Title Font

I ended up settling on the title font really late (the night before going to LA to do my layback).

Here's some options I considered:

And the winner:

I liked starting with a lower case 't' because it reinforces the idea that the prayer cap is a small difference between Hindus and Muslims. This version of the title is the most readable and clear, yet retains a distinct identity.

The font was something I downloaded, but I ended up tweaking it slightly for clarity. Here's what the raw font looks like:

I do like how the font looks in general, so I used it unmodified in the end credits. The line across the words is similar to Devnagari (Hindi) script, while the serifs and dots have an Islamic influence, again complementing the theme of my film.

Composite Breakdown

I started off compositing in After Effects, but have since shifted over to Nuke. I was reluctant to learn another piece of software at first because I had already had to learn how to use Massive, RenderMan for Maya, IQ, Motion Builder and others for this film. But I'm glad I gave Nuke a shot, because it has turned out to be a lightweight, fast and intuitive package.

I like rendering in layers, it gives me a lot more control in the composite.

For example:

Render Layers:

• Character (from multipass render):
  

• Middleground Crowd:
  

• Background Crowd:
  

• Ground:
  

• Platform:
  

• Sky:
  

Result of combining the layers with no compositing:

Final composite (after color correction and addition of atmospheric elements):

Working in 16-bit color is also very useful, as it expands the range within which you can color correct the image without creating artifacts.

Render Workflow Overview

The main reasons for using RenderMan for Maya as my renderer are:

1. Speed, especially when scenes are not raytraced
2. Fast motion blur, which is important in my film
   
3. Good memory management, which means fewer crashes (my Maya files contain anywhere between 2 and 200 characters, and can get as large as .5 GB)
4. Render-time smoothing (i.e. subdivision scheme) enables me to avoid heavy polygon meshes in my already huge scenes
   
5. Integration with Massive - initially, I was going to use Massive's direct integration with RenderMan, but have since abandoned this approach
6. I'm a geek - I've always wanted to learn more about RenderMan because of its role in the history of CG
   

Due to time and resource constraints, I can't render everything with all the bells and whistles I like. I've avoided ray tracing because the size of my scenes would probably cause all sorts of memory issues and require heavy optimization. As a substitute, I've relied on RenderMan for Maya's point cloud occlusion, which is a non-raytraced solution. Even with this feature, however, I can't render entire scenes in a reasonable time frame. (i.e. less than 10 minutes per frame as I only have access to 4-6 render nodes at a time).

Therefore, I only use occlusion on the 'hero' characters such as Bir, his mother, the old man, the goons, etc. For the rest of the characters and the set, I baked the occlusion into the respective file textures using Mental Ray. While baked occlusion doesn't look as good as the real thing, the rendering speedup makes it a worthwhile compromise.

So for example, a multipass exr might contain:

DiffuseDirect:

DiffuseIndirect (i.e. Shadowing):

DiffuseEnvironment:

OcclusionIndirect (i.e. Ambient Occlusion):

alpha:

Put the above layers together*, and you get:

Beauty:

Initially, I was rendering out all my render layers (such as the background, sky, etc) into multipass EXRs, but found that it was overkill and I really just needed that extra level of control on the hero characters.

* The actual compositing operations are:

(DiffuseDirect - DiffuseDirectShadow + DiffuseEnvironment) * OcclusionIndirect

** I left out the Specular components for simplicity, but the math is the same as for Diffuse

Shot 3 Comped

Took the settings of the last couple of shots, then added haze and subtle grain, blurred the horizon, added a ramp to the sky, and crushed the blacks a little (composited in After Effects).



Shake has been discontinued, and the compositor that everyone is shifting to is Nuke, but for my film, I'm thinking of continuing with After Effects because I'm happy with these results and AE now handles .iff files, which is what I render out of Maya.

Scene 2 Composite Test

More Style Frames

Finally started to render today. Did a quick style frame for fun.

Before:



After Color Correction:

Update - a couple more iterations that I went through on the look:

~December 2008

Final image:

~May 2009

More Texturing

Added a sky, some trees and changed the gravel texture a little:

Props

Classmates Thomas Huang and Jake Albers helped me build a bunch of the props and set. Taking a break from animation, I've started texturing and incorporating the models into shots.

In terms of color, I went a little cooler on the train station to help the skin of the characters stand out more. I'll probly warm everything up in post.

• Shot 5: Train station + Luggage model/textures
• Shot 7: Train station model/textures
• Shot 4: Cargo Train textures
• Shot 3: Luggage models/textures

Look Test

First pass render/composite:

Character Designs - Bir