Author: Xinran Li

This week we had our green screen workshop. We went through different equipments and facilities in the workshop, including lights, camera, etc. Apart from that, Gonzalo taught us about different jobs and responsibilities people may take in the workshop. People should all try their best when working cause time is money. Moreover, everyone in the workshop should be really careful not to make any damage to the equipments and facilities.

We also had a try of recording short videos in the workshop and to do compositing on it.

This is the original clip with background.

I firstly did color correction on it.

Then, I added the lower third and gave the text a small animation.

Then, I put logos into it.

This is how the clip looks like at this point:

Next week, I will give the logos short animations and make an animated ending.

This week I modelled this part in the room, including vase, tea set and table.

Create a cylinder and use lattice to adjust the shape

Extrude the mouth of the vase

Same steps to model the teacup

Then, I started to create the teapot.

Firstly, create a cylinder and adjust the shape of, extrude the base of the teapot.

Secondly, cut one of the rectangles and circularize the points.

Extrude the faces several times and use soft selection to adjust the cureve.

Then, I created the teapot handle and the lid.

How the room looks like at this point:

I began to model the camera. I prefer old camera and found some references for modelling. I divided the camera into two parts, which are the camera body and camera lens.

Firstly, I began with modelling the body of the camera.

Then, I modelled the object which looks like pyramid on the body.

Insert edge loops to the object

Add details which placed on the camera body

Cut the object into half and duplicate into two

Keep adding details to the object

Adding other components on the camera

Then, I began to model the camera lens.

Use gear to build up the camera lens

Model the desk

Use extrude tool to model the decoration under the desk

Insert edge loops and cut the lines and faces

Model the lamp

Place a camera and lock it, use other camera views to adjust the position of the objects

Idea:

I’m interested in 3D scene building, therefore, I want to build a room by myself.

Here is the reference of the room, I will make adjustments to it.

There are two parts need to be modelled, one is the inner scene, others are the houses, buildings in the outdoor scenery. For the outdoor scene, I may use some sources from online, because I want to put more efforts on the inner scene building.

Overall, the room is going to be bright and new, with lights coming through. I may select textures with warm colors , try to make the room looks real.

For the sea and the sky, I may consider using HDRIs or put the 3D scene into nuke and combine with scene in real life, or try with other software, just try to make the scene looks real. I will figure out which way is better.

Final Presentation:

The project may be shown in the form of 3D animation, which would be around 30 seconds. For every shot, it may stay 4-5 seconds. The camera will firstly focus on several parts of the room, show details of the 3D objects. After that, it will give an overview of the room and then zoom out to the scenery outside the room. I will also animate some of the objects in the room to make the room looks lively.

Schedule:

Week 1: Camera

Week 2: Lamp, desk, chair

Week 3: Vase, tea set, table

Week 4: Drawing board, books, paint brush, pigment

Week 5: Fan, ceiling lamp

Week 6: Plants, rest of the objects

Week 7-8: Building the outdoor scene, continue texturing & lighting

Week9-10 Rendering & Compositing

For these two weeks, we mainly learned how to clean up things that we don’t need in a clip.

Before cleaning, we learned about Denoise, which can reduce the noise in the clip, make sure to select well balanced part when using this node.

You can see the difference between the two pictures:

Tips: Merge(Minus) To reduce the noise, than paint on the scene. Then merge(plus).

We can adjust the RGB Chanel to adjust the grain.

Another thing to pay attention to is that do not to double Regrain.

We can use exposure, RGB channel and other channels to check the grain.

We learned a new node called Keymix, it was a little bit hard to understand how the node works.

After that, we did a little practise of cleaning up a lamp using Roto and RotoPaint.

We used Clone in RotoPaint: Apply the same effects did one the first one(if you do the colorcorrect, if will do the same on the other one)

Lastly, we went through how to clean up markers in a clip. Professor taught us multiple ways to achieve that, which all had pros and cons of using each way.

There can always be multiple ways to achieve a same effect, therefore, choosing which way to do is always up to the clip and the situation that we meet.

I practised each of the ways to clean up the markers, Roto and Transform, Clone Patch, Premult and Unpremult for Paint, InPaint…

At last, I chose to use InPaint to finish cleaning up the face, which I think is convenient and also shows good result.