Rough Cut

Here is my rough cut of my final shots. Due to limited rendering resources, most of it is rendered at half resolution, but now I have at least a preliminary pass of most of my shots. I still need to render a final shot that pulls back and shows the giant gummy bear sitting on the desk. Looking at the pacing of the rough cut, I think I might need some additional frames of the second and third shot. The fourth shot is also cut a little short.

I still need to render out the rest of the passes for the melting gummy: refraction, reflection, specular and SSS. I need to render a sky pass to composite behind all the shots with windows. Another intern was showing me some very cool rendering tricks using volume displacement on micro-voxels, resulting in highly complex volumes that render very quickly.

The reflections on the pirouette can need to be sharper, all the animated characters need a shadow pass. Luckily, I baked out the shadows from the environment into the alpha channels of the volumetric light renders, this will allow me to mask of the areas already in shadow in the character shadow pass. I still need to do a simple POP dust simulation, and I'd like to do a caustics pass, but it's going on the back-burner right now.

My primary focus in the coming week is going to be SIGGRAPH, but hopefully on Friday and the weekend, I can get some full-resolution renders of the background elements and work on rendering out some shadow passes.