wk 9: Problems ahoy captain!

Captains log, Star date 569706:Today I have had roughly 5 problems, some of them more annoying than others. These being:

Problem 1.=As a group we gathered and discussed our progress today. I had done the rooms and showed the group, but Matt brought up the observation that his characters although brilliantly made will not fit in. This is because it is much easier to make props, rooms and lights look realistic whereas attempting to get photo-realism in people is a whole different kettle of fish. We discussed whether it was possible to get everything looking to a level standard of realism but we all agreed that cartoony-looking characters would stand out from a textured background.
Solution.= Our solution was to adjust the rest of the scene to look more like a cartoon.

Problem 2.=The next problem was getting an effective cartoon look without making it look like we just added colours to everything rather than materials. Getting a 3D animation to look in the style of a cartoon is trickier than it sounds because cartoons generally have block colour but with 3D lighting there will be gradients and shadows which may look out of place.
Solution.= It was then that I thought that if most of the objects were outlined in black then it would look a lot more like a cartoon as that is how most cartoons appear. It was then that I stumbled upon cell shading! This involved giving the material its own illumination and restricting the amount of colours it radiated thus eliminating 3D looking gradients this reminded me of a old computer game that looked like this style which is probably where I subconsciously got the idea from! As you can see from the image below not everything is outlined but enough to look good!


Problem 3.=After much materialising below is a shot of the room as it stands now once I had changed all the materials!

The above shot shows a test that I made on the lighting rig but I have just realised that the top beams have dropped somehow, so this will need changing! Nevertheless I think it looks quite good! and below is a comparison video of now and after I made the material changes:

So all good? I think not! Unfortunately to get the reduced colours everything has to be self-illuminating, thus screwing up my flashing Omni lights! Because it was the Omni that provided the light to the room originally, when it went off the room went dark. But now because the room lights itself the dimming Omni has virtually no effect!
Solution.= It was then that I came up with the solution of cutting and fading in Premier Pro instead of 3Ds max. This would involve cutting out the sections that are meant to be dark and using a black box to fade in and out over the top for the fades. Below is a screen shot of what I did in premier pro.

The above shot is the first cut-job which cuts to black between each flash. The shot below shows the cut up video above the original covering up the fact that the lights disappear with the omni light.

Problem 4.= After doing this I then came upon another barrier! In the original when the Omni went out the room went dark but the lasers and lights remained. Unfortunately when I cut out the sections of darkness to leave a blank/black spaceting how to in Premier Pro the lights went as well. This meant that the movement of the lights looked a lot less real and convincing as it looked liked they were jumping rather than just moving.
Solution.= Luckily whilst I was testing how to overcome this problem I cut the new cell-shading version above the old textured version. This meant that when the Omni was on you could see the cartoon-room and when the Omni went out and I cut the section out you could see the old textured room. Because you only see the dark versions of the old room the textures aren't visible but the lasers and lights are, thus solving my problem because the lights remain constant and its the room that changes! Solution is below:



Problem 5.= This works for and Omni that turns on/off but some of my scenes have a dimming light instead. This is a problem because I was originally going to have a black box fade in over the top giving the effect of a dimming room. Unfortunately I am left with the same problem as before which was that when the room dims/disappears so do the lights which is not what I want.
Solution.= Regrettably I have so far only come up with a few half-solutions. These being either;
1. Dim the scene in Premier Pro rather than fade in a box over the top.
2. Hope that it is possible to animate the self-illumination on the materials in 3Ds max so that they can dim in sync with the Omni light. This will be time consuming though.
3. Don't fade!