Month: November 2024

After the end of rendering, it enters the stage of post-color mixing, which is an important link to ensure that the color of the picture is uniform, beautiful, and in line with the mood and theme of the work.

First of all, it is necessary to pay attention to the unity of the overall tone, adjust the exposure, contrast and saturation to highlight the main body and the sense of hierarchy, and clarify the overall mood of the scene. Here, my animation mainly needs warm sunlight, so I will use the warm tone for Zelda’s scene style as my reference screen and color reference standard.

At the same time, the white balance is corrected to avoid color bias. Adjust color tendencies according to the mood of the scene, enhance light and shadow details such as highlights, shadows and light effects, and add stylised effects such as particles and halos if necessary. Ensure that it is done on professional color calibration equipment and compared with the reference work or the original image to ensure that the desired effect is achieved, while selecting the right color space and high-quality output format to preserve detail.

In terms of post-production music and sound effects, since my animation does not include dialogue, I only needed to record some vocalizations and breathing sounds.

Sound effects were selected based on specific scenes. For example, Harlow’s entrance is always accompanied by the sound of bells, inspired by the Tinker Bell movies. For the cat’s appearance, I used a heavy thud sound effect to emphasize the ground-shaking impact.

Regarding background music, the story’s tone shifts between relaxed, exciting, lighthearted, and comedic over a duration of one minute and forty seconds. Finding copyright-free music that perfectly matched was challenging.

I decided to use Suno AI, a music creation platform. My experience with it is similar to using MidJourney for AI-generated images. Suno AI can produce music with or without lyrics and allows for keyword adjustments to extend or modify existing results, making it a powerful AI productivity tool.

What’s holding me back on rendering is motion blur,
First of all, motion blur is a kind of visual effect commonly used in animation or film and television production, which simulates the blur effect produced by fast-moving objects in actual photography. When the camera’s shutter is open, objects in motion move within the shutter time, creating a stretching or blurring effect in a single frame image. Motion blur adds realism and fluidity to the picture, especially when representing fast movements.

As mentioned in several previous blogs, my character moves very quickly in some shots, such as 008 and 017, and this motion blur is not limited to the character, in shot 010, the character and the camera are relatively still, so the motion blur here is reflected in the background

However, when I was rendering, I noticed that there was no motion blur in the originally rendered shot, and I filled in the instructions for motion blur in the Console Variables with a value of 4, but it didn’t have the effect I wanted. But after I kept checking, I found that first of all, in the camera Settings to turn on the motion blur option, you can set the MIN and MAX values, and their matching frame rate. After turning this option on, my motion blur was rendered successfully

I didn’t adjust too much on bloom and lens flare, because it didn’t affect my overall effect much, and the motion blur turned on May have partially affected bloom and lens flare’s effect

Lighting is also important in the scene. First of all, my scene is an outdoor scene with SkyLight and DirectionalSunLight, which can make my scene have a bright atmosphere and appropriate shadows, which is of great help for the rendering of scene shots. When I need to focus the camera on harlow’s face, there is usually no light on harlow’s face, resulting in her face being dull, which is also related to my character and action design

So my method is to light each shot one by one, and avoid harsh light. The light type I use is spotlight, so that I can achieve soft light effect according to the adjustment of the light source distance, and because my role does not have the effect of Subsurface Scattering Shaders, So I controlled the color of the light between skin tone and light pink to simulate the feeling of ruddy skin

This is before and after the light

Once all the animation was completed in Maya, the next step was rendering. I used Alembic as the file format to save and load the animation. Before exporting, I made sure that the model’s geometry didn’t have any faces with more than four edges. In Maya, I combined the geometry in face mode to ensure that the Alembic file retained the materials.

For the scene selection, since my character is a cartoon, and the scene is a combination of a forest and grassland, I designed the environment to be more stylized. I built the first version of the scene when I completed the first animation shot and performed some test renders to ensure the project was moving smoothly.

However, when I continued to promote my animation and collected a lot of data, I felt that my scene lacked details, my texture was too rough, the scene light was too stiff, and the style of the flowers in the foreground was inconsistent with the trees in the background, so I quickly began to conceive a new scene.

I have considered it based on my second role; It looked like an alien cat to set up a semi-alien world with an alien forest of fantastical plants, but when I confidently adjusted the camera and introduced Harlow into the scene from maya, my aesthetics told me that the scene was too realistic and had too much textural detail for my characters to fit in.

So I have the scene now, in the stylized grass with detailed trees and many kinds of flowers, the perfect realization of my story. In the construction of this scene, I refer to the animation of Miyazaki Hayao and the scenes in Zelda games. At the same time, I also use some assets to build my scene quickly and efficiently.