In these two weeks, we could dedicate the lectures to polish and finish the loop animation and to ask all the questions we had about it.
After I finally got to render all layers, I put them on together on Nuke. I order to do the shadows, I duplicated the main model and projected it on a card perpendicular to the first main model. Then, I colour corrected, desaturated, and blurred this projection to match the shadows from the background. Following on, I thought that the neon ring if the dome looked too flat, so I decided to add some fake neon effect by adding glow, filter erode, and edge blur to create this diffused yellow light, and then duplicated this to create the interior white light of the neon (just desaturated the colour so it looks white). Since this neon half ring is supposed to be reflected in the metallic edge of the model platform, I also added some fake reflections a radial node that has been rotoscoped and graded accordingly (also added some edge blur and blur to soften core and edges of reflection). Moreover, the space texture from the inside dome was not too visible, so I rotoscoped the area where this texture is supposed to appear and added the texture manually instead of exporting it again. I also graded it so it did not show too much detail (that was the previous problem I tried to correct in Maya but for some reason it did not render as it was supposed to). Lastly, I also considered that the background look too flat, so I added some more pronounced shadows on the sides by rotoscoping the sides I wanted the shadows and adding some edge blur, blur, and grade to get the shadows colour.
Since this was supposed to be an oddly satisfying loop animation, I also decided to include a relaxing background music to improve to the experience. The final looping videos were edited in After Effects.
I enjoyed this project so much and I think I got more confident in my modelling and texturing skills with it. I also learnt the different ways to render a comp to then comp it by layers in Nuke, and After Effects, meaning that I do not need to finish everything in Maya, and I can take advantage of different programmes that are specialised on different aspects, to achieve better results. I also got more confident with node editing in Nuke as it has always been a bit challenging and intimidating for me, so I feel like this project has helped me expand my creative, technical, and project management skills in many areas.