Perfecting The Look - Production Blog

 Before I opened up Maya, I had to create the HDRI image for lighting up my scene. So I opened up Photoshop and merged the individual images, masked out the sky region and applied an exposure and levels adjustment layer. I had to jump back and forth between PS and Nuke to check the color values of the sky region. Then I created an new project window on Maya and imported all of my 3D assets, the tracking scene from Nuke and the HDR. I organised all of the point could locators and renamed the camera and locked it ot be safe. Then the HDR was added to the skydome and the Image plane was added as a background to the camera. Then the 2 assets where brought in and I tested the animation and positioned the character on the ground plane. Keyframe animated the Statue descending from above. All of the textures were applied for the characters, I reused the base color for the subsurface scattering input.  I created 2 render layers one for both for the assets and for the ground plane for r...

The first step was to setup relative paths and to organize everything into appropriate folders. Once I bring in the footage I convert it into an image sequence and apply a primary color grade and correction. Then I imported the 35mm lens distortion grid and ran the grid detection function using the lens Distortion node. Some manual correction was required to detect every point on the grid once that was done the STmap was exported and attached it to the footage. Raw Footage Primary Grading Color Correction The lens distortion caused the bounding box to be expanded by 10 pixels on both axes, which was factored into the reformat node and the undistored footage was exported. Next was to match move and 3d track the footage. This footage was fairly clean there were no issues as the footage only has 2 planes the ground and the wall behind, there are buildings and trees beyond the wall but they get cut as the camera closes into the wall section. So for the majority of the shot its just trackin...

 Before I get started with the project I need to revise everything that was thought since the beginning of this module. There was a lot to take in and all of it was new to me, so even after going through my notes I feel kind of lost, mostly around the Maya workflow. Thankfully, there are a lot of incredibly narrated and structured tutorial videos on Canvas by Richard. These were extremely helpful, alongside these there were a lot of external tutorial videos as well, which really rounded out everything. Now, I'm ready to tackle the VFX sequence assignment. I also added few important Tips to all of my blog entries along with reasoning as to why we them that way, after Jamie's suggestions, which helped out a lot in the end. First I started out by going through the footage provided, waiting for some inspiration to hit me. I had lots of ideas popping in while browsing the all the different footage, but in the end it all came down to what assets I could find to realize these ideas. S...

 Now we'll see what the final steps are once the renders are complete. So, now we have multiple folders each for one of our render layers and each frame is rendered out as an EXR file and each of them has every AOV merged within it.  The Layer Contact sheet node shows all of the nested AOVs in the EXR file 1. Import all the rendered sequences into Nuke. 2. Attach a shuffle node to the the sequence and change the input layer to one of the AOVs from the list. Add as many shuffle nodes as needed )Motion blur and z depth doesn't need a shuffle node). 3. Add an Unpremult right after the render sequence, before the shuffle nodes and a premult node after merging all of them. 4. Add a Merge nodes and connect all of the shuffle nodes consecutively. In the end after all the merges the output should match the Beauty pass render. Set merge mode to plus. 5. Use a Copy node to copy the alpha from the render sequence to use for the Premult node. 6. We can attach grade, color correct and any ...

 As a 3D Artist I was familiar with the modelling and texturing side of Maya, but I was never exposed to the VFX side of it until now. This week we looked into how to add textures to our assets and how to use the node graphs for the same. Once that is set we learnt about render layers, overriding textures and AOVs. All of the assets in the scene will have aiStandardSurface and the surfaces that receive shadows and reflections will have aiShadowmatte as their materials.  Tips for Materials : 1. Always set color space as RAW for everything except base color. 2. Enable "Alpha is luminance" for everything except base color and normal map. 3. If you have a very shiny CG asset in the scene, add real textures from the footage to the ground and wall planes for the asset to pick up and reflect them as this would help it blend  with the scene. What are Render Layers and why do we use them? Render Layers allows us to separate each element of the render into their own exr image,...

 After the lens distortion is corrected we need to map out the footage and get a 3D representation of it, where we have points on the surfaces of the footage that depict their 3d spacial position, which we can use in Maya to orient our assets. Camera Tracker node - automatically tracks and generates a point cloud and creates a virtual camera that mimics the real camera which was used to shoot the footage. In the settings tab we can enable visibility of trackers, set no of features, ideally between 500-1000 and enable refine features. Before we can start tracking we need to input all of the known info in the camera tracker properties, like the presence of distortion in the footage if any, focal length of the lens, camera used (film back preset). Once the Tracking is done we have a collection of orange markers dotted around the scene, which turn green after solving. The quality and accuracy of the tracking is a measure of how many of the tracking points turned green and how many stay...

 Lens distortion is the deformation of the footage captured due to the curvature of the lens on the camera. Optical  Distortion is a rotationally symmetric image error which increases from the centre of the image towards the image margin, t here are 2 main types of distortions :  Barrel Distortion - image magnification decreases with increase in distance from the optical axis, hence    straight lines will remain straight towards the center but curve out at the edges of the image. This gives lines a circular, barrel-like shape. Seen in concave spherical and wide angle lens. Pincushion distortion- is the exact opposite of barrel distortion, image magnification increases with increase in distance from the optical axis. Hence,  the edges of the photo can appear to bend in, rather than out. Seen in Convex  spherical  and Telephoto lens. The human eye is capable to perceive distortions only if the geometric error exceeds two per cent. But this might alr...