Perfecting The Look - Production Blog

 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...