After the animation was finished, I shared it with the group to get any final thoughts and adjustments. Once I was happy with how both scenes looked I began the process of rendering each frame. This was the longest part of the production. I had to set up the lighting and make sure each character was lit up in each frame and make sure the background had sufficient light. I watched Mike’s video on lighting the scene and got a few tips from that. I played around with the exposure on some lights to make sure it was just right. As i toggled with the attributes, I did quick low render shots to see how the scene looked once rendered. For the background, our original 2-D planes which Mark had designed wouldn’t show up in any of the renders. I googled the problem and found a solution. I just had to select the camera, click on environment, create a plane and then pick the image from the folder. This meant when the scene was rendered from that camera, the background image would now be rendered too. I thought the rendered images could use more of a blue tint, to give off the impression of the scene being underwater. For this I went into the Dome Light settings and changed the colour to a bright blue, with low exposure, so as not to overpower the scene with too much blue.
Below is a couple of the render test shots, trying different shades of blue for the dome light in the background. I went with the second option as the blue seems more realistic and less saturated than the first.
Below this are also some more test renders I took while tweaking with camera and lights.
Once I thought the quick render looked good, and after sharing with my team members, I then changed the render settings to 1080p HD render and set the frames to be rendered. The rendering took a very long time for scene 8 as there were 200 frames. Scene two wasn’t just as long as it only consisted of 90 frames.
I followed along to Mike’s video on exporting using after effects. I imported the images as a TIFF sequence, however there was a bit of a problem. A lot of additional error frames were placed in the middle of the comp which ruined the scene. After looking through the whole composition, I noticed that the start scenes were fine, and after scrolling past the error frames, the rest of the proper frames were after the error ones. So I just deleted all the error and compiled the good ones together to make up the scene. I added the scene to the Adobe Media Encoder render queue and exported as an MP4. I repeated these steps for scene two and was able to share both completely edited scenes with the team.
After I had finished the process of animating and rendering, my group member Eimear, who designed the puffer fish model made me aware that she had tweaked the model and re uploaded it as some of the geometry on the original model wasn’t quite right. She explained when the puffer fish blew up, the geometry looked strange in the model. By this point it was too late for me to go back and re-animate the puffer fish scenes, then have to render and export again. I am glad Eimear made me aware, I re watched the scene which features the puffer fish panicked, and I don’t think the geometry is a problem as it’s barely noticeable in the scene.
Below are both of my completed scenes, Scene two and Scene eight.
Below is the final fully edited animation created by Timothy, Eimear, Mark and me.
As can be seen in the final edit, quite a bit of animation has been cut to save time and bring it under the 30 second mark. All of my scene two has been cut and the last section of my scene eight also didn’t feature in the final edit. i understand the reason for this as the animation would be far too long for submission.