Major Project - Lazarus - 007 + 008
- Nathan Jay Bishop
- Aug 29
- 3 min read
007
Before rendering I needed to create the ocean floor. I started with a plane and displaced it with a noise. I was struggling for a good couple of hours trying to figure out how to get the plane to show through the environment fog. I tried adding a giant area light over the plane, at first it had very sharp edges so I added a black to white radial gradient into the opacity of the light which helps fade it blend into the environment more.
This still didn't show any of the displacement of the plane. After trying everything I could think of like the material or the object itself, I flipped the plane on its Y axis and that seemed to fix it. It seemed the geometry just wasn't reflecting anything through the plane even though I checked double sided for the material.
I noticed the character wasn't even in the right position. I stopped the render, I realised that when I put the animation into a null it had messed up the keyframes as I hadn't exported the animation as fbx or abc at that point and was just copying the character from one project to the other, this was the reason I ended up exporting in alembic that I had mentioned previously.
I then put the shot on to render overnight, I woke up to find that the path file for the material on the character was broken. I'm pretty sure it is because Cinema4D crashed and I had opened up a backup and the paths were all messed up. I refreshed the file path and put it back on to render for an hour or two until.
I then rendered it out again and imported all the different files and brought them together.
I did need to render out some more earlier on as the fade from the shot without the surface water to the one with it was a bit too jarring so I needed to render a bit more out anyway so whilst I was doing that I just fixed up the character animation a bit by adding a few more walk cycles so I could add the character sooner instead of it just popping in and also because the look over the shoulder animation actuated too early which made the blend from the 2 animations very sudden.
I then put it on for the final render, until I can get my hands on some star citizen assets but I'm starting to think I should just make my own world up and create my own assets as its more complicated trying to get my hands on these assets than just spending more time making them myself.
008
After getting the render into after effects I downloaded a load of different mp3's online and layered a couple different sounds which I think helped blend them into the scene a lot more. I also added bass & treble effect onto everything with bass being on +100 and treble on -100, some sounds I needed to duplicate the effect a couple times to get a nicer sound.
Now I think I am finally done. I'm so disappointed in myself for how I handled this project. There were definitely times I could have put more time into the work but considering the circumstances I am glad I at least got it finished and didn't give up on it. I 100% need to work on my time management but I think that also means not allowing myself to give people revisions on work when I've said that I wouldn't be able to do it but still end up doing it anyway because I just like working on projects especially if its something someone is really passionate about.
Here is the final render, I want to come back to these shots as there are multiple different things I want to change with each shot, not including updated models etc. I definitely want to revisit the animation as well because I cut corners using mixamo animations, I wish I had figured out how I could edit the mixamo animations as well as I dont think the blend between the 2 animations would look as sharp if the arms didnt raise in the second animation.
I'm also not sure about the text at the start I think I might just have it fade from black instead I think the title onscreen like that looks a bit cheesy.
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