Hey, finally finished my animation. I did a lot of things in post, a lot more than I bargained for, but I bit the bullet and did it anyways. Learned a lot about colors, something I never really wanted to learn, but here I am. I'll recap what I did to get it published.
RECAP
Let me start at where I left off last post, I was done "animating" so to say and left it to render.
That is where I faced the largest amount of time wasted, actually wasted in making nothing productive. 7 Hours worth of rendering was, well, rendered useless. There was a weird lighting artifact glitch that would spazz out whenever lights were on camera. I spent the next 2 days, just troubleshooting, and rendering.
Eventually, I found the answer. There were too many lights in the scene that produced a shadow. Whenever there were two lights next to eachother and able to cast a shadow on the same object, they would glitch out whenever the camera moved causing the shadows to "fight" over each other creating the problem. After figuring that out, I went ahead and moved all the lights to be farther from each other and disabled the ability to cast shadows for the majority of them.
A rendered image of the troubleshooting I had to do, you can see the artifacting shadows on the street next to the cars.
The solution kind of pissed me off, but what can I do? While I was busy trouble shooting, I also optimized the scene further, pushing the 30 second frame renders to just 10 seconds. I'll keep in mind to use low poly assets from now on especially if they are that far from the camera. Anyways, while rendering out the animation, there was still one thing that bugged me so hard.
The facial expressions. They looked. Wrong.
So, I got to work on re animating the facial expressions, and oh man. They look pretty good now. Still sad the face rig isn't working as intended since I still wasn't able to express all of the emotions I wanted to express in the face. With faces done, I also went back a little bit to fix up and tidy some of the animation to make it look better. The whole final scene of the animation was essentially retimed and some key frames where added here and there to make it "flow" better.
Using two different rigs for faces, constantly had to battle for control over the mocap face.
Looking better.
Still reaching uncanny valley expressions. Sure I could say the same about the show, but man. I want the faces to work.
The most expressive face I could actually make with no squash and stretch
Alright, with the rendering actually done this time. I went ahead and exported it into an EXR and took it to Davinci Resolve for the color grading and final edits. I literally could not do this step without the amazing tutorial I found here : https://creativeshrimp.gumroad.com/l/blender-to-resolve?layout=profile&recommended_by=library
Without this guy, I honestly did not have the motivation to even begin touching Davinci Resolve but he explained everything perfectly. Now I know how basic to intermediate color grading works!
If you see those "color grading" videos, this is what they start out with. That's why its so washed out.
Color grading progress, I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned off. In hindsight, I should have lifted the shadows more since YouTube, completely ate the dark shadows and any special effects.
Funny Nodes for organization. Thanks to the tutorial!
With color grading done, it was time for the sound design. I sourced all of it through freesound.org and adobe provides awesome sound effect packs as well. Completely free!
Anyways, this was where I made another mistake only seen in hindsight. I switched over to Hitfilm Express for the final edits. Big mistake moving from a fully capable editor to a underpowered one. I wanted to not learn the whole Davinci program and it honestly kind of bit me in the butt.
Sound design.
With the sounds and music done, that should have been it, but after I rendered it, I quickly knew there were a lot to be done. Especially post processing wise. This was around the time I realized hitfilm held me back too as it completely butchered the render, so back to Davinci it is.
Adding on some halftones (should have made them brighter, youtube ate them all up in the compression monster)
The process of creating them
Added more effects for the finished flare. Added more lens distortion, a recording overlay, and more glow to the scene giving it more of a stylized look.
Just like that, its done. I quickly made some social media accounts to post them, so yeah. Onto the next blender project.
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