Week 5
Almost halfway done with the quarter! I am beginning the week by catching up on the things I was behind, specifically he different render layers needed to control the look of my material in comp and correcting my HDRI to match the color values of the canon footage.
Starting with the HDRI. In Nuke I sampled the pixel values of the middle grey square on the color chart in my footage and used a multiply node on the HDRI until the values on the 360 image grey square matched. This was effectively a custom white balance node. I could have wrote the HDRI out as a new file, but that may cause issues with the color management, so instead I copied the values in the multiply node into an aiMultiply node in Arnold.
Next I tackled the different materials needed to assemble my material in Nuke. I started by creating a pink glass layer that would be used in the
On a separate render layer I assigned a new aiStandardSurface and enabled only the Subsurface. I set the colors to pink based on my rock and played with the scale to get something similar to my reference. I think this could be better but for the sake of testing I will stop for now.
Finally the one I have looked forward to the most, the volume pass. Just like the others I created a new layer and assigned a material, but this this instead of creating a standard surface I created a siStandardVolume. To get this to work I had to adjust the volume step size and padding for the dragon object, but I am still trying to find the optimal settings for them. I created this layer a few times because every time it would be made my dragon would suddenly disappear from my other layers. Maybe I missed something with during the instruction portion of class. I ended up having to manually set layer overrides for any parameter I adjusted in the volume layer and that seemed to fix my issue. Now that I was able to get the volume object to work I could begin to assign 3d textures that allowed me to create the sort of vein look that is present in the rock.
My next step to tackle is the fractures present on the inside of the rock. Below is a quick render and slap comp for the dragon. I was having some issues rendering my shadow layer so I omitted it for this preview.
