For this week’s project I needed to make a couple of rockeries to enrich our project picture. I did this by using polygonal shapes and manipulating them with the various tools we have learnt before, then adjusting the vertices to create the shapes, then copying the models to adjust them and finally combining them to create a whole rockery. I came up with the nick method of using the Quad Draw Tool to draw on the hard surface of the model. Or use Sculpting to do the drawing.
I then split the UVs. For some of the models I used Substance Painter to create the mapping, and for two of the models I downloaded the material mapping to give a variety of hills.
Did my scene lighting this week, with the lights set in the scene.
In the scene, I set up four area lights in the scene. Three are for machines, as shown in the picture, where the light can reflect and pass through so that these objects look realistic in a scene with shadows. In class, I showed the lighting rendering to nick, who indicated that I had made some mistakes with the lighting. Nick told me that there should be one light from the left corner and another light from the right corner, hidden behind the wall. The light on the left should be facing downwards. We should look at the shadows of the stones on the floor as a lighting reference. So I adjusted the angle of the light to match the light from the ambient mapping better. To accommodate the ambient lighting, adapt the left and right sides to have two different colours of light, one a warm yellowish tone and the other a cooler greenish tone, so I set the value for temperature to 5000 and the value for exposure to 2.5. On the other side, I set it to 6000 to make the ambient look cooler.
The final rendering is as follows
Then my next step was to export the sequence to Nuke. I set up the Render, added the AOV Browser and adjusted the parameters for rendering.
This week we have learned a few important nodes, IBK COLOR, IBK GIZMO, KEYLIGHT, PRIMATTE, ADDMIX, LIGHTWRAP, which play a very important role in clearing the green screen.
The chromKeyer tends to work better with more evenly lit
screens that are more of a saturated color.
NUKE’s CHROMA KEYER is that it takes full advantage of any
GPU device you have in your system.
IBK stands for Image Based Keyer
It operate with a subtractive or difference
methodology.
It is one of the best keyers in NUKE for getting detail out
of fine hair and severely motion blurred edges
First I did a noise reduction on the green screen scene, then I used keylight and selected the background green to erase the background, held shift, absorbed the colour and processed it, I turned on the Alpha channel to check that the white and black areas were clean and completely separated, then I made some changes to the Screen matte values. Next I colour corrected the background video, to make the background colour look clearer I reduced the saturation value to zero, the other channels I fine-tuned to fit more closely with the foreground, after which I merged the two nodes together. After the Roto, I added a blur node to blur the edges. Then I set keyframes where the microphone appears and merged them together. And then, I tracked the background video and the foreground character so that the background was following the camera movement. I created a tracker node to make it follow the background. The tracking was done. Finally, the colour grading was done to make the video visually more colour fitting
This week I continued with my group project and my task was to make a bow and arrow and combine it with a weapon to enrich the picture of the project. First I used the polygon module to make the bow part of the bow, considering it is a symmetrical model I only made half of the bow, the other part of the model I copied and combined using the symmetry tool, then I made two arrows for the bow by making two small metal arrows with wooden shafts and metal arrows I used Photo shop to paint the base colour of the mapping and then found some wood textures to control the roughness and bumpiness of the arrows and the diffuse reflections to give them a more textured look.
After making the bow and arrow, I imported the weapon rack and integrated it, repositioned the weapon and rendered it as follows
This week I started to combine objects with scenes. I best tracked in nuke and exported the camera track. We exported the sky HDR and camera to Maya.
The traced scenes were imported from Nuke to Maya and then imported into my machine as a reference. I aligned them and added image sequences. My imported the camera environment settings into the sequence image in Maya, then I set my model into the scene and corrected its size and position. I have used the sequence frames I made and exported from Nuke to check the position of my model. I check that the camera and my model match and adjust the position.
I had a problem when I first checked that my camera track was wobbly, so I needed to retrace it and import it into Maya to make sure my model was stable when I exported the model sequence frames
This week started with our How to deduct green screens in Nuke, showing us how to use the colour controls to manipulate images. Specifically, we showed how to use the Keyer and Colourspace nodes.
Keyer node gives me access to several simple keyers. You can use it to pull keys based on the input image’s,red, green, or blue channel, redscreen, greenscreen, or bluescreen, luminance (the default), saturation, or maximum and minimum values.
The Colorspace node converts images from one colorspace to another,Set the output controls to sRGB, D55, and RGB.
And then, I added the red to the highlights using the level node and I masked the keyer so that alpha acts like a mask. The colour correction will then be applied to the white areas of alpha only. I then added a blur to soften the edges of the alpha mask so that the figure and the background blend together better, and by controlling different nodes I can get different effects
For our project we needed to make a weapon’s stand and some weapons, first I found some reference drawings to model the weapons from. The material is metal.
The weapon shelves are made of wood. The weapon shelves were simple to make, I did this by using polygon shapes and manipulating them with various tools we had learned before, then I found a good material map to give the model a more woody texture.
It is not difficult to make a metal weapon model, but my weapon is not very metallic, I personally feel it is more like plastic.
This week’s content covers the principles of CG compositing as well as the nodes and content needed for CG compositing and some tips on simply merging CG files and scenes together and setting up an STmap and reformatting the nodes before merging.
The shuffle node makes the CG in the scene look more realistic, simply by switching channels and grading them, and can rearrange up to eight channels from a single image (B input). rearrange channels between two separate nodes (A and B input), like a foreground and background branch, replace a channel with black (removing the alpha channel, for example) or with white (making the alpha solid, for example), and create new channels.
In this lesson you will learn how to correct colours. Techniques for quickly using scene colours in CG scenes are analysed. You can use the Grade node to select the original colour and then select the scene colour in the Gain section, which will change to the scene colour, making the scene and model colours match each other more realistically.
And then, we learned how to do the basic grade match.
Last week I finished the model building and the animation binding part, next I will be tweaking the UV. I need to add some textures to the model, but before that I need to start UV Mapping. But before that, I need to start UV Mapping. UV Mapping is quite complicated for me because I make a lot of small parts, such as screws and gears. I split the UV’s on my machine separately, sorting the different materials and putting the UV’s together for the mapping of the same material.
I wanted to use Substance Painter for the mapping. I watched some tutorials and looked at reference photos to decide on my colour scheme and aesthetic. Furthermore, I wanted to use a dark green as the main shade for my model. I really don’t know what went wrong, but some parts of my model imported into Substance Painter, the UV’s don’t show up and the model disappears, so I had to paint my own decals through Photoshop and download some metal materials to change the roughness and diffuse the model to control the texture of the metal.
I controlled the Bump Value of the model by adjusting the displacement of the material, and the final result is as follows
We learned in this session about different ways/software to render, how to combine different layers from a particular render, different renders using different nodes in Nuke
And use the LayerContactSheet to see the information for each layer rendered
This is about adjusting the colour and shading of the model by adding nodes and adding ground shading to the model to make it fit more realistically into the video space.
