I asked Pam to view the film with an eye only towards the flames and she found the flames I had in the previous COVID Convoy scene were her least favorite. This is the reworking of those flames. It involved five new layers and using all that had been learned form all the previous fire scenes.
Color is the most difficult aspect to control when there are three glow effects added to the fire. I finally learned that I could duplicate the entire flame and add a tint and hue effect to it to warn it up. I then use a multiply blend mode to blend the colors with the pre-existing flame.
She tended to like that all the fires were subtly different. I might go back and revise several of the earlier fires using what I learned along the way.
For now however I will be tackling the out of focus scenes. I looked at the Minotaur scene last night and it will involve re-animating the scene from scratch. There is no easy patch to fix the anti aliasing that caused the blur. I suspect that will be the case with zombies walking on the beach as well. These are two of the most complicated animations in the entire film and they both need to be redone at 4k.
If I remember right these scenes had so many layers that they started to have memory issues. I am not sure my computer will be able to handle the same scenes at twice the resolution. I might have to animates small groups of Minotaurs and zombies and export them is small batches to later be composited together in After Effects. I will push the program until it breaks and then start a new scenes. I’ll probably save daily versions of the scenes in case the program just seizes up.
I thought I was almost done with the film but that goal post had moved off in the distance.