Soft select vertices - Maya

Perspective view showing soft select mode and keyframes for vertices...

Shot_14

Maya render tests, tree texture and melting ice by animating vertices

Shot_13 showing the melted ice men. I created a simple polygon plane and applied a mia_material_x_passes water shader to it, and animated the vertices on the soft select option, and the ice men move through a combination of a rig, plus lattice deformers and again, moving the vertices in soft select mode....

Below left: Perspective view

Below Right and main image: Render showing tree geometry with a 2K texture map and lighting....this render took approx 30 mins, so I will double check all the settings before it gets sent to the render farm....

Ice Man - exr files, output of the Render Farm

Test render of the final shot of the iceman in a water droplet....I've animated him today and will create a close up of his face, possibly using some of the blend shapes that I created a few months ago, to create a final closing shot...

Of my 18 shots, I have four left to put through the render farm...

Below are some screen shots of the actual rendered frames (multi pass) exr files, which have been tested in Nuke....

Test render and new framing for shot_13, ready for tilt shift and blur in Nuke

Shot set up for shot_13

Having played with the tilt shift effect in Nuke yesterday, I've adjusted the camera angle for the final shot of the icemen.

The preceeding shot is an extreme close up of Kerry's eyes, which leads nicely into this closeup. I am going to use the tilt-shift on the ice man to the far left and a blur on the background; so that Kerry's eyes and the man ice man on the right are in focus....

Test render at 25% (6.06 mins per frame to render).

Next step to do the final animation on these melting guys...

Render check list and Nuke

One to one tutorial session with Sean, using Nuke to start compositing.

Below (top): Nuke UI, with render passes (Camera Depth, Diffuse, Indirect, Refraction, Reflection, Specular) and merge nodes.

The green rectangle, is a 'background' node, which allows for the node graph (equivalent of the layer system in After Effects) to be organised clearly. In this case, all nodes relating to the passes are on a green background; orange = CG elements; pink = green screen footage. . 

We omitted the Ambient Occlusion pass, as the tree geometry has only a bump map, rather than a normal map, and the ice men material shader doesn't require accentuation of shadows.

 My check list for render, which includes all settings for render, render layers, render passes; and to make sure I've got all texture and sourced images in the correct folder, prior to sending to the render farm over the weekend....
So far, shot 07 is out of the render farm and the quality looks great
In for render this weekend
Shot 05, 11, 11a, 11b

Playblast of iceman animation

Quick playblast of shot_11a; with the iceman beginning to melt.

The preceding shot is a close up of the female character's eyes and I like how this iceman maintains eye contact, with the live action character, whilst he begins to melt. I've played with artistic licence, and whilst his initial movements don't represent how ice actually melts, his movements begin to tell a story that he is melting and about to depart....

The image behind is an image sequence, with the image plane settings set to 'visible in refractions'...

Lighting and tweaks for the last shot

Lighting and final adjustments for the last shot...next steps to create a couple more rim and fill lights and then to animate the ice man!