Week 3
This was the final week for Project 1. Due MLK day to a snowstorm here in Savannah that has meant we have been working remotely for the entire week. Because of this shutdown I had to finalize the project on my own machine which is good, but not nearly as fast as the lab computers. Thankfully I was able to use the SCAD render farm to speed up my process.
My first task this week was to eliminate the specular highlight that is present in the sky light AOV. To accomplish this I created a roto shape around the light in the HDRI and cloned other parts of the image overtop. I wrote out a new HDRI and replaced the skylight in my Maya scene.
Full Nuke shadow projection setup
While I was able to get the shadow projection to work properly in Maya last week, I found the process to be very tedious. The shadow cast by the chair is very soft and required blurring to match. Due to how the process is I had to comp all the passes to see if it worked, if it didn’t I would have to go back to Photoshop or Nuke, edit the matte and write it out to a new file, bring it into Maya, and render the layer again. After a few loops around with this process I got very tired of it so I began to experiment with doing the shadow matte completely using Nuke. To do this I wrote my animated geo, render camera, and spotlight camera out of Maya as an alembic cache. I then brought the ABC file into Nuke to project. It was pretty simple to set up and meant I could make live tweaks like blurs in the comp. This also meant I wouldn’t have to include the files in my project folder, reducing the speed of upload for the farm. The main downside to this process is that if I am to change the animation of the objects in Maya I would then have to re-export the Alembic file to Nuke. Who knows maybe that is something USD can do live someday.
Before creating the final render I decided to test making the CG grey ball Styrofoam much like the one in the reference photos. However the ball appears to be as weird dense foam in the reference so I ended up just keeping the plain sphere because it was a better match.
Here is the breakdown I submitted for final critique.
