Into march and we had our characters, our assets to make the scenes, it was not just a matter of creating the scenes and animating the characters.
Firstly, before creating the scenes, we thought it would be useful if we pinned down the compositions for some of the pivotal shots.
Heres an example of a composed scene can be seen below. It was composed using the above composition.. At this point in the story, blue is seen searching around for pink. The animation using the rig has been blocked in. The compositions were assigned to a polygon plane in the scene and the geometry referenced in and composed this way:
It was in kay hill scene that we chose to do one last test with all the assets just so that we could be certain that after had animated the character in the scenes, we could actually achieve the look that we wanted through compositing.
Below is a number of test composites with the two characters in this scene:
We now knew that we could achieve the look we were going for . Below is the final composition process that we go through , with the resepctive render layers which we used as the standard model from this point on in the project:
OK. So everything was in place to start animating. The scenes were built, the characters were rigged, the asssets made, the composite tests were done, we knew that we could achieve the look that we wanted.
The only thing that we needed to do now was to create neurons' indivual sparks. These have always been envisaged in the same way as the animatic: their movement defines how they look really - fluid but snappy.
Below is how the sparks were created:
The following is a render test for when the spark was moving (this is not an animation test so does not move as the sparks will)
The rush of sparks which were needed would have been unfeasible to have animated each one individually so dynamics were used to recreated the swarm. This was quite simple effect to achieve. Here is a first test we did:
The final look for the sparks and how they would effect the environment was one of the first shots animated as it was quite difficult. Using one of the shot comps above, and the dynamics, this final scene was created:
Backgrounds
Whilst we have these scenes, we had to create a few generic backgrounds for the pieces. The an example of some of the backgrounds we used can be seen below. They had to be quite depthy. We did find though that the desaturation when composited bleached out and looked a bit muddy. Some had to be gone back over to resaturate:
