EP – Rendering CG
To finalize all processes before rendering, I created facial expressions in After Effects. Since I had already tested this in AE, I could start work based on the playblast videos. When I tested some expressions, the dots didn’t show well, so I changed the screen effect to bigger dots. After making this adjustment, I successfully completed the facial expressions.
I realized that I had forgotten to add the electricity effect to the character’s body. I once found a tutorial about creating lightning using Bifrost in Maya. Thankfully, a YouTuber provided a script file and a tutorial video on how to apply lightning to a mesh. However, for some reason, it didn’t work as expected, particularly when the mesh moved. The electricity effect concentrated on a specific point, making it look unnatural.
I found another solution using After Effects. Referring to a tutorial video, I created lightning effect. It initially looked too much, so I made it shorter and less intense. After creating the effect, I rendered only the effects on a black background and transferred them to Nuke.
After a few experiments with render settings, I started rendering. This time, I divided the render layers into parts such as shadow, character, electricity and reflection, which took a long time to render. Thus, I decided to use a render farm. It was my first time using a render farm, and I followed the step-by-step instructions on this page. It seemed complicated at first, but I found it quite straightforward once I followed all the instructions. Thanks to the render farm, I saved an incredible amount of time (if I had rendered using my laptop, it might have taken about half a day or more to complete, but it finished in only 30 minutes). Afterwards, I checked if the render images were correct, and then applied them to the scene or re-rendered them if necessary.
The main issue I encountered during the render process was cast shadows. Since I divided the layers into reflection and shadow, I had to set which layers had only shadow or reflection. During this process, I noticed that I had to disable the cast shadow option in the reflection layer. Also, before the character comes out from the monitor, it is located behind the monitor model, creating a shadow on the desk behind the monitor. To address this, I created a matte to avoid shadows on the desk by turning off the cast shadow option in the geometry settings.
When the character comes out, I tried to add a cartoon effect to make it more fun. However, I couldn’t find an appropriate way to insert this effect naturally, so I decided not to apply it in the final video.