Post Production Part 2 - Further Development

In order to achieve an animated texture for the eyes, the best way to go about it was to create a selection of main eye positions, making sure they were in line with the UV maps of the eyes and put them into After Effects to make an image sequence. This process didn't actually take too long, also I only needed to do this for certain scenes.

There were however a few things I needed to make sure of in order fort his process to work:

• The image sizes in After Effects needed to be 256 x 256 so that they would correlate with the sizing of the UV maps. 
• The length of the image needed to be the same as the time length for that particular scene. 
• When this was imported into After Effects, I needed to make sure that I ticked the box which said "Use Image Sequence" otherwise the eyes would have just stayed stationary. 

I kept the eye design quite simple in order to fit with her overall design, because through out the design process this character had been simplified a lot. Also, her colouring had changed slightly and I was unsure as to what colours would work best fort he eyes, so I didn't' go too over the top. 

Render Testing

Before starting to render each scene, I carried out a quick test render to make sure the lighting or everything was right. I was really happy with how my character looked when rendered, because she was still in keeping with the surrounding environment, but the fact that she was green gave her some more individuality. 

Bringing It Together

 As the rendering process was coming to an end, I started to bring each scene together in After Effects to see how it looked. I was actually pleasantly surprised with the how it all looked, because as a whole it all looked quite pale and "minty" which Ollie and I really liked.






The process of bringing in all of the renderings was easy enough, one thing however which I did need to fix was a glitch in scene 4. The problem was that scene 13 had not rendered, so I just had to re-render this individual frame, and then things ran fine after that.

This first section of the animation below is the first 6 scenes put together. This is un-edited, however I have put this up to show, because there were immediately some things I knew I Ollie and I were happy with, however some things that needed to be altered in post. We were really pleased with the colourings and lighting, however we do plan to alter some of the lighting in certain scenes to make it less intense. For example, in scene 3 where the mermaid first rises up out of the water, the lighting is a bit too bright, which has resulted in parts of the mermaid's body to look quite white. Once all of the scenes are together and the timing is right, we will go through and edit the areas which need editing. 

Adding the speech bubbles

Also, another aspect which needs to be added was the 2D speech bubbles. This is something Ollie is  focusing on creating during the rendering time, so they can be added through After Effects. We are feeling optimistic that the incorporation of 2D will give out animation a nice aesthetic. 

We also still need to add the audio, which will be a mixture of robot sound effects, vocal sounds for the mermaid which I will create in the sound studio, as well as some water sounds which can also be created in the studio.  We were originally going to have quite a lot of wave sounds, however now that the water is very calm, it would be a bit contradictory to have those sound effects when the water is making very little movement.