It's been a while since I've shown my progress, so with only a week or so to go, I assume this will be one of the last updates. Things are coming along, and I can see a blurred finish line in the distance, but I've still got a lot to do before crossing it. This week has been a mix of rendering (my room sounds like Heathrow), modelling and tweaking existing shots. I'm at the point where I've rendered the bulk of the shots, and am now pushing the rest (mainly the Time Machine shots) until the point where I need to commit and render the remaining. Below are some shots that I've rendered, but haven't been through the After Effects conveyor belt, so post-production tweaks aren't there yet, including 'god rays' through the window and maybe some lighting / colour tweaks.

With a week left, I think it'll be consisting of last-minute modelling to make sure there's no empty spaces, additional render layers (such as smokes/sparks) and a lot more fan-churning to get the last shots together. Below are some shots comped quickly in Photoshop as well as a smoke test I worked on today.










The smoke below is still a work-in-progress. The method I've used is Maya dynamic smoke on a separate render layer, which also contains the objects that the smoke will intersect with. The objects are set as a Matte Black Hole and then the smoke is rendered with an Alpha. In After Effects, i've then used that smoke render sequence as a Alpha Stencil on some stock footage smoke, to improve the look, while keeping the dynamic animation. It still needs work and I'm sure there are ways to improve it. If I have time this week I'm going to delve a bit deeper into it.

Only 4 seconds below! But it'll finally be in about three or four shots. The shot itself is far from final, the furnace will have a better fire-effect and some more detail.



I know there are no shots here of the most important thing.. the Time Machine. But I'm refining those and I'm hoping the next update will have them completed.

Back to work..