TeeHee
The culmination of two of my USC Animation classes, TeeHee was the final project for both an Animation and a Lighting and Rendering class. This project took about two weeks to animate and two weeks to light and design the environment. There were several technical challenges that I faced due to Maya being switched to support ACES natively during the production of this project, as well as memory management and ray-precision issues I discuss lower on the page. I really wanted to have a simple lighting setup that would not require a huge amount of keyframes, so each character is lit by the environment plus a few extra rim lights. Most of the foliage was sourced from Megascans and the furniture from TurboSquid. I retextured the characters from scratch in Substance and used Quixel for most of the other textures. The audio was borrowed from Paul (2011).
Final Render
Final Animation Playblast
Technical Difficulties
This is what happens when you render in Maya 2022 using the default MayaACES colorspace but you reference an environment scene that was made in Maya2020 with it's own dedicated OCIO file. Some frames go one way and some go the other. Weird right?
Here you can see the clorspace referencing issue is preventing the moonlight in the back, weird reflection map issues on the Megascans bowls, and a glitch the exact size of a render bucket I’ve been unable to replicate on the wood flooring. The background here is from HDRiHaven as well.
I was having some strange polygon display issues on the beanbag and character too, which I later realized was because 1 of the 9 area lights in the house was positioned in the same space as a polygon in the ceiling, which causes a precision issue. Be careful not to snap your lights to surfaces!