Scene 1 Even Closer to Completion!

Scene 1 has now been completed, minus a couple of minor tweaks to areas that need tightening. One or two of the motion tracked wall hangings wobble occasionally, and therefore just need some small readjustments in the after effects project. Unfortunately this means another render is needed, however this is necessary to ensure that the finished product is as high a quality finish as possible.

View the render as it stands at the moment below, subject to changes.

Scene 1 Almost Done!

Things have been a little slow in production cycle recently, due to the pressing dissertation deadline, however scene 1 is almost complete, with only a few extra effects to added, and then final polishing.


As you can see, there are a few areas where tighter tracking and masking needs to be applied to certain elements in the video. For instance, the blue frame on the right of the apartment has some inaccurate masking in a couple of shots, but this is easily rectified.

The next update will see this scene finished, within the next of couple of days.

Elsewhere, I've been working closely with the production team to create suggestions for where we are able to collaborate in a creative manner. The outdoor scene has potential for a wide range of effects and tracking objects to be placed into the environment, and now I have the files for this, the work can begin in earnest.

Post-Easter Update

Been a while since the last update, but I've been working away.

Spent some time with the production time looking at ways to make some of the effects that we need for the show.

One example is the fingers crossed symbol that needed rotating, but giving some depth so it's not obviously a 2d image. Since there's no simple way to add depth in After Effects, I instead opted to curve the 2d object with the ray-traced 3d settings in the program.

After some time fiddling with the segments and curvature percentages, I made this really rough draft.

The white in the background didn't cover the whole background, which didn't become apparent until the render was finished, as well as the text positioning in the foreground. The production team and myself agreed that the rotations were too fast and the curvature settings weren't quite good enough to give the impression of some depth.

A little more tweaking and some polishing left us with this:

Since Ray-Traced 3D needs nvidia graphics cards, the rendering and processing was done on CPU, meaning this 10 second render would have taken hours. Instead, I rendered one rotation of the hand and looped the resulting .mov file instead, rendering the video you see above in a matter of seconds.

The next step now is to apply this piece, and all the other final images into the apartment scenes, as well as inserting adverts into the outdoor scene I have received. I've also been working on display screens that the characters will interact with, and you'll see those soon too!