Making Giants - The Details

Joey Korenman : Time to hit render, go to the beach, come back, start sending autographs, right? Yeah. So this thing is feeling pretty good, but there are plenty of spots that could use some work. What we need to do first is get all of the animation, the textures, the lighting, and the layout, just the way we want. So let's walk through the cut and talk about what's working and what's not. So first off, why don't we watch this piece one more time and see where we're at? Giants are not what we think they are the same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem; nor, the weak as weak.
Joey Korenman :Great. So cohesively, I think it's holding together pretty well. I think, you know, we've got the shots, it tells the story. We want to tell the pacing's working. Uh, and for the most part, the animation is good, but there are definitely some things that could be better. So let's just go shot by shot and talk about this. So shot one, the way we start, I'm digging this. Okay. Um, I like it up until this camera move. It feels a little abrupt still. I want to smooth it out just a bit. So that's one thing I'm going to do once we get to this final position, one thing that's always bugged me. And I think I figured out a good solution is, you know, the way the ground is constructed, we've got this low poly look. There are some straight edges here, like this edge, which is blocking the bottom of the plant, creates a very hard straight line edge to the plant and it looks unnatural.
Joey Korenman : And I want to break that up. I want that plant to, to feel like it's, you know, kind of rooted in the ground. And right now it feels like someone took a razor blade and cut the bottom off of it. So what I'm going to do, you may have noticed this, but on this shot here, I added a bunch of little rocks. I thought it would be, I thought it might make this shot a little more interesting because we're so close to the ground that, you know, that it felt so flat. Like there wasn't enough detail. So I added a few of these little rocks, you know, just really easily using the cloner. And, uh, what I might do is hand place some of those so that they break up that bottom edge. So I could place it actually very close to the camera here, maybe a little rock kind of here.
Joey Korenman : It'll be a little bit out of focus, but it's going to break up that bottom edge of that plant for us. Okay. And then I might add a few other ones, uh, just kind of sprinkled throughout the scene just to give us a little more variation in the ground. Okay. So that's what I'm doing on the first shot. Now on this shot, I want to do a little bit more work to draw our eye right here. And I think what I'm going to do, there's several things I'll do, including having some depth of field so that this building is slightly out of focus. When we composite, I'm going to vignette this shot, you know, so that this side is brighter. So we kind of look there, but another thing I could do is play with the density of this frame. Right. And, you know, density is basically just the amount of information, um, you know, in a, in a spot on screen, right?
Joey Korenman : And because we have the same texture across this uniformly lit ground plane, the density is pretty much the same all throughout this region. So our eye, you know, kind of gets lost around here and, you know, you're, you're, there's, uh, there's several cues to make your eye go here. The building's pointed that way. The shadows pointed that way. You have the flower, but it would be great if we could do a little bit more and maybe adding some of those little rocks or maybe even some bigger ones that are maybe boulders or something and pleasing them around this part of the frame, but not so much over here, it's going to draw our eye over there. Um, we could also do some things in compositing to make it look like, you know, maybe there's clouds or something, or there's, there's less light over here than there is over here.