Week 9 / Class 17

Class 17 Full Video:

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Smoke Color Iteration:

In this iteration, I keyframed the color of the smoke in Maya so that it would start dark and end with white. It does not have the headlights coming through the smoke since this was just a test I did to see how the shader would look being keyframed.

Some other smoke color iterations:

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Goals for this week...

• Adjust atmosphere for Shot 2 & 3

• Refine smoke color

• Refine color correction of smoke with Light AOVs

• Final touches :)

Accomplished for today...

• Adjusted color and density for smoke (darker in color, lighter density)

• Adjusted lighting for Shot 3 (more light in front/underneath car, less light on top of car, softened shadows)

• Created light AOVs for smoke for color correction

• Refined comp for Shot 3 (shadow ramp, occlusion, smoke density, light AOVs, light wrap)

• Added atmosphere “orb” to Shot 3

• Refined color grade (less green, matching black levels between shots)

I accomplished a lot this weekend (hence the bullet point list) so lets start with what I did first. The biggest critique I got was about the smoke and that it was comped too heavily and that the shift in contrast from the black car to the white smoke was too much. I went back into Maya and made a few different iterations of the darker smoke colors (as seen above). I also chose the color I did because I felt like the darkest gray was flattening out the smoke so I went with a more middle shade of gray that was a little lighter in the car so it would still stand out but not be so stark. Deanna gave me the idea to keyframe the color of smoke so that we could have the black and the white smoke which I think turned out pretty cool.

Frame 99: Frame 140:

The darker smoke color came with some unforeseen challenges such as having to adjust the density per color and having to adjust the intensity of the headlight pass. The headlight pass was an easy fix but adjusting the density for each color was a little more tricky since I was walking a fine line of making the smoke too dense again. I changed the way I was shuffling out my volume AOVs which made it easier to grade the alpha of the smoke to make it lighter. Once I got the smoke color and the density, I moved onto the lighting.

The biggest critique I got about the lighting was that front and underneath of the car felt too dark and the top of the car was also getting too much light. I increased the exposure for the ground plane projection so the car would get brighter reflections from the ground underneath. For the top of the car, it ended up being a shader issue so I adjusted the sheen of the material for the canopy and then graded it down further in Nuke.

Before & After Color Correction in Nuke:

The front of the car being too dark was a different issue. Upon further inspection of the model for the grill, it's completely flat with no beveled edges so that is why it is not catching any light. Since it's a little too late to remodel it and replace it for the all the shots, I lightened up the shader on it from black to gray so that it would catch more color from the environment lights.

While still inside of Maya, I set up light AOVs for the smoke. I made three different light groups; one for the warm point lights, one for the cool point lights, and one for the headlights. I then plugged in these groups to the volume AOV to make volume_warm, volume_cool, and a volume_headlight AOVs. I shuffled these out of the smoke pass in Nuke and used them for my color correction. I used them to increase the intensity of the light on the smoke so the smoke was catching more light. I also used it to make the orange and blue sides appear more warm and cool for some added contrast in the FX.

Warm light AOV: Cool light AOV: Headlight AOV:

Before & After Color Correction with Light AOVs:

With all these passes, I got to work refining the comp in Nuke. I adjusted the ramp of the shadow falling to the left so it wouldn't fall as far into the sidewalk. I then adjusted the occlusion pass to make it darker since the intensity of the shadow on the right came down quite a bit so the shadow directly underneath the car was feeling too bright. I also added a little bit of light wrap to the car which helped the car also feel not so dark on the bottom. Lastly, I adjusted the density of the smoke further. I keyframed the density of the center smoke so it starts off much lighter and blend with the other effect. I then put it back to the correct density in 10 or so frames as it got larger.

I went back into Maya to make a new version of the atmosphere past. Professor Gaynor suggested I try making making something like a ghost for the atmosphere for Shot 3 and this was her suggestion. I was only able to get one working and looking good but I think it's a cute subtle subtle detail for the background. I created it by changing the shape of the sphere and plugging an aiStandardVolume and an aiCloud into a lambert and then applying the lambert to the sphere. I then put a point light inside and animated the group to look like the ghostly orb.

The very last thing I did was adjust the grade and the black levels between the shots. The first thing I did was adjusted the black levels of the first two sots to match the levels of the third. Once this was done, I adjusted the color grade itself. The professors felt it was too green in the last shot so I turned down the amount of green and brought up the amount of blue instead.

Last weeks Color Grade: This weeks Color Grade: