Work Preparation:
This week, we had our Soft Opening on Monday, and we got a lot of valuable feedback from the faculty. We made great progress on the AI textured film, with an updated character animation, new hand texture, and more VFX implemented. The research on AI rendered film also went well, and it produced two films with distinct visual effects and art styles.
We locked down both films, and started to do more house-cleaning work, like documentation clean up and final presentation deck preparation.
Progress Report:
- Updated the project website and weekly blogs.
- Added new research results into the documentation.
- Updated the documentation in the correct format.
- Met with Pan-Pan and updated her on the feedback we got from Soft.
- Updated the character animation, VFX, and character texture in the film.
- Continued researching AI rendering.
- Finalized both films.
- Reviewed the documentation.
Research Results:
- AI Rendering:
We have figured out our new working pipeline during the past weeks which polished the lighting as well as the sampling of the generated images, it is time to apply this method to the animation.
The first outcome seems to be improved a lot compared to previous ones, but the noise problem is still distracting. Then it came to mind that we could possibly take out some frames to reduce the noises, so we took out 2 frames from each 3 frames, so the video’s fps reduced from 30 to 10 fps.
30fps
10fps
After we got our character inside the scene, we applied the same pipeline to our finalized playblast.
30fps
10fps
We also tested other alternative styles mentioned in previous research. We first tried to have the Normal unit disabled.
30fps
10fps
Next we tried with the Depth Unit disabled.
30fps
10fps
All results share the same prompt:
(detailed texture),(black and white), nature, primal, Mountains and clouds merge with each other with a giant standing up between mountain, giant, muscular man, perfect anatomy,clouds floating and changing rapidly, ((Chaotic)), Taoism, Myth, fog, stylized, lighting, unrealengine,
Negative prompt: (worst quality:2), (low quality:2), (normal quality:2), lowres, bad anatomy, bad hands, normal quality, ((monochrome))
Plan for next week:
- Meet with Panpan for sound support.
- Continue working on the website and weekly blogs.
- Work on the project trailer.
- Prepare for the final presentation.
- Everyone goes over the research documentation.
- Post-mortem for the project.
Challenge:
- Hard to produce films of good quality with unpredictable AI behaviors throughout the semester.
- Need to make sure we have some powerful shots in the film.
- Need to make sure we get useful feedback from faculty consultants.
- Need to keep Panpan on the same page for sound production.
- Need to do house-cleaning and prepare for the final.