This week, we finished all the rendering and did compositing in Nuke and After Effects. Here is the final video of our group project.
Overall, I think Hao Yu, Yikun Zhang and I did a great job. We literally followed our schedule, each of us put great efforts into the project. What’s more, we had great communication and cooperation with each other. We almost kept sharing our progress in group chat everyday and asked for other’s opinions.
This is a good try for making group project, we are getting used to it and I believe that we can do better in the future.
Then we go through how to edit with simple blue screen, which we can even do it at home
Which may finally looks like this:
Then we go through color correct trsaparencies It may also affect how much information and details we can get from the picture
Add details of the hair by using difference key. Details can be important when showing Nuke skills.
For homework, we were asked to combine a short clip with the a background, using any ways we have learned.
Fistly, I used keylight to reduce the green background. Then, I add Erode and EdgeBlur to make the edges looks softer.
After that, I added Grade and ColorCorrect nodes to adjust the color of two clips. I mainly reduced the saturation of shadow in colorcorrect to make the hair looks not that warm and bright. Apart from that, I redeced the lift and whitepoint of the woman. Last but not least, reduce the saturation of the background and increase the contrast to make the background looks darker.
This week I put the machine into Nuke and did some color correction. I knew that there was not much things to do before rendering the whole clip, however, things just went wrong several times and I kept solving problems for days.
When I was doing roto on the machine, I found that a part of the wall was hiden by something. Then I went back to the previous steps and found that I made a mistake when I was cleaning the markers. The card on the ground was so big and it covered up a part of the wall. Therefore, I had to redo the clean up and rerender.
This picture shows how I did the compositing.
Clean up the markers:
Apart from that, the order of the nodes also bothered me for a long time. At first, I thought it was the matter of the roto, then I spent a lot of time adjusting the roto, however, it didn’t work. There were two layers of the scene, and I had to put the machine layer between two scenes. Anyway, I could not match the front scene with the back scene. At last, I changed the order of the nodes, finally it worked. Then I had to redo the roto.
This is the final look of the nodes:
Overall, I think it is quite fun and somehow challenging to produce a clip like this. I practised my skills in Maya and Nuke a lot.
This week I continued to make changes to the light and began to render.
These two pictures are the light settings from the last week. I placed 3 area lights in the scene. However, if we check the shadows of the stones in the scene, we can notice that there should be a strong light coming from the right side.
Therefore, I changed the lights to a spot light from the right side and an area light coming from the front top. Apart from that, I also adjusted the color of the light to make it looks warmer.
This week I continued working on textures and setting the light in Maya.
My original idea was to make the machine looks renewed with flat and metallic luster. However, it does not fit in the environment of the old and dilapidated environment. Therefore, I changed the textures of the machine, which shows below:
Processes of texturing:
Import into the scene:
We learned how to create shadows of the machine. First, create two planes below and at the back of the machine. Be careful to match the planes with the back wall and ground of the scene. Then, give these two planes new textures, which is called aiShadowMatte. Then, you can see there are only shadows show in the render window instead of planes.
This week we began to combine the objects with the scene.
Firstly, we exported skyclouds and the camera into Maya.
Then, we created 3D objects in the scene, to compare the position with the background.
After that, we tested the light.
Import the machine into the scene.
We learned how to reference one Maya scene with another by suing Create Reference and edit and update it in the Reference Editor. By doing this, we can just put rigged machine into the scene.
Apart from that, we also learned how to set up the AOVs. We can always refer to the render window to check how the UV looks like.
