Attention to detail and visual errors

          It is funny how many mistakes you might have in your animation but no one will notice! It was actually quite amusing asking people to tell us what was wrong with a certain shot only to realise that we were the only ones who were noticing the mistakes! This is kind of a given, of course, because we have been working on this non-stop for a long time. But sometimes it really does seem strange how some people dont even see missing textures...

As you can see, by importing this shot into different computers to render I forgot to check that the textures had been processed properly. Basically what happened is that I had several textures with the same name but in different folders. In this shot, the specular map of the cables machine (the one behind the character) was used on the pipes of the button machine. I have learnt from my mistakes however and have started making sure that even if the files are in completely separate folders, that the names remain different.

Here I had the cogs inside the central machine (in the background) rendered separately along with the ambient occlusion. However I needed to re-render and did not have time in the end to composite the cogs on. But because the focus is on the characters (and the shot is extremely short) no one noticed.

Lastly, we have the closing shot of the film. This had several errors. The explosion consisted of two separate renders (I will make a separate post about this). We were very constrained by deadlines so I only had one night to make the explosion work. I was having some problems with MassFX meaning that the particles flew out too far off the screen, making the explosion seem too big. This was never picked up on.

Next, because the explosion was rendered separately, the lighting, for various reasons, was not 100% the same as it was in the original shot. This meant that just before the explosion happened you would be able to see the very obvious change in lighting.

Lastly, and this is by far the most obviously noticeable thing about the shot, is the fact that after the explosion happens the camera continues to track back for a second and a bit as we watch the smoke go up. We later decided that we needed to keep the smoke in there for a little longer but we did not have the time to re-render. Because of this the shot becomes a still (apart from the smoke). All th spinning platforms and moving cabins stop dead in their tracks. The beauty of it is that no one noticed anything!

The lesson that can be learnt from this is that attention detail can be key, however in most cases it is the one thing which can massively set a project back. If it is not noticed by someone else who has not seen the shot before, then it means that it is not something which you should spend hours worrying about.