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A lot of Unprecedented Changes: How to go about it

  • Writer: Leighanne Fernandes
    Leighanne Fernandes
  • Apr 4, 2020
  • 4 min read

Progress this week has been good and overwhelming at the same time. On one hand, I have finished majority of my work including the robot textures, spinner textures and have been testing some CGI shots in a mock test shoot, while on the other hand we have to compromise and rethink of a story to fit an indoor shoot due to the current Covid-19 situation. How can I go about this?


My team and I held meetings this week to think of ideas on how to work around the situation and come up with an indoor shoot. Schools and universities will be closed till June and no one is allowed to go out. We were depending on the equipment from SAE to shoot in week 10, but now have to carry out our own shoots with a cellphone. Quality will definitely be compromised but we have to work around it.


So, we thought of a slightly different story - A conflict between two siblings over a remote control leads them to battling off with spinners and robots to determine the ultimate champion who gets to watch TV. With this, we needed new storyboards and a new mock with CGI implementation. Because my teammate will be doing the entire shoot at her place, I decided to work on the new storyboards as a baseline for her to film with. These are the new storyboards below.

Storyboards drawn by me.


I managed to finish my Robot and Spinner textures this week, which feels like a massive relief.

ROBOT TEXTURES

SPINNER TEXTURES

The reason why it took me this long for the textures is because VRAY Triplanar texture wasn't giving me the results I wanted. After a lot of experimentation and research, I was able to achieve my desired effect through using VRAY Curvature map as a mask and using multiple materials in the blend material. It allowed me to get the "edge wear" effect as I intended to create. Studying various surfaces was definitely the best way to go and took me a while to implement as well.


Moreover, studying reflections a little more in depth helped me to push my skills in texturing a bit further. I knew the basic concept of what the values and options in the material tab were about but i wasn't sure on how to test for the right values for the right surface materials I wanted to achieve. Hence, I studied a bit and played around with the interactive learning document by Chaos group (chaosgroup, 2020, p.1) and was able to achieve the above results.

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CGI Implementation

My CGI implementation seemed to be good this week in terms with lighting and shadows, however, there were other minor issues that I still need to fix. The below video is with the feedback from last week applied. I couldn't do the Sky replacement and tire squash due to some glitches with my software but these issues have been addressed and will be rectified later.


We also learnt in depth VRAY settings and how to push our renders to the next level. Through multiple tests and experimentation, we came down to the right about of noise threshold and render time for us to get clean renders. We were also introduced to VRAY Sample rate in the render elements and how it functions. After compositing a shot in After effects, this is what I ended up with.


This includes the different render elements composited and color correction added with cinematic bands.

The Sample rate render pass looks like this. It took a couple of tries to ensure that most of the shot is rendered BLUE and not green, red or white.






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Lastly, as discussed with my team and lecturer, we decided to go with my teammate's living room that looks like this in a panoramic shot.

With the way I organised tasks this weekend, we were able to get some good shots taken today and will redo some of those that require to be altered by tomorrow. Our aim is to finish the new mock by Monday for a review during our consultation.



In my opinion, the balance in warm and cool colors in this setting will enable us to work well with lighting our shots and I hope the best for my team and I to deliver the best we can over the next few weeks. Also, as I had been working side by side on the previous VRAY camera shot, below is the final video I completed and sent for review. I received some good feedback and some areas where I could enhance it but I'm not sure if i will have the time to re-render these shots. Until then, I'm happy with how this turned out.


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For next week, we are hoping to get our models rigged and ready for animating in the scenes. Since the shoot is done, we held a mindset that this will be the final shoot and tried our best to make the shots look clean in the filming stage. This way, we can focus on getting our VFX shots to look good.






References:

ChaosGroup (2020). VRayMtl [help document] Retrieved from https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY4MAX/VRayMtl



ChaosGroup (2020) Curvature Map | VRayCurvature [help document] Retrieved from


Pixel and Poly (2017). Index of Refraction values (IOR) - For use with 3d modeling / rendering and animation applications. Retrieved fromhttps://pixelandpoly.com/ior.html



Visual Centre (2015). VRay Fresnel [help document]. Retrieved from http://www.visualcenter.ch/vray-fresnel/




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