Week 4 / Class 7

For this class... I did the lighting, animation, and composite for Shots 2 and 3!

Here is the gray ball reference on the left and my lighting match on the right. We did not shoot clean plates for any of our gray ball shots so I had to use the clean plate for our whole shot instead. For this pass, I was just aiming to recreate the main sources of light. In both these shots, the car will pass through a shadow so I will have to troubleshoot the best way to recreate that.

After the lighting, I then set up the render layers and AOVs in Maya to be rendered out for the comp. For Shot 3, this is how I chose to create my render layers. Since Shot 3 has double shadows that need to be graded differently, I created two shadow passes. This week, I will be going back and modeling some of the environment geometry so that I can add a reflection pass and so the shadows on the ground will feel less flat.

To create the headlight falloff, I made a layer override for the headlight color and changed it to red to create a mask that could be shuffled out. I then assigned an aiStandardSurface shader to the ground plane and changed the base color to black and adjusted the roughness. Here is what the headlight falloff pass looked like. Once in Nuke, I shuffled out the red and color corrected the mask to be more yellow.

Once my layers were all set, I comped everything together in Nuke. Here are the final results from my quick pass. The car itself definitely needs to be color-graded to better fit into the environment and the intensity of the headlights needs to be brought down. As mentioned before, I need to figure out how to move the car through shadow and the blend the shadow from the car into the environment.

I also was able to quickly put together a composite of the VBDs from Seonjae's residual smoke test and the background plate. Something happened to the placement of the camera in Houdini which then affected the position of the VBD in Maya so that is something we will have to go back and troubleshoot.

I also adjusted the rig this week with Deanna. For our first test, I was able to get the wheels bouncing over the cobblestone geometry with a geometry constraint from the wheels to the ground plane but ran into the issue of the wheels shifting backwards as the car moved forward.

Deanna was then able to constrain and parent some more elements for us to be able to get this as our final result. Something is still acting weird with the suspension but it's most obvious when the camera is this close, which it won't be for any of shots.