10/8/24
Week 5: CG Integration Begins
Completed Tasks and To-Do-List
This week, my tasks were to begin preparing our CG elements for integration with our live action plates. This includes fixing and aligning virtual cameras to match the perspective and orientation of the live plates, as well as arranging the objects correctly in 3D. A full day was spent just transferring our shaders and assets to Houdini, which proved to be a rocky transition, but having the smoke rendered in the same scene as the chest allowed for more realistic lighting and interaction with the objects.
Another important goal this week was to deliver all the necessary render layers for our compositor Veronica to begin integration. Using Ambient Occlusion and Shadow Matte, these layers combined with the object beauty layer can be merged together in our comp. In the future, we will need other AOVs, mainly diffuse and specular.
For the shot with our chest on the sand, we have an effect of smoke coming out of the chest. To approach the CG integration, we needed multiple shadow layers- the smoke interacting with the ground, the chest, and the chest's shadow as well. If the density of the smoke is to change in the future, the smoke shadow being separate will allow for a smoother workflow.
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In addition to the CG integration shots, our shot displaying the inside of the chest is fully CG. There were many challenges with this shot, but above I have shared the progress from the previous week. I am still not completely sold or happy with this shot, though it is progress nonetheless.
From a lighting standpoint, this was a challenging shot to approach. There isn't, and realistically wouldn't be, any light coming into the chest. I decided that it would be interesting to lift the lid of the chest slightly, allowing the sunlight from the back to seep in. In the future I would like to experiment with light linking, to give more backlight and keylight to the sprite cans, while keeping the rest dark.
This shot has also been complicated in a shaders perspective. The reflectivity of the objects makes rendering substantially more time consuming, and as you can see, there is a green hue that is now reflecting from the cans onto the wood and coins. I think potentially we can render the two separately (either turning primary visibility off for objects or removing reflective rays), though there is definitely too much green in the shot taking attention away from the cans. Hopefully by next week this will be cleaned up!