FILMING IS A WRAP!
Leading right up to the shoot date was quite the stress, but now that it's passed, it's such a relief.
As it turns out, production design was lagging quite a bit behind what we were anticipating, reportedly due to backlogged work in the shop. (They also did not appear for the days that I was thinking originally would be for testing the match between the virtual and live-action elements, but that ended up being not a major issue) As such, some of the assets that were supposed to be photoscanned by now were not even painted, notably (at least, notable to me) the columns.
Thankfully, production design used CAD to design the columns, so I was able to grab the STL and use that as a base. Upon opening the file however, I noticed that every single piece was an entirely different object, and it would *not* play nicely with Substance. It took some time, but I eventually got into a workflow using Blender+Machin3Tools+MeshMachin3 (Incredibly powerful addons that I cannot recommend enough) to retopologise the model.
Or so I thought.
48 hours before our final load test, I learned that the geometry for column had changed. At first it looked like only the top had changed, but it ended up being faster to just redo everything than try and update the model I had.
After retopologising *again* I was able to UV unwrap and send the file to Substance to texture it. I think I'll stay away from CAD STL files for a while after this...
Pretty soon though, we got to genuinely filming! Most of us were in dire need of sleep, but everything went pretty smoothly with the copious amounts of caffeine that were graciously provided! Black coffee had never tasted so divine...
Filming started off a bit behind, but we made good time overall, despite a few setbacks. Most of my time was spent pressing the start and stop button of the smoke machine. Not the most exhilerating of tasks, but it was cool to have a physical job after working virtually for so long
Asides from some adjustment issues that the on-site tech-team had to deal with, the only major setback was when a mysterious fluid started leaking from the generator! Was dealt with promptly, and since we were running on good time, it was more amusing than worrisome for me. The highlights of the day though were definitely the appearances of our resident giant rat.
Next, I'll be getting all the purely virtual shots done. I'm a bit concerned with colour management with both virtual and live shots, but we'll see how it goes. :)
