Week 16 + 17: 75% Deadline Rendering + Terrain Look Development

Feb 22

These past two weeks I have mostly focused on rendering, we had a lot of issues to trouble shoot that caused multiple re renders and that took up a lot of my time these past two weeks. I managed to make some decent progress on the terrain’s look development, but I think with a couple more hours of work I can improve the quality a lot before the final renders.

For these last re-renders (for this week’s 75% deadline) I was in charge of all of scene 1 and scene 3’s rendering, along with the 3 fully CG environment shots to turn into comp.

Shot 2D

Shot 2E

Shot 2F

Main Critiques:

Scene in general looks extremely flat (need to work more closely with lighting)
Snow Emission used to fake Subsurface Scattering is a bit too strong, making snow look even flatter
Objects are not causing ambient occlusion on terrain, might be a normal map issue
Need to plug in a realistic tile-able rock texture, just mixing noises is not looking good
Possibly could reframe/re-animate shot 2F

I am no longer creating the texture in COPs, I created this procedural slope mask in material X using the world normal and separating the Y values to create a mask based on the steepness of different areas of the landscape.

I also changed the way objects are scattered onto the height field, I now create a mask based on the trees first so I can spawn rocks and shrubs around the trees for more control and realism.