MS6 - Compositing Updates
February 6
From the review with The Mill they suggested for consistency of the plates that our first plate should have a higher depth of field and larger bokeh. First, I painted over the old plate then I used rotoPaint to create different color circles that would represent the bokeh.
At first I tried to just use different blurs to create the effect but it wasn’t exactly looking right. Then I tried to create spheres in maya and turned on the z channel thinking it would give a sightly different effect.
Below are my beginning attempts.
I honestly wasn’t getting any good results on what I was doing so then doing more research into creating bokeh and there was a gizmo someone had made for nuke, and Sarah from the Area 51 team added it to our nuke pipeline she developed for our studio class so I could use it.
After using the gizmo plus the direct blur, and I remade the circles in a larger size and different colors. I was finally able to create a more realistic bokeh, matching more with the references of the other two shots.
To the right is the node tree for the new shot 01, the bokeh blur gizmo helped make the noise on the inner part of the bokeh, and it also made it easier to mix it with different colors like how it is in other shots. It also made the inner part of the bokeh lighter in the center. Below is the final out come of the new plate for shot 01.
February 7
With the feedback from the mentors Kiersten recreated the grey sphere and the lighting so we can get it correct in the second shot. Because where the highlight on the board has been the most difficult part to pull off.
The rest of the week have been trying to set up the for sure layers we need for the renders. The main one that was edited was the reflection one. The idea now is to use the reflection pass and have another shadow pass that would be the cut out of the object blocking the light from the blue light. Then we have created another reflection pass to without the blue light rim light to lightly put back into the area that the object shadow into the blue light.
February 8
We decided the best way to create the same effect as the sphere example for shot 02 would be to paint out the current highlight because there is not a way to effectively because the plate was so blown out in that highlighted area. Below is the painted plate without the highlight.
February 10
The last couple of days was just trying to troubleshoot the renders because with Houdini Arnold the render farm won’t let us render out all of our render layers together if the ROPs are connected. So for the renders we have for this week we had to watch the farm very closely and render our each of the render layers individually which was a hassle with the slow network. We eventually got the main render layers that we needed for each of the shots, but we still need to edit each of them and make a more efficient way to create the renders. After getting these new renders I want to take the time after the mentors comments and try to edit my nuke script so in the next upcoming renders it will be easier to update the files. One of the things that was difficult was that after creating the grey sphere test render, I thought that I could just exchange the render layers with the truck but how the truck passes over the blue highlight it made it look odd. So, I am still trying to work the layers for shot 02. Below are the build-ups of shots 02 and 03. I don’t have shot 01 on here right now because it is unnecessary to have as many different layers.
SHOT 02
SHOT 03
What’s Next:
For me, I need to refine the render layers for each shot, adjust so shaders of the assets after seeing them rendered out, edit nuke scripts, and start rendering the updates for the shots as soon as possible to do more troubleshooting.