MS10 - Final Touches — Evie Hoffman

March 4 - 5

Shot 02

I have been working on finishing Shot 01, it is the first the shot that has been done rendering. We re-rendered Mason’s pyro to put because he increased the density so you are able to see more of the bellowing motion that he had. I also am using a gizmo called Flare Super Star to make the car light flare on top of the Expo Glow. From the last render I changed the angle of the flare to match more with reference of the lights.

The flare doesn’t stay on the truck so I had to track the motion of the truck on this shot. Besides that I have also color corrected around the lights so that it seems like more light is coming in the pyro using a roto on the pyro beauty.

I have also been trying to figure out a way to fix the back ground to match the other shots like the mentors suggested. I used a hueshift on the blue but it made it a weird color that didn’t match that well. Now I am going to try and replace that area with a area from shot 02. The only thing I am worried about is it being very obvious that it is from that shot which would make it confusing because we are viewing the truck in different angles.

Below is a first iteration of a new background that was taken some from the second shot. Because adjusting the color of the original background was ending up very odd looking.

March 6

Today we finished all of our renders so I was organizing them and then working on shot 01 again. I adjusted the background a bit and also the flares. Then I added motion blur to the bag when they fall and also the truck when it bounces.

I am pretty happy with how it it turning out, the only thing now that I want to fix is the blue edges that are being made by the chromatic aberration node because it looks off on top of the cream background.

I have also started to fix shot 02, and at the moment to be able to have the depth as like the background plate as possible I am using three different zdefocus nodes, which is starting to look more like the result I want. I have also been adjusting how when the objects got out of focus they were starting to make this bokeh effect but now I have changed that with a filter on the defocus node. I am still trying to get it to look correct, but this is a start.

March 7 - 8

Shot 01

With shot 01 after yesterday I just did a couple of adjusting tweaks and then after I rendered it Kiersten suggested to remove the chromatic aberration off of the truck or add it to the background because it wasn’t really blending that well. Then Bridget also reminded me that our DOP was also off in this shot. With I forgot to adjust and now it looks way more cohesive with the other two and looks more micro now.

Here is my script for shot 01

Shot 02

I had a bunch of work to do for this shot. I repainted the clean plate as well as colorcorrected it a lot to get it more alike the original. If I had more time I would edit this more because the transition of this plate showing over the original is still a bit rough because I wasn’t able to get the lines to look exactly the same. I also adjusted many of the aovs because the original render was a bit bright from the ground bounce.

And then also with the pyro, each shots pyro has the same shader but in this shot it seems to just get too green, so I tried to turn it down a lot for my first. Then I darkened it even more because Bridget suggested that it seemed like the bokeh looked like it was on top of the pyro instead of the other way around. Below is the pyro after I darken it a bit more and fixed the reflection a bit.

Getting the shadows and the ground to look nice was one of the hardest things with this shot and I still want to work on it because I think it has a lot of potential. I’m still not fully satisfied with how the shadows and the reflection look. I’ve changed it so many times but I’m not completely sure where the disconnect is. One of the issues I feel like is what I mentioned before about the cleanplate looking a bit off. Even now the colors don’t seem to completely match.

For the headlights in this shot I also used ExpoGlow and tracked the lights layer to use the Flare gizmo on the lights. These were harder because I had less light to work with so there is less detail. I’m still pretty satisfied with the look but the back lights look very dull still.

The DOP was very difficult with this shot and I had to make several layers to get it somewhat looking correct to the plate. See more from the days before.

Below is the main script for shot 02.

Shot 03

With the lights I did the same method as the other shots and I like how they ended up for this shot especially at the end of the shot.

The pyro was a bit difficult with this shot because it seemed so much darker the last shot so I was trying to make them match more. And we also had some rendering issues which I tried to fix a bit. So at the end the pyro didn’t have enough frames so I had to freeze frame the front pyro then slowly make it dissolve to the end.

Below are some frames of shot 03.

With this shot I thought everything would go smoothly putting it together but then I realized that the beauty layer was rendered without the Z channel. At this point it was way too late to start a new render because the farm was so backed up and our renders took awhile. I ended up using the zchannel from a past render and merged it into our new render. This would be one of the reasons why it looks weird. Then after that I had to use many blur nodes and rotos to try and mimic the DOP. It ended up looking okay but the way it is interacting with the money is a bit odd so I would go back and work on that or just rerender the beauty correctly. Below shows my script for the depth and also the really messed up alpha I had to make for for this shot.

Below is the main script for shot 03.

Overview:

There is a bunch of things that I would fix with this project, but looking back at the renders now I think they ended up nice for the time we had and the challenges my team faces. I really enjoyed creating it and I know my group got a bit irritated with all of our hold ups, but I really like the look of our out come. If I get time to work on anything soon I would work on the integration of shot 02 more because it just isn’t looking as nice as I would like. I am hoping to ask the mentors what edits I should make to make this a demo reel piece. Overall, I am really glad to have has this experience and I am glad to have such a hard working team!