[Episode Deneb] Progress Update X

Greetings,

I'm currently working on the scene in the pool as can be seen above. So, progress is running smoothly and I hope to finish this scene in the coming week. 

For those who are interested I'll write a bit more about some technical aspects of the scene, like water and caustics and a short talk about image-processing and file-formats. The current status of the update will be at the bottom as always. 

Water and caustics

I really wanted to have caustics in the scene, kinda like in the movie blade runner. I thought it would have looked pretty cool to have those light reflections in the scene. However, it isn't an easy task to get them right. Octane had released a new kernel which promised to be fast calculating those caustics. However, the kernel isn't present in the current version of the plugin for DAZ and my tests in the octane standalone  weren't very promising from what I have had in mind. So I tried 'faking' those light reflections with some trickery (gobos, geo-shells and additional material layers) and got it working in some scenarios. But I would have been fairly limited in camera angles and I wasn't happy with the overall look of those fake caustics. They didn't feel very naturally and where a bit distracting from the main focus of the scene and they made the scene more 'turbulent' when I was looking for a more calm environment. So I decided to stop experimenting with caustics and worked a bit more on the water surface itself. I added some water ripple effects around the characters in the water to have a bit more of a realistic approach and to create a connection between the characters and the water. Together with the color-absorption beneath the water surface and the reflections I'm quite happy with the look of the water and the scene as whole. And because of that I added a few more preview pics than usually.

EXR

Until now I saved rendered images as PNG16. With this scene I was using EXR as export format. EXR has some advantages, like more color-depth and layers / passes. Now I only have to save one file instead of a file for each layer / pass for each frame. I usually save the de-noised, post-processing and z-depth passes to have more control in the post-work.

So .exr is very handy for post-work. However, there is always a downside. First, the file-size is huge- 50 - 80mb per frame, depending on how many layers I decide to export. Sooner or later this could lead to storage Issues. And second, windows doesn't support file previews of .exr which would help me to keep an overview of the already rendered images. But I'll probably will stay with the .exr file format for new scenes.

Current status

~ 370 rendered and edited images

- 1 animation

~ 35% of scripting done

- 4 tracks