Major: Update

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on improving my animation from my first pass. So far I have improved how the birds fly by giving them more movement up and down as they flap their wings in both the sun metaphor and birds metaphor. Also I have improved the characters in the house animation by making their movements more organic and having them be more constantly moving.

I have also been working on lighting my film. I have used a skydome and two directional lights for each 'planet'. I have used 'light-linking' so that only the two directional lights for each planet affect that planet only.

example of lighting- room (flowers and webs metaphor)

I also had some trouble with the water textures on the ocean for the boats metaphor as the original texture didn't work very well with the lights when rendering so I had to spend some time working out how to fix the texture so it looked good in the render. The only problem I have now is that the render times are very long for this scene but I will try and cut down the time or make it work.

For the extra lights in my scenes- lamps in the room and house, lights on the road (traffic lights etc.) and lights on the robot I added 'emission' to the textures of these objects. I am also going to render these separately so that I can add glow to them in after effects.

example of emission for lamps etc- lamps in top bedroom (windows metaphor)

 I have used maya to create the spotlight on the peacock as I had previously tried creating the spotlight in after effects for my pre-viz and had found it very hard to get it to look right.

I am now spending my time going over the rest of my animation and making any improvements before I can playblast it for the post-viz version of my film and start compositing it together.