Shot 150 (Hue Animation Test)

Testing animated hues on a scene where Boomer sinks from a seething rage to a defeating depression and hands the narrative emphasis over to Lefty, whose... also sad.

 

  The hue is adjusted by feeding the "Key only" sequence through two hueCorrect nodes, the start hue and the end hue, and animating the Mix attribute in the corresponding Merge (over) nodes. I tried "Set key on all knobs" on one hueCorrect and Merge node, but it didn't seem to do anything.

  

​This was actually Cassie's setup for Stage Fright, so I'm not exactly sure why she didn't just feed the depth map through the filter attribute of the ZDefocus. Applying the Zdepth sequence as a depth map to the beauty sequence via a ShuffleCopy node in nuke seems to work just fine after adjusting the focus in a ZDefocus.

Lighting Master Course (with Special Thanks to Dave Walvoord)

Dave Walvoord gave us a master course in lighting recently. He went over the various types and said to render each one by itself to make sure it looks good by itself. Here it is in action for shot 040.

 

Incandescents: First of all, these are the self-illuminating surfaces with all the lights off.

 

Key Light: This is the light that most highlights subject and directs the audience's attention. It comes from a corner of the room we never see, and thus, from an unknown source.

 

Edge Light: This brightens up the hard edges and sculpts our subject a little better. In this shot, it's physically motivated by the screen.

Rim Light: This light is placed directly behind the subject to create a thin rim that helps separate it from the background. Here, it's originating from the computer, making it slightly screen left of a traditional rim light, but I figured the edge light made up for the lack of a right rim on lefty.

 

Fill Light: The soft light that fills in those ugly hard shadows. Here, it's originating from the left of the camera, but adjusted to look as if it's coming from the computer keys.

Eye Lights

I was looking at those last renders and thinking... "Those eyes and teeth are WAY too dark." So I added some lights linked exclusively to them, and played around with the bump map on the hair.

Trailer Sneek Peek

Since the newest renders won't be ready in time for Viz-a-GoGo, I'll post the screen shots here.

070 - frame 1

070 - frame 130

100 - frame 294

140_frame 324

Huge Texture Fixes

Two Major issues were solved this past week.

1) All textures for each pallet were copied to one asset pallets, so that I could remove the duplicate pallets for a much cleaner project space.

2) I copied the node networks that Kelly Kin gave me from her Summer Course project, thus solving all the attachment issues arising from the coshader I'd absent-mindedly imported instead.

We've had a lot of trouble with textures breaking, and me having to fix them because the team couldn't make heads or tails of what my pallets have become. The biggest breakthrough came this last week, when I discovered that the gold texture from French Toast Mafia's 2012 Summer Course project, Berry Scary, was apparently not attaching to the surfaces because I must have imported the coshader, rather than the slim node network. This doesn't explain why it seemed to be working for a while, but whatever, I've fixed it now.

As it turns out, Kelly Kin put the pallet with ALL the metal textures from Berry Scary into my project space without explaining anything to me, under the assumption that I new jack squat about slim and TOTALLY wouldn't screw up such a simple task of applying them.

To make things easier for my team, I copied all the textures to one centralized pallet so that I could delete the duplicates, and make the overall project space much cleaner. I then opened the "shaders" pallet from Kelly's project, copied them, and again deleted the duplicate.

Voila! Much cleaner (and working)

This also allowed me to attach a variety of metals to the more mechanical assets, making them just a little more interesting.

 

I also added a tire texture to the top of the bcam.

Weeklies

WAY behind on updating the blog, so imma upload the weeklies that survived.

February 23

March 23

April 16

April 22

POV Ending

So guess what? I'm an idiot! I went through all the trouble to film that coffee house shot, and forgot to film the pov until Osa (Richard) was out of town and wouldn't be back until Anne (Ava) had already left for Germany! So I'm filming them sepparately, so that I can REALLY put my compositting skills  to the test.