Day 47




The scene from LOTR - Balrog had some really nice shots and colours used were very close to what i wanted. Absolutely sure this is what the final render should look like. The lights emitting from Balrog (in our case, the 7-headed drake) is redish orange. There was a bridge in one of the shots where they used rimlights to bring out it's silhouette.



























Mr Douglas provided us the animated dragon head and at the same time spent time on our files blocking out the cameras.
Mr Michael was sharing lighting tips and suggestion to the lighting.
Also rendered cam1_Terrain_Wide_DL, but with alternate frames of 24 to save a lot of time... that didn't cross my mind until Mr Michael mentioned it, should had thought of it earlier & would had saved tons of time... was too obvious over other problems.

All this time, i've had been trying to kill the flickering and noisy renders via Pixel Samples and Min/Max Rays inside Mantra ROP. It hit me that i had other options available such as Shading Quality under Dicing Tab of Geometry Objects where increasing it's value means dicing up micropolygons further to achieve better renders. It makes Mantra calculate micropolygon more than once depending how much Shading Quality was increased, tried it and as expected it was effective.

Missed out one comment made by Mr Pang yesterday, i should be working in the proper aspect ratio (HD720, reducing the res but maintain aspect ratio). It's probably something i shouldn't had overlooked!

Redid the lighting, picking some colours off the screen caps from LOTR and made sure i missed as little comments as mentioned.

With these in mind, here's render...

cam1_Terrain_Wide_DL_v001


The shot looks ok from frame01 but when the camera traveled up and the area behind the stone arc, hot spots and obvious unmotivated lighting were revealed.