Week 32 - Final Environments and Beginning Rendering

Well, I neglected this blog a bit for the last few weeks of my production since things were so insanely hectic, so this post will be a bit long! We'll take it bit by bit though- I'll be making two separate posts of my progress for brevity and to stay in keeping with the end of my production process!

I finished all of my environments! Unfortunately, I had to abandon my original (updated) plan of transferring some painterly 3D trees from Blender into Cinema 4D. I was so close to figuring out the baking for the textures of them, but unfortunately figuring it out was taking too much time and delaying my progress, so I wound up using some backup assets as a last resort (using the Stylized Pine Tree Pack by W.Illness on Sketchfab). I altered the textures and leaves on them a bit to better fit my style as these were a bit too stylized, and I added a snow layer on them by duplicating the leaf meshes and offsetting them a little bit above the actual leaf meshes, to give a 3D feel and some visible snow on the trees! The effect turned out rather good, and I think it actually fits my film's aesthetic better than the trees I was originally planning on using.

I also updated the rocks I was using in some of my shots with some stylized rocks from Sketchfab, courtesy of ashkan.fancy. I would've loved to make all of these assets myself, but unfortunately time did not allow for this, and I decided to prioritize the animations over basic environment assets such as rocks and trees.

With this, I also played around with different HDRI maps to create some basic lighting for the scenes! I played around with different settings and maps, and tested them in various shots. Since the film is set outdoors, I wanted to ensure the lighting was consistent and natural in each shot, so I played around with different HDRI maps and did some test renders with each one before setting on one! With all of this set up, I started my rendering!

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that rendering everything out with Ambient Occlusion and Global Illumination made my render times entirely unfeasible for the remaining time in the project (about 15 minutes per frame!), so I wound up finding a decent hack for the environment (which you can actually see in the above shots). By setting all of the diffuse maps for my assets and characters as diffuse layers in the 'Reflectance' channel of the materials, and deactivating the 'Color' channel, I could mimic the look of Global Illumination in C4D's Physical Renderer without actually having the calculate GI. This drastically decreased my render times, which allowed me to start rendering things out at a much more reasonable pace!

With this figured out, I started rendering things out as quickly as possible, though some problems still arose with render times for each shot (Cinema HATED rendering out so many trees), all while continuing to create all of my final VFX for my shots and beginning to composite things together. This, however, will have to wait for my next (semi-final) post.