Rule of Rescue | Work in Progress Deer Groom and Slap Comp

Groom Reference:

I groomed the rigged and animated deer model in Houdini. I referenced photos of white-tailed deers.

Below is the work in progress video of the comp for the cg deer. This is not the final shot. It is a test render using the longest piece of footage we had. The shot will be broken up into four shots between two different scenes.

I am responsible for deer groom, texturing, lighting and rendering, plate tracking (in Nuke) and the test slap composite.

I need to add one more light in front of the deer to help get rid of the dark reflections on the chest fur. I will also make the deer shadow slightly more intense and the size of the deer another twenty percent smaller. I will also add motion vectors to the next render pass so that the deer has motion blur to match the camera that will be added in Nuke.

The animation of the deer is going to be redone. The movement isn't bad, but it is not what we want for the sequence, and some of the rig controls were not utilized properly or at all. Look-at constraints for the eyes were not animated. I'm currently in contact with another animator.

Battery Texturing and Modeling Detail:

I'm not one of the modeling and texturing artists for the project, but I was willing to step into when I needed to since we had a small CG team. I finalized modeling and completed all the textures for a battery prop. The battery is a real life item that appears in the footage and is used by both our main character and the droid, so it needed to match. I painted the textures in Substance Painter and made the decals in Photoshop, took those into Substance and stamped those on using alphas.

Reference:

Turntable (rendered in Redshift):

Moving into Spring Quarter:

All assets are modeled and textured. Lighting is currently being completed before we render any non-FX work using Redshift. All FX that are currently completed will be rendered in mantra, except for my deer groom which is being rendered in Arnold. There is one more destruction and one wood RBD FX sequence that needs completed over the short spring break and/or over the first week of spring quarter so those can be composited.

After that we just have sound design to be completed. Colorist work has already be completed and will be applied to all the composited footage as soon as it that is done. Final edit tweaks will likely be made to tightened up the footage and make sure that the heart of the story is still coming through.

Next blog post will be when the film is completed and we move onto sound design.