The Chopping Block

After review, the team created a new plan of action that will hopefully put us back on track. 

Wednesday - Feb 7

During review, we noticed that there was a lot more feedback on the ground-based version of the shot. Due to that observation, we've decided to pursue that direction. We've also re-assessed priorities in order to account for dependencies. During the afternoon, I was able to create a new version of the camera that followed Kyle's framing notes.

Thursday - Feb 8

Today, we checked in with each other in class and reviewed everyone's contributions. We also made a long term plan on how to finish our advertisement. I was tasked with  improving the portal effect. I also talked with our animator and made sure to establish our animation timeline. We also established that we needed to switch to a shading-based version of the nanotech effect due to our time constraints.

Friday - Feb 9

For Friday, I created iteration of the portal effect with a larger quantity of significantly smaller cubes. I then continued that work by reducing the influence of the POP Curve Force node that I was previously using. I paired this with a new POP Advect by Volume node that adds disturbance in a select area of the simulation. I wasn't able to use the POP Wind node since it is more difficult the localize the effect of the wind. In addition to the simulation adjustments, I halved the intensity of the incandescent shader that I used for the pixel cubes. I made this change so that the portal contributes less lighting to the scene.

After the adjustments were made, I cached them out and included them in our main rendering scene so the effect could be render in context.

At 8pm, our group had a meeting to discuss progress. After the meeting, Josephine, Chaithanya, and I worked at Monty. During this session, I created the shading-based version of the effect.

To create the pixel effect, I used various ramps to control where various parts of the shader should be present. I also used a point attribute that allows for animation of the effect. Currently, the point attribute is animated globally. In order to create the desired animation, a point attribute has to be animated per instanced point.

It was recommended that I added breakup to the effect. I elected to postpone this change so I could fix issues in our file that were blocking others in the group.