Greetings and salutations readers!
After a winter break focused on personal portfolio development, the semester has begun again and I am back on the BSG production grind. Here is a brief recap of where BSG was when I last posted.
In December, we had our preview screening of our film with a test audience. The film had every shot in 3D blocking, with a rough lighting, rendering, and composited export. The character was still our stand in base mesh, and most of the props were the temporary blocked geos. However, all of our sets were modeled to the point where they will not be changing in layout or composition, and the aliens were in only need of clothes to be finished.
So, as our group reconvened, we set our sights on finishing our characters in their entirety before our next monthly review, so that we can begin final animations promptly. Some of our team members are finishing up the sculpts and adding final details, two of our members are working in Marvelous Designer to tailor clothes, and two of our team members are working together to learn the ways of xGen hair simulations.
So what am I doing while all this is happening? Well, I am the only one not working on characters, and my job is to keep pushing forward on odd job tasks for the short.
This past week, my priority has been working on the research/development side in order to get our rendering systems ready for the end of the semester. This work has been focused on exploring the Path Tracing feature in Unreal Engine, yet it has not been on actually getting renders from it.
When experimenting with Path Tracing on my home computer, everything seemed normal and the results were quite nice. However, upon arriving at school, I noticed that the path tracing options were missing from the computers. Trying to solve this problem was a four day journey, through trying to enable path tracing by modifying the engine files, trying to figure out if updating the drivers would enable it, seeing if the project was compatible between the windows 11 computers with the newer graphics cards, and trying to modify the registries of those cards to solve black screen glitches. Ultimately, we were able to succeed in getting the Path Tracing features to work for our project on those computers, the journey was a lot of wild goose chases and throwing stuff at the wall though.
With the rendering method sorted out, the final part of the research work that I will do is seeing how to submit our Unreal Jobs to the Deadline render farm provided by the school. Currently, the version of deadline that the school uses is older than the system with the easy to install Deadline plugin for Unreal engine. Therefore, in order to submit jobs to deadline, we will have to create a data asset in Unreal Engine that allows us to connect the project's remote rendering option to our school's local farm. I will be testing the setup process of that through the weekend, but fingers crossed that we will have rendering on the farm enabled soon!
In addition to this rendering work, I have also made some roughly modeled prototypes for the robotic arms in our short film, animated some low quality control board startup movements, and spent a good amount of time revising our Terragen Earth planetary shot.
Our Terragen shot previously was just the planet using daytime satellite image textures in full direct sunlight, and I revised it to have a terminator line and a mixture of daytime and nighttime image textures. I used the render layer features in Terragen as well as a duplicate Earth with a flat white albedo to create a mask of the sunlight to composite together the Earth renders that have the daytime texture and the ones using the nighttime textures. I also fixed an issue where the displacement maps that were layered on top of each other for the world, North America, and the Midwest were all adding together to protrude past the atmosphere, so now they replace and improve the displacement quality. The shot still needs a lot of atmospheric work revisions, as well as some improvements to the rendering of the city lights on the planets surface. Here is a before and after of the shot:
As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read about my work on Bathroom Stall Galactica, and I look forward to more positive updates coming soon!
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