Week 8 Development Blog

For this week, we finally had access to our cloud rendering server. So we tried to render out some scenes and composite footage with them in AE.

For the art part, we encountered some problems when building the terrain and tree:

1. Textures of ground and hero tree are blurred
2. Textures not showing correctly in Arnold

For terrain, Arianna fixed those problems by:

1. Editing nodes connection in Arnold materials, use material directly from Substance designer
2. Changing the shape of the terrain plane
3. Adjusting normal and height parameters in Arnold

Besides, Arianna also fixed problems of not showing trees correctly:

1. Sculpted more details in Zbrush
2. Use UDIM to unwrap the model
3. Increase the height texture map resolution (4k, 32bit)
4. Separate the tree model into three parts, only render the front part with subdivision to speed up the render in the close up scene

For the render part, we had access to the server of RenderCore and connected our maya project to the server this week. We also tried to render some critical scenes. It really helps us save a lot of time because we don’t need to render every scene our workstation slowly and we can work on other part when we push render request to the cloud side.

Here are some scenes we tested on the render server.

We also tried to making new composition in AE to combine the footage and virtual environment.