phacoemulsification continued

[Also-- click here to watch a test render of the procedure animation so far!]

My group finished the actual animation part of our animation; right now, all we have left to do is render everything out and composite it in After Effects. Rendering takes a loooooong time on the super-slow computers we have available, so we're doing some test composites of stills in Photoshop, just to make sure everything is hunky-dory. (This is all just quick testing; none of this is final. It's also a random frame from the animation with not a lot going on at the particular moment.)

We started with a straight-up "beauty pass," which is the basic output the computer spits out.

We could probably use it as is, but we can do better! Let's throw an "ambient occlusion pass" on top of it.

Ambient occlusion is a mode where the computer calculates the distance between objects. When things are close to each other, you see black; when things are far apart, they render as white.

Ambient occlusion is useful 'cos it can be really hard to make shadows work perfectly in 3D programs. When you overlay one of these passes onto another one, it helps make things look more realistic.

Side by side:

Just the beauty pass	With ambient occlusion

To make the nice depth of field--like you'd get in a real camera--on the first/very top/featured image, we took a "Z Depth" pass, which calculates a map of how far stuff is from the camera:

...which you then put into a lens blur and adjust accordingly.

Sooooo that's where that is right now.




[3ds Max, Photoshop]