forth a bit but I think I succeeded in that considering nobody noticed issues in that area. I got everything approved except for shot 160. I just need to make the chess piece a bit brighter so that it stands out against the background. I know how to do that though so it's a pretty easy fix.  I really loved working on t

I was able to take and apply the notes I got in class to make the lighting much more ambient because there is no 'sun' or major light source in the chess world. I especially spent some time on the 'death' world scenes, with the green. I changed the color of the black king piece to a really dark red and shine green lights on it so that it would still appear like a black piece. Before, the colors made it seem like it didn't belong in the world. Changing it to a dark green made it blend in the environment too much and adding more light took too much of the black away and it looked like a green piece despite it being an extremely dark color texture wise. I think I got it working better than it was before Again, in case blogger has troubles displaying my work, here is a link to syncsketch https://syncsketch.com/pro/#/project/94008/reviews/601985