ct.rt.oconnor@gmail.com

  • The Tower | Final

    My last ditch attempt rendering the problematic frames of shots 5 and 6 worked. I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t put together that most of the successful frames came from the render nodes and not the Monty machine nodes, but at least it happened before it was truly and entirely too late. Here is […]

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  • The Tower Class 20

    Rendering has not gone as smoothly as I had hoped. The majority of the shots were within acceptable margins of dropped frames, but the shots of the tower collapse were not. In shot six, I am still missing 70 of ~150 total frames. This has been baffling and infuriating, as the log files list no […]

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  • The Tower Class 19

    Since yesterday: Rendered shot 1. Samples weren’t high enough, so there’s significant noise. Currently re-rendering with higher samples and image planes to shuffle out & denoise in Nuke. I have a test comp with projected grass, clouds, and a temporary sky (I don’t have a 2D drawn sky quite yet). There were a few dropped […]

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  • The Tower: Class 18

    Minimal update for today. I restructured my approach to the moss, creating a result that I like better. I also made a titlecard using the tarot card that inspired the short. I’ll be using Nuke to project some 2d drawn assets in front of and behind the rendered geo. Here are some of those: Tomorrow, […]

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  • The Tower Class 17

    Forgot to make my post last night, but here’s the update: I fixed the deformed moss sliding around with the attach to geo constraint in Vellum. I have initial lighting setups for each shot. These test renders are all at default samples for rendering, which is why there’s render noise. The .pngs for uploaded exported […]

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  • The Tower Class 16

    Since last time: Tower now leans and slides less at beginning of destruction sim. Added debris sim and dust sim. Working on solving the problem of how to deal with the tower moss during collapse. Current attempt is running a sort of vellum peel-ish workflow. It slides around and stretches too much, which I’ll fix. […]

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  • The Tower: Class 15

    Well, I’ve run into approximately 7000 issues since last class. Probably the most important at this point is that my sims have become far too heavy to render in Maya. Poor Maya can’t handle a 6GB ABC, which I can’t fault her for. This means that I’m going to switch my rendering solution to Mantra, […]

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  • The Tower Class 14

    I’ve been working on the tower collapse sim. I spent far too much time trying to figure out why my glue constraint wasn’t working before remembering that I’m working in Houdini 19.5.303 which has some broken code in the glue constraint shelf tool. So, I’m not quite as far along as I’d hoped. I’ve got […]

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  • The Tower Class 13

    I’ve gotten the vellum peel working on all character animations except the tower collapse shot. Implementing the peel on the tower collapse won’t be difficult, but I do need to complete the destruction sim before it’s worth simulating the skin. Destruction sim update on Thursday.

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  • The Tower Class 12

    I’ve been learning the basics of the Vellum peel and working on getting a controlled result with it. I think I’ve figured out the workflow with this test, but I still need to fix the behavior and apply it to the other animations.

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