Week 4 / Class 8

Since our floating car animation wasn't coming across as planned, I updated the animation for Shots 2 and 3 to have the car going over the cobblestone instead. Here are some playblasts from Maya where you can see the rig moving over the cobblestone.

Once that was done, I fixed the issue with my headlights going through my mesh. It ended up just being a box accidentally unchecked so it was an easy fix. I then adjusted the keylights in Shot 3 to be brighter since I overcompensated for the night lighting and had to bring up the gain of my beauty pass in Nuke last time. I also increased the warmth of the keylight that is casting the orange light from the right side of the shot so that the car would catch more of warm glow. I'm pretty happy with how this lighting looks so far but I definitely need to figure out a better method for the headlights. I currently have mesh lights but I think I'm going to need to use spot lights to get the correct fall off on the ground.

Before and After (and the gray ball lighting reference):

This shot is causing me the most trouble as far as lighting goes. I am going to have to find a way to get the car to pass through shadow, either with a shadow matte or another method. I also need to adjust the animation again because the bounce on the cobblestone looks a little too rough. As mentioned previously, I need to figure out a better method to create the headlights and how to comp the falloff. This shot also needs some sort of motion blur but I want to hold off on that until I can get the lighting more correct.

I comped these shots together in Nuke but I think especially for the Shot 2, it needs more color grading on the car and the shadow and headlight falloff pass.

For the lanterns on the vehicle, the light is still a kerosene wick so to get the flickering effect, I wrote out a little line of code and created an expression for the exposure of the light. You can't really see it too much now though so I'm going to push the values in the rand and see if that will make a difference.

For next class, I will continue refining the lighting in Shot 2 and 3 and modeling environment geometry for reflections and more accurate shadow placement.