It's the eighth day of the studio project and stress levels are rising steadily. Some have resorting to singing, some have resorted to swearing and some have resorted to casting imaginary spells on people using a wacom pen. Anyway, today was a boring day. I was staring at the screen the whole day trying to match the lines on the texture to the lines on the actual wall by manipulating the texture in photoshop. I think it looks pretty nice in the render (so nice you can't see the difference). I supplemented this by rendering out the image at 1080p and painting and blending the images together in photoshop, on a new layer so I can save it out as an image. So that's what I did for 8 hours. Painstakingly paint the lines and texture in. For 8 hours.
After that, I tried to randomise the texture of the steps, however, not only did it not work, it became even more obvious that there were only 2 variations of the texture being used. All of a sudden, a light bulb exploded in my head. I realised I could use camera projection to project the texture from the footage onto the front of the stairs. This would, with one fell swoop, eradicate all continuity problems as far as that area was concerned. So I proceeded to do just that. While there were some minor discrepancies, which I resolved by moving the vertices of some of the steps, it worked like a charm.
I also managed to figure out the optimal timing for the steps' animation, I had to compromise on the jerking motion (of the steps) a little, as I only had so many frames to work with in order to sync with the live action. If I fully emphasised the jerks, I would exceed the frame limit. Further adjustments to the animation would be need to ensure the steps are completely level when Shaheed walks over them.
After the steps came down, another gigantically obvious problem reared its head. The top part of the steps, which looked fine before it started moving, looked as flat as a computer screen once it started moving downwards. As of .currentTime, I am unable to solve this problem although I tried bump mapping the steps. I even tried creating a bump map from the image in photoshop, but it just won't work!!! However, I managed to catch some highlights for the front of the stairs using bump mapping and adding a specular directional light.
cmds.powerDown
Final Result (as good as real!)
Lowered steps (ignore Shaheed)
Matte Painting
Texture:
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ReplyDeleteEach step has 12 equal width blocks. The block on the left and right ends of each step are thinner than the rest, which means the perspective is incorrect.
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