Week 8
LDR image for website upload size
I was able to shoot my plates over the weekend so I can finally start to work on everything. I ended up pivoting from the idea I had last week, but its probably for the better. The new plan is for the drawer to open up and for a character to jump out and land on the top of the table. I filmed the project at 24mm which means I had to remove the distortion before I could eventually track the shot. I was able to remove the distortion by filming a grid with the same lens and camera settings, then applying that to the footage. I then tracked the camera and created some stand in geometry. Bringing that into Maya I started to recreate the lighting and make a quick animation to show the concept.
If you recall, last project I was having problems with rendering using the legacy render layer system and chose to adapt to the newer render setup. I really enjoyed how it works and was looking forward to using it again, unfortunately I may have to go back to the old system. I currently have the shadow layer(s) set up, but ground is casting shadows on itself. Normally I would fix this by selecting all the faces I wanted to exclude shadow and apply a black standard surface material to it. The problem is it doesn’t appear you are able to create material overrides for individual selected faces using the newer system. This becomes even more of a problem because I was planning to create several ID passes for the different parts of the object so I could mask layers later.
Last class we took a look at the plates each of us shot for the project and the biggest note I received was to clean up and remove things like the wires of to the sides of the frame. We were also asked to do a quick slap comp render to see if the cg objects have problems in motion.
The next steps would be to add detail to the cg drawer (bevels, rails, 3d handle, textures, etc) and finally get my character into the scene. I had one previously in the playblast for Monday but it appeared to small. Normally I could just scale up the model until it looked about the right size but I am unable to do that with a Lego model because their is already real Lego sets in the scene so I have to math the brick scale.
