Surpasses Project: REF

SURPASSES


	REF
	Lukasz Pazera



	Surpasses was used extensively during production of an award-winning REF short animation. In fact, requirements of REF project were direct reason for starting Surpasses development. For more information on REF and animation download visit www.ref-movie.com

	Scene Setup & Rendering


	Surpasses allowed for significant workflow enhancements on several production stages. While building a shot it was the ability to focus on a choosen part of scene. For example, it was little point to see whole scene when I needed to adjust lights affecting characters. Thanks to Surpasses I could simply switch to the Warrior Key/Kick Light pass and only items important to this pass were left visible. And of course, test previews were coming MUCH faster.
	A similar passes setup was used in all shots and it was the same for both scene editing and rendering in layers for later post-production and composition.


REF_PassSetup.avi, DivX 650kB


	Setting things up manually was rather boring and time-consuming task. With Surpasses, it was all interactive and layers could be exported as separate scenes with just a few clicks. These scenes were then rendered over network and brought to the compositing software for further processing. Passes were not different item groups only. Each pass had different rendering settings, optimised for speed and quality.
	Here is a basic breakdown of an example shot and descripton of passes used:

		Volumetric Light. Pictures rendered from this pass were the base for whole volumetric lights effect in REF. Since volumetrics tend to render slowly pass was to set to have minimum AA, no Motion Blur and no DOF effects.

		Background. Rendered with very poor quality (no AA), out of focus (X-Dof 2). Quality wasn't important in this case as the pass has rather slight effect in final shot.

		Floor. Shadows casted by characters are visible.

		Warriors Key Light. One of two passes used to cast light on characters. This pass needed very high AA quality, Motion Blur - since warriors are moving pretty fast and DOF in close-ups. For DOF and Motion Blur to composite properly, pass was rendered in Fader Alpha Mode.

		Warriors Kick Light. Rendering settings same as above.

		Alpha Channel was used to cut out characters' silhouettes in Background, Floor and Volumetric Light passes.

	After rendering, raw passes were initially post-processed. That included cutting out warriors silhouettes where needed, applying masks and various effects like Curves, Blurs, Noise, etc. Such prepared passes were finally composited together. Watch video below to see the progress from raw rendered pictures, through initial post-production up to the final composition.


REF_GaeshiMaking.avi, DivX 8.2MB

	Character Animation
	In character animation it is very important to keep high frame rate to be able to work fast. This is often achieved by using lowres proxy object for animation and highres one for previews. With Surpasses, You can create such setup in seconds. The video below shows an example passes setup in one of REF animation scenes.


REF_CharAnim.avi, DivX 1.2MB

		First layer was for animating. It had a specially prepared warrior's object copy with uniform surface. All rig controls visible. Uniform surface and almost flat lighting were helpful to see all parts of mesh and make sure they're deforming well.

		Preview layer was for previewing the work without all the controls cluttering the screen. There was no lowres and highres objects in this case as the frame rate was close to 25 fps anyway.

		After sequence was completed the motion had to be baked. Rigged objects were not used in shots directly - just meshes with baked motion applied. In addition to warrior's body, cloth object and a collision object for cloth were baked for further simulation.