For the Final Major Project, I have furthered my knowledge of Houdini, Maya and Nuke, and learnt to use Redshift, a brand new renderer, to great effect.
For my project, I studied a lot about Taoist culture, such as the Bagua, the Heavenly Stems, the Earthly Branches, etc. Tao’s story is based on a battle between Shifang, a young Taoist priest, and a sorcerer, who is a representative of the Taoist family, and a sorcerer, who represents the forces of darkness. This requires Maya for modelling and scene building. After referencing a lot of relevant content from film and games, the two characters were finalised for production.
For the most prominent visual effects shots, I further learnt how to optimise particle related items and learnt to use Redshift for rendering. Most of these visual effects shots were inspired by the Taoist word “Bagua”. This required deeper research into the different Taoist tools that contain the Bagua to avoid cultural errors. At the same time, it is important to use imagery that brings out the Taoist culture, such as ink effects.3D ink is also a topic I have been working on since 2019, and I have also worked on 3D ink in my previous studies. This time I have optimised the overall effect even further through my studies and this improvement is visible to the naked eye.
But excluding the special effects part, I found that for the production of animation in Maya is still insufficient. The processing of some frames is not smooth enough, and at the same time, the control of the camera language still needs to be improved. Although I tried my best to learn and adjust the content, the effect is still not very satisfactory. This requires me to further study the related knowledge and content in the future.
After the completion of all the contents, I carried out the work of soundtrack, dubbing, colour grading and editing, and finally showed the film in front of you. But this is a new starting point for me. Through this short film, I have learnt more relevant knowledge and also realised my shortcomings. Learning during the production process will become a regular part of my career in the future, and I will keep learning.
