Week 5: Livening Cameras, Lighting Iterations
2/3/25 - 2/9/25
Mentor Feedback
This week, our group presented our first passes of FX, lighting and compositing to the Harbor mentors, aiding in this week's adjustments and iterations. Since I am mainly in charge of rendering shots 4, 5, and now a shot in between, I have listed the main notes to address and consider below.​
Kyle:
- Story and layout wise, the commercial is holding up
- Shot 4 needs slight rotation either in the camera or bottle
- Extra shot between 4 and 5?
- Shot 5 composition needs to be fuller
- Bottle placement needs to be slightly adjusted to accommodate for end card
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Billy:
- Caustics (not sure if I will address this for next week but soon!)
- Check IOR of glass
Vi:
- Shot 5 framing is better
- Shorten shot 4
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Hailey:
- Shot 4 has some yellowish green color (from color correction, perfume shader needs adjustment)
- Light rays are a good idea
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Joleen:
- More flowers in shot 5, more variety in rotation, maybe scale
Addressing Feedback
To address the feedback, here are the main goals that I want to accomplish for this week:
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- Adjust camera movements to be more dynamic for 4 and 5, also adding back another shot in between to act as a better transition between the two
- Adjust end of shot 5 composition to flow better into end card
- Fill in shot 5 composition with more flowers, breaking up the horizon line
- Check shaders for the perfume bottle glass and liquid
- Other: Add in additional AOVs based on compositor needs / feedback​
Camera Changes
The first things that I addressed were the camera movements for shots 4, 4.5 and 5. Below is the new camera movement for the shots, not including shot 3 which will be altered by my teammates Wei or Shannon. The main changes were adding a light crash zoom at the beginning of each shot, allowing for a more dynamic feeling to the ad. Then for shot 4.5, I used a similar approach to the camera movements in one of last week's cuts, however I added flowers in the foreground and background to help bring more visual appeal and fragrant elements to the shot.
Lighting: Shot 4.5
Taking a similar approach to last week's lighting process, I developed the lighting for shot 4.5 by disabling the HDRI, then assigning lights with fully saturated hues. By doing so, I am given a clearer image as to how my lights are effecting the object, which for a translucent object like this bottle, is very important. With the colors, it not only looks pretty cool, but allows me to quickly identify and/or adjust specific lights where necessary.
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For instance, I noticed through the iterations below that I favored the placement of the blue and magenta colored lights, however the green and yellow highlights were flashing too quickly across the bottle. I also decided the first of the 3 highlights, the red bar, was unnecessary and maybe too distracting. I then keyframed the light intensity for the yellow and green, as well as decreased the speed of the bottle rotation.
Iteration 1
Iteration 3: adjusted rotation slightly
Iteration 2: removed red bar
Iteration 4: adjusted position of lights
Iteration 5: keyframed green + yellow light intensities, previous version showed unwanted artifacts before bar swipes across
Slap comp with HDRI enabled and lights recolored
Lighting: Shot 5
Using the same approach as above and building on top of last week's edition of lighting, here is what the lighting looks like when separated from the HDRI for shot 5:
Slap comp with HDRI enabled and lights recolored
Shot 5 Rendering Troubleshooting
Unfortunately, one of the issues our team has run into is rendering the environment for shot 5. Due to a few major issues, mainly the poly count of the scene, all of the reflective/subsurface elements needing high sampling, along with our render farm's time limit being 2 hours per frame, I needed to get creative for how to render the shot. To do this, I set up 3 different ROPs in Houdini each dedicated to specific assets of the scene. One renders the bottle, the second renders the flowers, then the third renders the plane of water.
To allow for the flowers to be properly merged over the plane of water, a cryptomatte is necessary to key the areas that the flowers do not cover. In the Houdini scene, I created a flat plane assigned a black matte shader, then turning off all visibility that will effect the flowers. This allows the cryptomatte AOV to have data for the plane, though the render is unaffected.
By separating them, I was able to decrease the render time just under 2 hours per frame. Here are what the layers look like separately, then slap comped together.
Layer 1: bottle
Layer 3: flowers
Layer 2: water plane
Layer 3: flower cryptomatte, showing plane to use for keying but is hidden in render
Slap comp with all layers