Car Commercial – 11 – Final Updates + Final Video!
November 15, 2017
Check out the final video at the bottom!
After my last post I didn’t mess around with the lightning system too much, just a couple of random things here or there, but mainly pushing parameters. The biggest change to the actual system I made was where new connections are sourced from in section 4 of the solver code which can be found here. In a session with the Mill it was brought up that in our second shot when the camera is following the car as its driving, the lightning looked as though it was slowing down the car. The bolts connect towards the front of the car and it was suggested that having the bolts streak back a little bit and follow the form of the car.
This behavior was mainly due to the fact that when new lightning prims are sourced, they are sourced in a radius around the current point. All I changed was that I added a vector to the current position that is being sampled as to move it back further along the car. In doing so we have bolts that are pulled back along the car. This change is, however, a magic number and is not at all procedural. It would take a little bit to calculate the correct velocity vector and use that to offset the position, this way it would be procedural and work on a point by point basis, so that is an object was rotating different points will have different velocities rather than just following a single object velocity.
Other than this change, the rest of my time has been spent pushing parameters around and trouble shooting file transfers and what not. Making sure I keep my caches organized and transfer my files correctly as well as have them in multiple locations as I need them has proved to be quite time consuming. Not only this but making sure we have enough space on our collab drive has restricted us slightly at times. Definitely something I’m learning the more I work on these bigger projects is how much time it really takes to transfer files, make sure everyone has the correct and most updated version, and just how crazily important it is to keep organized and implement naming conventions! Everyone talks about it, but make when that stuff is done poorly it can seriously waste time.
Once I got my geometry files out to Rachel I was basically done, I had implemented a quick particle system earlier when creating the project so I messed around with that a little more just to get a few sparks out and rendered that for Abby. I had so much extra time, about the entire weekend, after our soft due date for vfx being Friday at 6, when we were talking we all thought it would be really cool if we had a final scene of the logo just like an actual car commercial. So I grabbed our model, pulled the logo off it, and animated a few sets of lightning on it. It really only took be about 2 hours to get all the lightning into scene and everything set up, after that it was just time spent messing with deleting certain points out to control when and where the lightning was. This is really nice because it makes my job, REAL easy now. Work smart, not hard kids. Check out our final video! Ignore our splash screen, we needed something relaxing to do when we were rendering and caching at 4 in the morning.
All in all this project was a bunch of fun, we learned so much working together as a team. I want to thank the Mill also for all of their support and feedback, with their guidance we have all become much better artists!
