Description.

1. Production Diary
Matthew Evans

2. Week 1:
Starting the first week of production for this project, I planned on working on a lot of the roto brush work for the trailer aspects of this project.
I wanted to create a trailer that was short and snappy and, at the same time, showed off some difficult technical skills. My idea was to roto
brush out characters from famous films/franchises and create an animation, taking inspiration from the intro for the Marvel Cinematic
Universe. I started this part of the project on the first day of production, I immediately downloaded some of the clips that I had selected and
gathered at home prior to the first day of production. I then imported the clips into After Effects to begin roto brushing, I used After Effects
built in roto brushing tool to get a basic outline around the characters movement in the footage. I then used a collection of effects and
tweaked settings within the roto brush tool but I found it extremely challenging to create a sharp edge around the character without and leaks
into the background of the footage without loosing too much quality on the character himself. Following this, I decided it would be best to
scrap this idea for the trailer as the roto brush work would take far too long to produce an outcome that I am happy with, and I just don’t have
the time to spend on this due to the time limit of 3 weeks of production for this project.
Later in the week, I decided to start work on the 3D aspect of my project, the interactive
map. To start this, I used a tool called RenderDoc which allowed me to capture 3D
information from Google Maps. This was a huge trial and error process and took many tries
to capture a scan that I was happy with. Towards the end of Friday I finally gathered a scan
that I was happy with but I still think that I could gather a better scan for this project. At the
moment, the angle that I have captured from creates a rugged outline along my 3D replica
of York and its not the most appealing thing to look at currently. RenderDoc imports the 3D
scan into Blender in a chunk like system, meaning that small areas of the city are imported
as a single mesh/object. This means that when I deleted an areas of the map to try cut
down on areas that I don’t need, it creates a square/blocky outline to the map. I will work
on this in week 2.

3. Week 1:
To start this process of getting a 3D replica of York within Blender, I did some research into
how this may be possible. I found a couple of videos on YouTube going over a 3rd party
software called RenderDoc which would be able to capture information from Google
Maps 3D view and convert that information into a file that I could import into Blender. I
started by downloading everything I needed and after following a tutorial I found that I
needed to change some code within Chrome that would allow the software to capture the
information that I needed. I'm not entirely sure what I did or what I change but I copy and
pasted some information into a shortcut of chrome that allowed me to proceed. I then
headed to Google Maps on this new, different version of chrome. I opened up RenderDoc
and took a capture of York. I then imported this into Blender and had my first scan of the
city.
However, this scan was a very low resolution scan and didn’t capture the whole area of
my tour. For the next couple days I take a collection of different scans of the city until I
eventually got a scan that I was happy with using for this project. I found that I could
move my view around the city in Google Maps and use a ‘Capture after Delay’ function in
RenderDoc, that would allow me to set a number of second that the program would
capture the frame, after I had clicked the button, to create higher quality scans. I'm not
entirely sure why this improves the quality of the scans but I believe it is due to the
movement of the camera causing Google Maps to render the locations multiple times,
causing an increase in resolution/quality.

4. Week 2:
At the start of this week, I decide that I would start tiding up my 3D replica of York. Going into the week, I had an extremely rough scan of the city. I started by
cropping down the area of the scan to just that of where my tour would be contained within. The scan that I took using RenderDoc created meshes and objects
within Blender that were formatted in a chunk like system. This meant that little areas of the city were grouped together in small squares which caused the edges
of the scan to be extremely choppy. Because of the chunk like system, I couldn’t delete parts that I wanted by deleting the entire object. To solve this, I went into
edit mode in Blender and highlighted all the vertices that I wanted to delete and then deleted them from the project. This then created a much more pleasant 3D
replica of the city to look at. After this I decide to start animating the camera around the replica of the city. I decided that I wanted this to feel like an animation
and not a real like camera flight around the city. Because of this, I created a quick circular animation of the camera flighting around the area of the city that my
tour would be contained in, the plan was for the camera to eventually get to the first location of the tour, this being the Cocoa Works. After the camera flew
around the city, I had it fly upwards above the Cocoa Works and begin to look down. I decide to do this as I wanted to create a system that would highlight the
tour path and attractions to the audience. So my idea going forward was to have a bright object emerge outside the first location of the tour, and then extend and
move through the city following the tour path and passing every location. If I have time towards the end of the production period for this project, I plan to have
text bubbles coming out from each of the tour locations to clearly show the audience each location and the name of the location. For the majority of this week, I
spent it working on cleaning up the 3D scan of York as well as working on basic animation for the project.

5. Week 2:
If I have time over the weekend I may try to clean up my animation at home as it will be easier to grasp how the final animation will look at
home as my computer will be able to render the animation playback in the correct FPS. I will also render what I have currently so that I can see
how the HDRI is working with the scene as well as to see how my animation currently looks and identify any glitches I may have.
Moving into the final week of production for this project. I
want to try and get the 3D aspect of the project finished
early on so I have time to create all the information based
content on all of the locations within the tour. I plan to use
either a really low resolution scan of the surrounding area of
the city to place around the area of my tour or a 2D image
taken from directly above the city. This is so that the void is
not visible from any angle around the city as well as to create
a more realistic feeling. I plan to use clouds and other
atmospheric entities above this surrounding area of the city
to angle in the audiences attention to the area of the city
that they need to see. This way I will also be able to cover up
the lack of detail in this surrounding area using the
atmosphere, this way the lack of detail will be barely visible.

6. Week 3:
This week I started working on mapping out the tour path for this video. I experimented with a collection of different ways to make this. I originally planned on
making a KML path in After Effects using Google Earth Studio but this would have meant that my camera animation would have been locked in to the one that I
would have created in Earth Studio’s so I decided against this. I then tried creating a line along the entire path but couldn’t figure out how to make the animation
for this line look good, whilst still suiting the purpose. I tried using a build modifier but that didn’t create the effect that I wanted and I also tried using an object
with a Boolean modifier to take away from the line and slowly reveal the path, kind of like what a KML path would look like. I also decided against this as it was
extremely awkward to work with and created some strange shapes on the edges of my line. Finally, I decided to make the path using small button like objects,
creating an effect like something seen in the Indiana Jones movies. I decided that this wasn’t the most appealing thing if the guide objects were just still, in place
the entire time of the video, so I decided to animate my camera around the tour path and follow the guide as the buttons fell from the sky landing in place, to
highlight the tour path. I'm currently pretty happy with this but I may decide to change this part of my project in the future as it may not look how I want it to in
the renders.
This is basically everything I did this week due to the fact that
animating each of the individual points along the tour path took a
long time as I had over 200 points that needed to be animated to
create a smooth, aesthetically pleasing animation. I very briefly
started to animate the camera for this project and created a rough
outline of the path that I wanted to camera to follow. This was an
initial starting place for me as I just animated the camera above the
tour path and it stuck to it. I will eventually add some more
movement to this camera, developing the keyframes that I already
have to create a smoother, more fluent and free feeling camera
animation.

7. Week 4:
At the start of this week I worked on some lighting and texturing at home. I
used the majority of the textures that Google Maps provided with the
import from RenderDoc but had to swap out some textures in key areas of
my tour that were glitched. I did some basic lighting by adding a nice bright
HDRI and turning the strength of the HDRI up to expose the city, making it
more easily viewable for the audience.
Moving further into the week, I worked on creating a more fluent camera
animation by developing upon the camera animation I already had. To do
this, I focused on adding a lot more motion and variety to the camera’s
animation. I used the dope sheet to create a general rough animation for the
path that I wanted to camera to follow and how quickly I wanted it to move
and then used the graph editor to edit the keyframes to grant myself more
creative control of how I wanted the camera to move. This allowed me to
create a camera animation that I was happy with by the end of the week.

8. End of Week 4:
Due to the fact that I am not that close to finishing yet, I plant to use the weekend at home to work on this project and ensure it is finished to the best of my
ability before I start the evaluation next week. For this I have created a plan for the weekend to ensure I can get this production process finished in time:
-At the start of the weekend, I want to focus on ensuring the camera animation is the best that it can be. To do this, I will be rendering and using the graph editor
to ensure the camera moves how I want it to in the final version and to smooth out any rough edges.
-I then want to finish texturing the city and the tour path markers. This should only be a brief job as I have done a decent job of keeping up with texturing during
production so far.
-Moving on, I want to ensure that my lighting is good enough to ensure that the city looks good from all angles to make my audience want to come to York.
-After this, I will work on providing the 3D city some atmosphere and filling in the void. To fill in the void I will use a 2D image of the outer city and import it into
Blender as a 2D plane. This will allow me to position the rest of the city around my 3D city so that the 3D area of the city doesn’t just fall off into nothing like it
currently does. I will then work on the atmosphere by adding a small amount of volumetric lighting and atmospheric qualities such as fog.
-I will then work on adding clouds around the 2D part of the city, this will help to focus the audiences attention on the main part of the city, that contains the
tour path, as well as help to disguise the fact that I have used a 2D plane for the outer part of the city.
-Finally I will do some final touch ups in blender to some textures, scaling and lighting then set of the render.
-Before the start of the final week for this project, I will import the video from Blender into After Effects, add some effects, colour correction and sound design to
bring the video together. Then I will edit the video into an app concept ready to be shown to the client.

9. Week 4 Weekend:
Over the weekend, I was able to get everything that I
wanted to get done such as lighting, texturing, camera
animation and filling the void in Blender but
unfortunately there were a couple of things I were
unable to finish. I spent a large portion of the weekend
working on try to add atmosphere and clouds to the city.
I experimented with a collection of different ways to
incorporate atmosphere into this project such as clouds,
volumetrics, lighting and particle systems but I found the
clouds worked best for doing this and making the city
feel slightly more real and tangible to the audience. I
used volumetric systems to create a collections of
different clouds that I could scatter around the border of
my city. I decided upon placing the clous purely around
the 2D area of my city, this would have helped to hide
the lack of detail in the 2D areas as well as provide a
border around the 3D part of the map to focus the
audiences attention on the area of the city that the tour
would take place within. However, after completing the
clouds I set of the render but unfortunately the render
time were way too big for this project. Due to the fact
that I had used volumetrics, Blender’s cycles render
engine would have taken close to 3D days to render out
the entirety of the project. This was just not variable
given the amount of time I had left so I unfortunately
had to remove the clouds from my project and left the
city feeling extremely empty and lacking atmosphere.