MS5 - Scaling, Look Development, and Render Passes
Scale Testing
January 28
During our meeting with the mentors they suggested creating different sizes of the truck with motion blur and depth of field. I did a quick render of the test before our group meeting so we could all decide what size is best for our project.
I test of the depth of field is very rough, because of the rig I was not able to move or alter the truck without ruining the truck or the animation which would ruin the motion blur. To the right is my settings for the motion blur, and I am trying to figure out the best way to set it up for shot 2 . Because we are thinking of making it a slow motion shot so trying yo figure out what the motion blur looks for that.
So to compensate for not being able to change the truck model, I just adjusted the camera with out changing the angle of it. But, with changing the camera is going to effect the z-depth aov that is rendered out of Maya. So all the test are very rough with the inaccurate camera set up. But, after figuring that out Mason was able to adjust the scale in his original scene to match version 2 of our sizes of the truck. So now we have a accurate scale of truck, rig, and layout to hand off to the animator.
All Assets Look Developed and Textured
January 29
Today’s goal was to finish all of the assets look development and have them ready for critique early so there is time to fix them before we start a majority of our render passes this weekend. The one shader that has changed the most is the dice shader, which has now been turned red to pop out of the background more.
Red Plastic - Dice
Hypershade
Chrome - Duck and Hat Monopoly Pieces
These have mostly stayed that same from the last update just some individual edits.
Burlap - Money Bag
This shader was a bit difficult, I kept going back and forth with creating a map for the texture or creating a procedural texture. In the end procedural was the best way especially for the geometry in the beginning of our shot 1. I don’t want a map I made to be warped or distorted by the vellum effect. The only thing I don’t like about it at the moment is how receptive and a bit unnatural it comes off as. I also was having some issues with getting rid of the ring render artifacts, and I am going to ask one of my team mates if they know how to fix this on Houdini.
Red Plastic - Monopoly Hotel Piece
The only thing I edited on this shader is the subsurface colors, because on the green shader I added some blue undertones to make it pop. So, on this shader I added purple to make it more dynamic as a shader.
Green Plastic - Monopoly House Piece
Colorful Paper - Monopoly Money
All of the paper has the same settings the only changes are the color maps and subsurface colors.
Various Metals - Kentucky Ave Sign
All of the shaders are the same since last update on these, but I final got the sign itself to render. I realized I was plugging in the material nodes to the wrong place with the geometry. I am still using the same alpha map from before, but it actually works.
Smoke Comp Tests
January 31
Today I started testing with the smoke render that Sumedh handed off to me. The smoke is not with our animation we are going to have so the trail is not correct, but it was just for starting to test the set up and to get the smoke looking correctly integrated. These test do not have any reflection apart of it yet.
Looking at reference of burnout on trucks the smoke barely creates much of a shadow which is my issue with the first test.
Reference
Test 1
Test 2
Node Tree
WIP Compositing of Renders
February 1
Today we started getting our renders done and putting the scenes together. All of our shots got roughly comped together, and we still have some settings we need to figure out. On all of our renders we do not have motionblur yet because of the time constraints from having to locally render. We had the motionvector aov but when implemented I got a unrealistic blur on the entire car. I will continue to work on that. We also do not have the other assets in the renders because we wanted to focus on the truck, but for the next update they will be integrated as well with textures.
Another, technical issue I had was adding so many zdefocus nodes in my script, because I wasn’t sure where or how the correct what to comp together our rendered assets then zdefocus all of them in one node because I have the shadow, occlusion, etc directly effecting the backplate with the shadow plate before connecting the beauty render of the truck. I will look into this more, I am probably just overlooking the obvious.
Shot 0010
With shot 01 it is the easiest to set up, but I am worried about making it flow with the others because it is at a high angle. We also decided that we are going to re-time the pyro and the moneybags because they get lost in the pyro.* We also have the textures for the moneybag it just wasn’t implicated for our render. We are also still working on the shaders for the pyro in this shot.
*see Mason’s Blog for more information about moneybags: https://www.masonbrahney.com/post/sdgm-560-monopoly-car-commercial
Shot 0020
With shot 02 at the moment we are rendering the effects and the car separately only because of time constraints, but next week everything is going to be rendered out together so the truck will correctly interact with the pyro. Right now there is not reflection or intersection with the tires and the pyro, so in the comp I tried to layer them with the volume direct and indirect aov, but it could only do so much. So for next week I’m expecting a better integrated scene for this shot.*
We also are adjusting the light that is creating the blue highlight so that it matches up more with the highlight on the board. We saw that it was a bit too off after seeing all of the layers together in comp.**
Also since we were rendering them separately there was a lot of overlap with the shadow and occlusion layers which I think made it a bit to dark at times, but I am hoping to resolve that with our next renders.
In out video we also slowed down the speed of the footage a bit to get the reference of us wanting to do slowmotion for a part of that shot. As of now it is a bit choppy because we need to export our animation at a different frame rate and we also thing in our final renders of the pyro/dice and truck that they were rendered out at different frame rates. To adjust that for this first pass we just added time offset for now.
*see Sumedh’s Blog for more information about pyro: https://sumedhk.com/sdgm-blog
**see Kiersten’s Blog for more information about lighting: https://www.kierstenyahn.com/themill
Shot 0030
With shot 03 a bit of a size issue with the animation but we were able to adjust it in Houdini, and I also adjusted the scale a bit more in Nuke because shot 02 and shot 03 were not matching up scale wise. Our plan is to fix that as soon as possible. The only thing that the scale effects with the final comp is at the final frames the truck wheels are getting bounce from the red spots for the board, so when it is scaled up it looks incorrect.
Overall, shot 03 went the smoothest to comp together because it doesn’t have any of the effects incorporated yet with our render. The animation ends a bit abrupt right now, but it is currently being finished. Also seeing all of the plates side by side I think I need to color correct this one bit bit more to get it less saturated and to match shot 02 more.
