Week 8 / Class 15

Goals for this week...

• Refine shot 3 comp (blending FX, grain match, ect)

• Refine atmosphere shot 2 & 3

• Continue to refine color grade

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Shot 3 Final:

I was sick this weekend and had a big submission for another project so I wasn't able to get as much done as I previously hoped (along with the farm being completely full and having to sit in the queue for 24 hours to get any sequences through). The progress I was able to complete was updating the FX pass for Shot 2 in Maya by rendering the smoke in a separate pass and reducing the density in the aiVolume shader, updating the FX pass in Shot 3 to have the headlights coming through the smoke, and then updating the comp for Shot 3 as well.

First thing I did for Class 15 was update the Shot 3 FX pass to have the headlights coming through the smoke. I did this by simply adding the headlights into the FX pass and turning off the intensity on the frame the car is disappearing. In Nuke, I currently have the car fading out starting on Frame 105 and being gone by frame 110. I used these same keyframes to key the intensity of the headlights. Once this was all set, I sent it to the render farm so it would be ahead of the queue.

The next thing I did was update the FX pass for Shot 2 in Maya. Our biggest issue was the smoke was being rendered in the same pass as the beauty so it would hide the emitter. To get around this, we duplicated the beauty layer and applied an aiMatte to the car. After this, I adjusted the density in the aiVolume. I sent this to the farm and then handed off to Deanna to comp.

The last thing I did was update the comp for Shot 3. The first thing I did was refine the shadow layer for the car. I got the critique that something looked off about it so I graded the alpha of the shadow pass to increase the contrast. By doing this, I was able to bring up the double shadows which made the rolling shadows more obvious. While this did help with the shape, my shadow color still feels off and the shadow themselves need to be softened.

The next thing I did was refine the atmosphere. I wasn't able to render a whole new pass so I graded the plate I had for the previous iteration and brought the opacity way down.

The last thing I did was adjust the black levels. I got the comment that the black levels would be lifted when the car is far away so I keyed the grade I had on the car so the black levels would be lighter and then go to the proper value as it moved towards camera.

Frame 1: Frame 50:

The very last thing I did for this class was adjust the color grade. My color grade didn't entirely come across last time so I made sure this time I pushed the levels more. The mentors mentioned that they wanted it to be cooler toned and to see more blue so I made sure I brought up the blue and brought down the orange in the highlights. This might be a little too far in the blue direction.

Before: After: