Week 5 / Class 9

My final renders for Shots 2 and 3.

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For this class, the first thing I did was refine the animation for Shot 2 so that it was less jittery and more bouncy instead. I did this by adjusting the scale of the cobblestone geometry.

I then moved into Shot 3 and modeled the geometry for the sidewalk so that the shadows would have a bend and fall more accurately in the scene. I also fixed the headlight pass so that the light was falling onto the ground instead of just reflecting off of it. I was originally using an aiStandardSurface for the ground and I just needed to switch to a Lambert with a white base color to get my headlight pass to work correctly.

Updated shadow pass:

Updated headlight pass:

A major milestone I hit this week was figuring out how to render the VBDs on the farm by making the path of the VBDs absolute to the farm by editing the Maya ASCII file.

With this, I was finally able to render the whole FX sequence and make more adjustments to the aiVolume. I brought in Sanat's updated FX and played around with the density and color of the smoke in the aiVolume shader. We got the critique last week that our smoke was too dense so I wanted to find a good balance of making it more ghost like but also dense enough that it blends with the disappearing geometry. Here is what I have for my current settings for the aiVolume Shader.

I also played around with the smoke color. I made it slightly blue in Maya and then color graded it in Nuke so that it fit in a little better with the background. Professor Gaynor briefly discussed using a normal pass of the smoke as a mask so that we can see the different colors of the lights and then color correct the smoke with that. I am currently rendering out a normal AOV so I will look into that further this week and see how I can apply it to the smoke.

Color corrected smoke in Nuke:

Color correct node:

This is my current setup for my render layers. I originally had the shadow pass for the FX in the same shadow pass for the car but I realized the shadows for the smoke will be much lighter so I moved them to their own pass. With all of these rendered, I brought everything back into Nuke to composite together. Deanna showed me how she set up her comp for the AOV passes and it was much more streamlined than my previous method so I rebuilt my passes with the same method she uses to clean up my script.

I then moved back into Shot 2 to fix the headlight pass there and fix the reflections in the car as well. I talked to Professor Gaynor about the best way to tackle the shadows and she suggested using a ramp to blend them together. This did not make it in the final cut for our presentation but I already started playing around with the ramp in Nuke to see how the results look.

Here's how my first attempt looks, it will have to be keyed in Nuke but it's already starting to feel closer.

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For this week... My goals for Shot 2 are to continue to refine the lighting, ramp the shadows, add motion blur, and create a reflection pass. My goals for Shot 3 are to continue to refine the lighting and refine the color of the smoke.