20. CAMERA

Getting feedback of these early shots was very important in the further development, and making "The Music of Erich Zann" a better film. This went for the sets, and characters, but also rendering techniques. I showed a friend an early image, and he quickly saw the improvement over my previous projects, but also lamented about some rendering elements. He was a photographer, so on those early shots, he only talked to me about photography. Here, when I say photography, he wasn't even talking too much about image composition, but rather about the mechanics of techniques of using a camera. These were all new ideas to me, and things that I had never considered before. To be sure, I have other friends who are photographers, but it is sometimes difficult for people to talk about and explain their art, or their medium; my friend here had no problem with that, and told me about many interesting photographic features that I should incorporate in order to make a more compelling image.

As I stated before, I am still quite a novice when it comes to rendering issues, but after some online research, I did figure out how to include lens flares and depth of field to the cameras in the scenes. (There is a ton more stuff that I left out and that I've still yet to learn, but for now...)

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19. EARLY RENDERS

During Christmas, I was at a friend's holiday party, when the discussion of animation came up. We were all watching my favorite Christmas film (and my favorite animated film, and probably one of my favorite all-time films) The Nightmare Before Christmas. I must have watched that movie hundreds of times in my life, and dissected many of the key elements of the film.

In any case, when the discussion turned to animation, I shared that I am an animator, and that I was currently working on a short film. However, I didn't have anything to show my new friend. She just had to take for granted all of the weird things I was telling her. Since animation is essentially a visual medium, I should have a visual example to share with discussing my work. This might seem odd, except that I always carry with me an iPad so that I can read (or a smart phone that has the ability to share images or movies). (The careful reader will notice that in an earlier post I slammed Mac computers for their inefficient OSX that doesn't run 3D applications well; to be sure, I love Apple toys (iPhones and iPads), it's just their computers that I think are terrible.)

I'm telling you all of that so I can tell you this. I then began rendering still images as I could, and carried them with me, or shared them on social media (a little bit). Like I said earlier, I don't like promoting a project before it is complete, because if I don't complete it, then I dislike the character that makes of me. However, I was willing to share stills here and there with certain people. This was a big change for me, because in my previous projects, I didn't share anything until the final product was complete. The problem with such a strategy is that by that point, it is too late to fix or correct problems. Thus, for the first time, I was opening myself up to criticism and asking for feedback so that I might change things and better them while still in the production process.

  
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18. TOO MANY LIGHTS

When setting out writing this blog, I had hoped to tackle production issues more or less in the order that they were faced. However, I suppose that now is as good as ever to discuss the rendering issues for the foyer.

The first obvious issue is that the polygon count was ridiculous. This always seemed to increase because I insisted on an ornamental style. This goes for the arches, as well as the columns that held the walls up. I could have made the Greek columns relatively simple, but instead I went for the more complex Corinthian style columns. This meant that I had to model all of the ornamental details at the pedestal of the column.

But I later discovered that the greatest challenge for rendering the scenes in the foyer was the lighting. To be sure, as much as I complained about my lack of skill with texturing, I have so much less understanding of rendering and lighting. I've read books, and it all seems straightforward, but I doubt that I've scratched the surface of understanding this.

It seemed obvious to me that I wanted a dark environment for "TheMusic of Erich Zann," since it was, at root, a horror story. This seemed best achieved with low lit rooms. But in order to have a low lit foyer, I decided to put lamps all over the room. Since I was going for high quality, I determined that I would have each of the physical lamps in the room represent a real light source. In the earliest incarnations, this set had twenty or more lights. Of course, this made render times blow up. I later tried to strategically eliminate lights, as well as physical lamps in the foyer. In fact, at the very end of production, it was one shot in this foyer set that I must have rendered six different times, all with a ridiculous lighting artifact that I didn't know how to solve. In the end, I just sacrificed this shot, and included an inferior rendering of the shot. (Those who watch carefully might see what was sacrificed.) Oh well.

In the future, I would really like to study rendering a bit more, and discover more tools and options for this task.

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17. ORNAMENTS

One interesting challenge that I posed to myself was to model ornamental elements for the foyer. The most obvious examples of this are with the Greek columns and the stair railings.

For the Greek Corinthian columns, I had to continuously refer back to reference images in order to plan out the each element of the capital. Then after one element was completed, I duplicated it around the column.

A easier, though still tedious, solution was achieved with the stair railing. In order to give that fancy feeling, I wanted there to be a wrought iron element here. I did online searches for ornamental design, and found many nice black-line illustrations that I could simply trace over. I started with a plane, and drew curves through which I would extrude the edges of the plane. After that was complete, I extruded the plane to give it 3D depth, and then smoothed it.The solution was easy, and only utilized very beginner-level techniques, but was tedious because it entailed tracing over so many lines. After texturing the wrought iron geometry with a rusty texture, I duplicated it along the entire staircase. Of course, this increased the polygon count many times over.

The last example that you see in the picture below is the arch. Instead of doing a simple arch, this one has indentations, and different levels of detail that add just a little something extra. 

        


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16. PROPS AND SET DRESSING

As can be seen from the final images of the foyer, they are a far cry from my initial vision of an abandoned or derelict apartment building. In fact, the final version of the foyer actually seemed quite a bit more refined in nature. (I think a term that is used to describe such a style is rustic-chic.) This is just one example where the final aesthetic choices were determined not by my vision, but rather by the resources that I had at my disposal. I couldn't find adequate texture sets that gave a nice run-down look (or as run-down as I had initially aspired to), but I did find texture sets that fit this scene and architecture better. That is how many of my aesthetic decision were determined while making "The Music of Erich Zann."

Since the style of the interior was thus determined, it also figured that there should be interesting furniture to fill out the space. Unlike the exterior scene where a lot of trash and debris could be placed here and there, a nice interior must have a bit of furniture. I regret that I am not the best interior designer, but finding some reference images that I liked was fruitful enough, and I thus fleshed out several furniture pieces. From the outset I researched Victorian, Louis XIV, and French furniture. I knew that I wanted something more ornamental as opposed to stark modern styles.

I actually impressed myself, because I was pleased with how these chairs and sofa turned out. I hadn't created such pieces before. I didn't think that I could model such pieces, and figuring out the details was nice. However, like everything else in this film, they were high-resolution, and thus the total polygon count of scenes exploded.

The frames and the flowers were easier to execute. The flowers I already had from a previous project, and frames were little more than decorated squares. For the pictures in the frames, I looked for Renaissance drawings... just because.

  



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15. TEXTURING THE FOYER

The abandoned aesthetic that I was going for in the interior sets required very specific texture details. I found some examples that really spoke to me, and that I preferred for the walls, but they just didn't work. I tried many times to force them in place, and I still couldn't manage to develop an image of paint peeling off the walls. As I've noted several times earlier, texturing just isn't my forte, so I was limited in what I could do. That said, my eyes did work well enough to determine that my initial attempts were not turning out well.

To be honest, at this point I felt that I was at a loss. I didn't know how best to texture the walls. But then looking at my original reference images of Beelitz Sanatorium, and other images of interesting interiors, I noticed that most large interior walls are not one surface texture from floor to ceiling. Instead, the walls are typically split at certain places (typically by some sort of rail or something like that), and thus the monochromatic nature of the wall fades. Because I was only using tiled textures, this was where most of the problem sat: the size of the walls required that the number of tiles added up beyond the small number that I wanted to limit myself too. When the tiling gets too large, repetitions are clearly visible to the viewer, and thus offers a diminished aesthetic experience. But once I divided the walls up, I was able to significantly decrease the number of times any texture was tiled.

I also realized that for surfaces that still required large tiling numbers, I would have to use a more evenly distributed texture. That is, I used more plain textures that didn't have conspicuous defining features that would be easy to spot when repeated. I hope that this illusion held up in the final product.

  

These are some early versions of the foyer, with the textures that I decided to not use.

Below is a more finalized version of the foyer.



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14. FOYER REFERENCES

I've been writing all of this as though I merely created the exterior scene, then created the three additional interior scenes in a strict order. In fact, there was a lot of jumping back and forth between the scenes. Sometimes I got overworked on one set, and had to take a step away from that set for a bit, and so I worked on a different set. The rule for each was more or less the same: research online images for reference images, and go from there.

For the interior scenes, my initial attitude was to create a grungy, abandoned building sort of aesthetic. I liked the idea of paint peeling off the walls, and derelict furniture throughout. But before all that, I had to get the underlying architecture first.

So when I did my Google searches, I entered things like abandoned houses, asylums, or hospitals. One particular place that caught my interest, and was well documented was the abandoned Beelitz Sanatorium complex in Germany. After making that decision, I simply followed the model that I could decipher from several photographs, and that served as the foyer of the apartment building where "The Music of Erich Zann" would take place.

My final foyer design

Beelitz Hospital reference  

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