Week 6: Render Troubleshooting, Adjusting Composition and Lighting
2/10/25 - 2/16/25
Mentor Feedback
This week, our group presented an updated version of our ad, this time with an additional shot and newer iterations of lighting, shaders and FX. Due to some complications with shaders and render time, this week's focus will definitely be on troubleshooting those issues to improve for next week. Here were some of the main notes regarding my role/shots:​
Vi:
- Adjust lighting within renders to avoid relighting in Nuke
- Shot 4.5 needs new camera movement or framing, too similar to shot 4 at the moment
- Tighter zoom into the droplet for shot 4.5, maybe following the droplet down towards the bottle?
- More breathing room, go tighter but adjust composition
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Emma:
- Adjust lighting to add more detail, right now the lighting feels 'blocky', not enough variation within refractions
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Molly:
- Similar note to Vi on shot 4.5, follow the droplet at the bottom of the bottle
- For lighting, adjust the cards swiping across bottle as they are too fast and distracting, soften edges of the swipes
Shot 5 Lighting
One of the notes mentioned briefly by the mentors and also my professors was the lighting in shot 5 needing to have more directional light. In the previous week, due to the flower shader including transmission, creating a sense of directional light was challenging without overlighting or losing details in the shader. This week, with my teammate Shannon's new iteration of the shader, she excluded transmission properties-- which also solved the issues with render time significantly.
​ I also continued to utilize light linking for shot 5 in order to light different objects in the scene. I did some tests using different HDRIs for objects, although this caused a feeling of objects being cut out and pasted / overlaid on the scene. ​
HDRI - used to light all objects
Environment lights
Perfume lights
Based on guidance from the professors, the approach to adding color in the shot 5 flowers will reside in using light group AOVs and color correction in composite-- which explains the black and white look on the current flowers. Using these and other AOVs (about 30 in total, but the contact sheet below only shows the most important ones), the professors suggested color could be added to the flowers in comp instead of in render.
Old - one sided geometry in the cap
Update - boolean within the cap
Another issue that I tried to explore this week was the stripes appearing in refractions in the cap of the bottle. I still need to explore this further as the renders aren't developed enough yet, but adding thickness to the cap helped break up the blocky stripe-looking refractions. The images below use the same lighting setup as well.
Rendered shot 5 bottle
Rendered shot 5 bottle
Shot 4 & 4.5
Given the notes from the mentors, I also needed to make adjustments to shots 4 and 5 within the lighting, composition, and camera movements for shot 4.5. However, based on other notes of our current FX in shot 4-- being the water droplet-- the bottle's position and animation were changed just before the weekend. In addition, the mentors suggested a change in HDRI which should allow for better reflections and depth of color. Our previous HDRIs were color corrected to be tinted gold, though we are now using the raw HDRIs we took earlier in the quarter.
These adjustments led to the need to redevelop the lighting and camera movements, not entirely from scratch, but with short notice. I was able to still deliver the shots with somewhat decent lighting, though I have several elements that I would like to change and continue developing, including but not limited to:
Shot 4:
- Address dark reflections within the bottle and underneath cap
- Minor changes to camera movement
Shot 4.5:
- Maybe add water plane in the background for better context
- Brighten darker points inside the bottle (ray depth?)
- Elevate the gold tints of the perfume
- Add back white card/light that flashes across object slowly
