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Unfortunately, Corey was still unwell today and it is difficult to work on animation when we are not together. For this reason, we decided just to animate the two main characters in class.

Unfortunately, the old ghost model had not been correctly rigged and was unusable: I suggested that Will change the shape of his character’s mesh slightly and give him a different hat. That way, we would be able to save time rigging and worrying about skin weights, but we would still have an old-man ghost:

We also managed to finish animating our first two scenes fully – Will was able to animate the old ghost’s scenes almost completely, save for the final scene! I rendered out a few scenes just to see the lighting for our ghosts, and their own individual lights:

The ghosts were a little reflective, so I removed their specular elements so that they appeared matte so that they better suited the environment:

I am going to continue animating over the weekend, so that we are hopefully able to get the rendering finished early next week!

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!