Major: Lighting and Rendering (Part 6)

 I rendered out some more passes of my rooms and edited them together in Photoshop.

Classroom:

Exterior:

Hallway:

Playground:

Major: Timecoded Animatic

I made a timecoded version of my animatic with a frame count for when I animate later on.

Major: Lighting and Rendering (Part 5)

 I rendered out the individual images of the characters from the lineup that I made yesterday while working on putting my turnarounds together.

Major: Lighting and Rendering (Part 4)

 Today, I focused on posing my characters and taking some renders and playblasts for my turnarounds and art of. This also involved me taking some more renders of my environments.

Some environment renders:

The full lineup of my characters, comprised of their poses from their turnarounds:

Group renders, also for turnarounds:

I have spent today also creating and putting together some turnarounds, which should hopefully be finished tomorrow. I've also noticed that I'm getting a better handle of the rig the more I pose with the characters, so I'm hoping it'll be easier for me to animate some shots over the coming days too.

Major: Lighting and Rendering (Part 3)

 Today, I applied the rim light to the other characters and some of the props in my environments. I began to work on rendering clearer quality images for my individual characters. 

Here are the final renders with the rim lights attached:

I still have to apply the rim light to the rest of the props in my file specifically for those items, but I also began to work on the lighting and rendering of my scenes. As the lighting generally remains the same across the entire film, I tried to get the lighting done as best I could in the classroom environment (using Kit's model as a reference), and then exported these to the other three environments and tweaked it slightly. The initial lighting took a few tries to get right, and for the sky, I ended up using a skydome with a ramp texture attached to it to create a nice gradient colour to fill the black space. 

I then began to take some test renders as I worked on the lights. 

I still have some work to do regarding reducing render time and graininess of scenes; I am considering using stand-ins so less space is taken up by the props in each scene, and where possible in certain shots, I will remove pieces entirely. Otherwise, I will focus first on getting my turnarounds out tomorrow for props, environments, and characters, and then taking some more renders, followed by beginning to animate some pieces.