Fighter Kites - Progress Check No. 22

My workload this week has been smaller than usual due to all my time being directed towards internship applications. It's difficult to relinquish thesis work for demo reels and website updating, but it's an important adjustment. I didn't realize how much work I dedicate towards the thesis each week (I think I just got used to the workload), so switching gears has been interesting. I fully plan on getting back on the grind next week (after all my application material is to my satisfaction).

That being said, we were having some strange rendering issues with Sc01Sh01, so I spent some time figuring that out - it just ended up being some Deadline render settings I needed to toggle (thank goodness), but now it's working great! It's nice seeing the Arnold renders relative to the viewport renders - the school building itself is much more appealing with all the scratches and details reflecting light and casting shadows. My goal with our shot process is to render as often as possible and not wait for shots to be complete before doing so. At Pixar, the short was rendered every night so we could review the render each morning. That's the same way I would like to manage this process. Every time our team meets (Mon/Wed) we can look at the new renders. This makes it easier to catch general and render errors timely.

On that note, I noticed that the Arnold renders created a new challenge with the grass alpha cards. The multitude of overlapping cards created some black planes which are distracting and ugly.

AFTER

BEFORE

After a few hours of troubleshooting, I learned that in the Arnold Renderer settings under Ray Depth, increasing the Transparency Depth from 10 to 100 fixed the issue. Now we have beautiful stylized grass without worrying about how often they overlap to camera.

While the grass is beautiful on its own, it still needs set dressing adjustments to ensure it's touching the ground plane, looks natural and full, and moves in the wind. My plan for that is to look into Unreal Engine 5's alembic exporting options and to play with that. Otherwise, a great backup would be Mash or SpeedTree.