Category: Animated Narratives

We started off the morning by planning out where our background ghosts would be in the opening and mid scene, so that everyone could get to work on animating the background ghosts:

Today, I lit our environment for the animation. Unfortunately, Corey was unable to come in today as he was ill; I decided to go ahead and cover lighting, as we can’t wait much longer to get it done. This was the beginning attempt, using this HDRI image; we chose this because we liked the warm orange and pink colours:

This was still a little too dark – we wanted to make sure it gave off a night time vibe, however we still want to be able to see what’s going on in the scene. I also made and added the following image to add to the night’s sky:

These were still a little too dark, and I thought that the floor/grass was looking a little bit too rubbery. I decided to turn the roughness up and make it matte, and add another light from the left hand side of the scene

I think that it was heading in the right direction, and wanted to get a sense for how the ghost would look in the shot, so I added him gazing up at the stars to see how he reacted with the lights in the setting

I asked Alec for some feedback, and he said that the graves were looking too reflective. This was making them seem quite dark, but also giving off the view that they were metal and not stone/marble. He also suggested that we should light the house more, as we’re unable to see it’s details. I took the grave stone’s roughness and metalness maps off of them in order to lighten them and to take away their reflectiveness, and then I added another light to the front of the scene to light up the house.

I still think that this could be better, so I decided to light the house specifically:

I also made up the opening graphic, which we will overlay onto the scene in editing:

Today, I spent my time applying textures and rendering our environment:

I also played around with the lighting etc. just to experiment – this is not a job that is assigned to me for this project, so I didn’t dive into it too much; I just was interested to see how much it could influence the scene:

I spent the morning getting textures done for the last tree in our environment:

I then wanted to apply textures to the environment: unfortunately the props used were not the UV mapped versions, and therefore I was unable to import the textures and apply them. I remade the environment to include all of the props with their UV maps done:

Tomorrow, we will be able to begin animating!

I did some test animations today to test the rig of my ghost:

I’m pretty happy with the rig and how it performs! I think we can call this character finished!

I spent the day scaling back the texturing of the assets for some items:

Hopefully these are simple enough: I didn’t want to take away too much of the lichen on the house and walls, just because I think it gives them some contrast. I took most of the dirt/damage masks off of the items.

I also created an eye rig for my ghost:

My Ghost is now fully rigged and ready for animation – I am going to spend tomorrow doing some test animations with him. 🙂

Ciara finished up setting out our environment over the weekend:

I think it’s looking really good, she’s done a phenomenal job; I spent a couple hours tidying up the outliner and reuploaded it to our one drive: