Week 3 / Class 5

We went out to film this weekend so for Class 5, I was responsible for tracking the footage, animating the new car (that now included materials thanks to Deanna), and making a quick slap comp for our updated previs.

We ended up having to shoot our footage at 3am so River Street would be empty. We were able to film all 3 of our shots which I then brought into Nuke to track.

Since our footage is handheld, it was a little more difficult to track but since this is just a first pass, I just wanted to make sure the camera and the scene were in the correct position. The track I had the most trouble with was Shot 2 which is our pan, following the car down the street. The first half of the track is okay but with the second half, most of the trackers are unsolved. The track itself doesn't look too bad but the perspective still needs to be fixed and the error needs to come down.

This is my first pass of the Slap Comp. The footage from the first track needed to be adjusted so I talked to Deanna about how it could be changed and she was able to re-track the footage and put back together the first shot.

I was also testing the pipeline from Houdini to Maya using VBDs. I was able to bring the VBDs into Maya with the pipeline Sanat worked through and got this as my result. The smoke you're seeing is from the disappearing effect Sanat is currently working on for the final shot.

This is what it looks like in the viewport but by applying an AiStandardVolume to the AiVolume with the VBDs, the effect will appear in the render.

The biggest problem with this pipeline right now is figuring out how to render out the VBDs on the farm. I've tried different places to source them from within the project folder with no luck so my next attempt will be with exporting the VBDs as alembics and then re-importing them into Maya in the hopes that will help Maya find the cache for the effect on the farm.

Here are my goals for the week! I am going to refine the camera track and the animation as well as continuing to test how to render the VBDs on the farm.