Mikayla Fuehrer - The King and the Pawn

Finals Week is here and I am keeping busy lighting our film! We have a more established idea of where the sun is in relation to the house now, so I made adjustments to this shot. The first image is a render from a technical issue. It's not pretty, but I feel like it's important to show the technical issues going on since the blog is like a process book. I felt like the lighting setup that we have (which is gorgeous) was too strong for this shot, so I wanted to sort of tone it down so that the hand could stand out more without overexposing it.  This shot I think I've improved. I think the got the over lighting in the background working a lot better now.  I also like the lighting I got on the computer screen area too. What I think isn't working as well is the character lighting. I got David illuminated well to separate him from the background. That being said, I think its too harsh and casting very strong shadows. I got help from a classmat...

My plan for week 10 is to refine the lighting that I've done so far. I had meetings with our director and head of lighting to make sure that we have a plan for continuity and a plan for each shot what the time of day is and where the sun is positioned in relation to the house.  Now that that stuff has been cleared up, I believe lighting shots in the real world will move efficiently compared to what has been going on, because a lot of confusion between us has been discussed.  For the chess world, lighting happens a bit differently because we are limited in certain areas compared to what we can do with Arnold rendering. Despite these technological limitations, we spend a lot of time refining the lighting to make it very appealing and we will continue to do so going forward.  I met with Ethan to get some extra help and I plan on sharing my work with him and Olive to get more consistent feedback as I go on the shots I'm lighting. We believe this will help the...

This week was full of shots to get lit.  This shot I tried to just refine some more and get a nice rim light of the pieces. I think there was some continuity issues though with other shots and so I need to go in and change the light source to the other side of the house. Also the textures for the chess pieces got updated so stay tuned for their new look!  This shot I needed to update the textures on because we have darker colored couches now and it definitely helps the focus stay on the character's hand now with the contrast there in the textures. I also wanted the audience to be putting their focus onto the hand, so I added a strong key light to it.  Below are really rough starts to lighting. I'd consider them more of 'blocking' if that makes any sense. This week I ran into quite a few technical roadblocks such as the character's shirt not following the rig. I also had some automatic render aborts that I couldn't finish the render past 2% c...

We've got more updated textures for this shot which is super exciting! After getting feedback  from the class, I don't think the stabilization I was trying last week was working well for an audience so I stepped back a bit and refocused and took the notes from our professor and director. Because the sequence is over a course of time, our director suggested that it could be like a time lapse where a 'picture' is recorded at the same time every day, which means that the lighting can stay steady for this shot, solving the issues without adding on a lot of frames for a shot without a lot of complex animation. I think this is a good decision so that the shot is visually appealing while also being logical. I spent time fine tuning the lighting so that we got a subtle rim light on the chess pieces.  After a lot of look development this quarter, we are finally able to start lighting in the chess world! It's super fun to see the bright and fun colors of this e...

This week I wanted to get a rough color blocking to help texturing the environments move more efficiently. I wanted to 'block out' the textures to have a focus on just color in terms of value, hue, saturation, brightness etc. Having this information locked down and decided on will also help lighting move forward more efficiently even if the textures aren't 100% done. The more complex objects are UVd and ready to get maps assigned efficiently.  For color schemes I wanted to present multiple options for our team to talk about. I personally feel that the last one is working best but I wanted to share other options as well since color is so subjective and interpretive.  I also did some textures of some of our smaller and simpler props and items. The office is more mature and serious so I didn't want anything too crazy popping out. I also wanted to add a hint of green in there because we are using that color as part of our color story with Harold...

This week I juggled a lot between modeling, texturing, and visual development of the chess world. For modeling, I focused on addressing the notes given to me in class and outside class, as well as making tweaks and changes that will help our environments look more refined.  Some of the tweaks that I did were adjusting the proportions of things like the doors for example to better suit the height of our characters. I also worked with the layouts that we have to refine the composition of our environments so they aren't so symmetrical.  I also got some texturing done. I wanted to look for areas where we could add some color into things that were otherwise neutral in color. The vase and the office books were smaller areas that I thought it would be nice to have an actual color on rather than just keeping it all neutral. I tried some options for the phone to have color on it instead of being neutral toned, but they really weren't working well. After looking u...

This week was definitely a change of pace. In addition to finishing up the modeling on the environments, I have tasks that involve making changes to the models depending on the feedback of our team of animators and layout artists alike. For example, we got rid of the center hallway of the environment to better achieve the reoccurring flat shot in our film. We also moved around decorative props to best suit the camera. There was also some aspects brought to my attention, like I needed to raise up the door handles to better suit the height of our Harold model. Originally, David was shorter than what he is now, so I had the handles quite low for Harold so that David didn't need to reach too high. With the model height changes that happened a few weeks ago now, and the animators bringing this to my attention, we were able to make changes like this to make the environment more ready for the animators. We've also been having our fair share of technical issues for the a...