Indie Film Production – Week 5

This week I had 2 sessions with KK as the footage arrived and as it was delayed we needed to get moving on the lighting task.

Lighting

In the previous session KK asked me to make the nuke set up for the hdri we had found to get the high value and low value, I had an issue when finding the high value as the node has 2 outputs and on the viewer panel I wasn’t able to see anything. KK showed me a way to discover if there really was no information on that node, by hitting ctrl + mouse click on the viewer we can see if the values of the rgb channel change. They did change, so, the way to fix this was to change the outputs of the nodes and the problem was solved.

So the clamp node sets every value above one to one and the merge node (minus) is the hdri minus the clamp node info which will help us discover the location of the light source.

HDRI:

Clamp node:

Merge node (minus):

As we can see the hdri contains all the info, while the clamp node clamps that info and the merge node is all about the light source and intensity.

Before exporting values, we tried to debug the skydome issue from the previous session and discovered that the path for the hdri was different and tried a few more renders with the spheres and another issue appeared: the floor was not showing up, so KK was going to look into it and let me know next session.

In the middle of the week, the footage came! I sent it to KK and we had a session on friday to see what needs to be done. The first step was to organize everything on nuke and separate the shots for the different light rigs that we need to make. Every shot we had access to was imported to nuke and in the end we got a small video with the videos referenced with labels and blacking out when finished.

We uploaded this to ftrack and KK asked me to find HDRI matching the light from the footage, prepare a maya folder with everything needed inside, to set up the spheres in a maya scene and to see if I was able to track a shot (that turned out to not be necessary for next session).

Matchmove

When the footage arrived, I set a meeting with KK and while I waited I began tracking a shot, which was challenging as the footage is a bit blurry as it moves too fast, but I think this is a good practice, I don’t believe the footage in industry is always perfect to track like the shots we began working on. Eventually I stopped working on matchmove and prioritised the lighting tasks as it is much more complex than I thought.

27th May 202127th May 2021

Indie Film Production – Week 4

This week I tried to focus more on lighting as I am the only one doing it and really need to understand it better. I had one more session with KK and this one was focused on the render layers on Maya, I had used it before but with little success so KK asked me to prepare a maya scene with some render layers and we would check it out and talk about that subject more deeply.

Lighting

On the maya scene I created a floor, a grey sphere, a chrome sphere and a skydome, assigned the materials to the spheres and setup the render layers.

The rest of the layers contained the same setup, so we began by checking if everything was correct then, KK drove the session on my pc through teams, also something that I’d never done but it is pretty handy as someone can show you everything on your own computer.

My render layers were okay, but we made a lot of changes as everytime we think about a light or a shadow that we want another render layer is needed so it can get out of hand pretty quickly so, one of the main focuses was the “housekeeping” to keep everything organized and intuitive. KK showed me how to ad content from outliner to the layers through expressions, a simple * in front of an objects’ name, this is usefull for when we are dealing with a lot of content.

When rendering the spheres we found a few issues with the hdri as it was not being disabled by the render layer so both of them were in display. For some reason Maya was using the master layer when we refreshed the render. KK is still going to look into the issue with the render layers as they were not working the way we want it to.

Matchmove

This week on matchmove I had an issue with tracking a second shot from the preparation videos as I tracked it but the points were not creating a depth on the footage, this was due to the fact that the camera that recorded that footage did not move enough for the software to recognise a paralax.

calc from scratch result after tracking points

On my session with Dom he showed me a way to solve this, by creating two planes perpendicular to each other positioned in the limits seen in the footage (the end of the road, begining of the mountain) and project the points on to the planes. This way the software can recognise the depth and position of the points.

calc from scratch result after projecting points

After this, when fixing the lens the results were the expected.

Both results were made in brute force and everything was exported to jump to maya and finish this shot.

20th May 20212nd June 2021

Houdini Session – Week 7

This weeks’ session the task was to continue destroying the building from the previous session, with the meteor animation Mehdi prepared for us. I had a few issues on this task and keep having them, each time I fix the problem with Mehdi on a 1 to 1 and I face another issue not much time after. Houdini is complex and these sessions are great to have a better idea of it, it needs solving every time.

We began by assigning active points and static points, as the active points would be the ones affected by the destruction and the static would be the ones who stay in its’ place. For this we created a simple geo of 5 spheres and used a motion trail node to see preciselly the path of the meteor, group it and with an assemble node create the packed geometry.

The for each nodes are used to run a number of loops inside a simulation and the time it takes to complete this operation depends also of how many cores your cpu has available, not all nodes are able to run in this method but the ones that are can be fastened by this process.

After running the compile block with the for each nodes we got some artifacts, to solve this we set up an expression to change the method on which the operation is being run, for this we create a switch node and write an expression on it.

When we are happy with the setup and there are no more artifacts we create a file cache node and save it as part01, this is also a way to make the simulation run faster as it is now running from disk and not calculating all the nodes again. We repeat this file cache process for the concrete nodes – facture of the building we did in the previous session, save it as part02.

For the glass setup, we create a for each block and copy the group made for the factured pieces, this way we know what glass we need to break, add an rbd material facture and run the compile block. We had some artifacts, and I had to set another metting with mehdi to solve this as I was having more issues than mehdi in the tutorial. We fixed it, the problem was that some glasses were duplicated and the facture was creating artifacts. After this was solved and we were happy with the result, we repeat the file cache node process and save it as part03. The same is done as part 04 and part 05 for the bricks and aircon.

Finally we create a null, a vdbfrompolygons and a scatter and a voronoifracture node and the static points cache is also created, saved as part01_static. This is how the complete setup nodes look like:

When this process is complete we merge all the geo we just setup, create packed geo and an rdbbulletsolver node, that will be used later, first we need to create another for each and compile block nodes with a polyreduce node and a switch with an expression to make the simulation faster. Both these geo need an assemble node to be made in to packed geo and we can run the simulation. The result is that the whole building just destroys itself as all we’ve been doing is destroying it.

Next, we will copy the active group set up and set another expression with the attribute wrangle node and we run the simulation. This is how it looks like:

To create an explosion and some drebi projected on to the air we can use the pyro trail path nodes which will create a small animation for the debri to fall and all this can be adjusted on the parameter window.

This will need to be placed on the right place and the right frame, in this case we set this trail path to 6 frames and got another one on the end of the building, where the meteor comes out. This is the result of the first debri explosion without the fire simulation:

This is how the geo RBD SETUP nodes looked like in the end:

17th May 202117th May 2021

Indie Film Production – Week 3

This week was about continuing last week’s assignments from matchmove and lighting with a catchup session from KK and Dom to see how everything was going and make some questions.

Matchmove

After being able to finish the shot on 3DE before my session with Dom, we began by checking if everything was correct and jumped to maya to set up the scene. We imported the mel script and got the scene in the right place, the road points centered on the grid and scaled it up to now build the road.

On wireframe mode, viewing the camera we got from 3DE, I created a plane and adjusted its size to the road from the footage and repeated this process 3 more times. In the end I had 3 separate pieces of road, so I did a bridge on them and adjusted it’s vertexes to fit the road from the footage, this is how it looked like on maya viewport:

Dom showed me a trick for when we have a drone shot, for this we went back to the 3DE scene, tracked a single point on the car and exported “2.5D points to Maya”, this created a mel script that we import to maya. On the maya scene we created a locator and constrained a sphere, as a test, to the locator and this made the sphere follow the car throughout the road.

After this I imported the car given to us for this exercise, to the scene and draged it over the locator, now the car follows the road. I still had to make a few adjustments with keyframes for the car to actually follow the road and this is the final playblast of the tracked shot:

Lighting

For the lighting session I prepared the 2 maya scenes with the chrome spheres. This week KK showed me how to prepare the HDRI (high value and low value) on nuke and how different HDRI can be exported and used in different skydomes to have more control over those values. On Nuke, with both daylight and night light HDRI image, with a clamp node we make every value above 1 set to 1 to discover the low value and with a merge node (on minus option) we can get the high value. This process is the same for both images but ofcourse, need some tweaking in the values and ussually we will need multiple nodes to get to the desired result. In the end we need to export the different values. I had trouble finding out the high value and that is something I will have to ask KK next session.

On Maya, KK showed me how to set up the render layers and told me that, in production, it is best to only use one maya scene with every light in it and use the render layers to get the different lights from that shot. After the session I set up everything that KK showed me and next session we will see continue setting up the lights.

7th May 202117th May 2021

Indie Film Production – Week 2

As we got the test shots to track and scenes to light, this week we had to begin working on them, I set a meeting with Dom and KK even before working on the shots as I was sure I would have doubts, specially with lighting.

Matchmove

I began with matchmove and tracked a shot, but only the road and I was getting some errors so Dom told me to track the rest of the scene and after that it was much easier to calculate results. Although, when I had the meeting with Dom he explained a few steps I should follow when calculating the lens distortion, as well as tweak the deviation browser for a better result.

Before the deviation browser this was my result from “calc from scratch“:

This was the “calc from scratch” result after turning off some points from the camera point group:

So I set another meeting with Dom as I was not getting the results I expected. But the session is only next week and I wanted to go through the process after 3DE, in MAYA which is the part that I have more doubts with. So, I jumped the deviation browser process as I was getting better results from not touching it and began tweaking the lens and follow the steps Dom gave me and again, the results were not what I expected. I made a lot of tests and none of them was working, these were the results I was getting:

For lens distortion, when we don’t know the lens that recorded the footage we need to open the parameter adjustment window and calculate distortion and focal length on adaptive mode, then calculate curvature x and y and quartic distortion on brute force, finally when we are happy with the results we add all the parameters and calculate them all to brute force. These were the steps Dom gave me, when I asked for help he told me to calculate only on brute force and these were the results:

distortion and focal length calculation results

When calculating focal length and distortion the expected result is a curved plane, when calculating quartic distortion, focal length and distortion, in the end, the expected result is a cube.

After this we export the maya .mel file, run warp4 to export distorted footage and we are ready to jump to MAYA. With Dom’s help I was able to get everything ready before our session.

Lighting

My session with KK was to understand better the concepts involved in the lighting process, like the environment we want to replicate and what aspects to consider, after KK explained everything he asked me to make a study with bullet points for the car and the cafe exterior both in daylight (overcast) and night light with reference images and gather HDRI for the study.

Street (café)

Characteristics of overcast daylight:

No direct light source
Shadows are less strong
Can’t see much inside the cafe
Colors are brighter as there is a “general” lighting because of cloud reflection
Strong Reflex of sky on windows

Characteristics of night light:

Café lights on
Lights inside of café are visible
Light is warmer due to café red color
Darker shadows
Darker environment, only light source is un natural and easily changed
light reflex on floor if wet

Car

Characteristics of overcast daylight:

Strong reflexes of suroundings on car
Strong shadows under the car, not around it
No light on car lights
Unable to see inside due to reflex
Bright rims
Bright car color

Characteristics of night light:

Strong reflexes of city lights
able to see inside the car (if there is light inside)
Color of exterior lights noticeable as it reflects an artificial light to some parts of the car
Headlights turned on as well as plate light
Street lights mirror on the car

HDRI examples – daylight (overcast)

HDRI examples – night light

I asked KK if we could do a test next session so he asked me to prepare 2 maya scenes with 2 spheres (chrome and lambert materials) too.

7th May 20217th May 2021

Solo Project – Week 2

This week I sketched the storyboard and built up the 2 master file scenes from the cafe and the store. I looked up some free environments online but none of them was good so i built them up with assets I found on turbosquid and cgtrader websites. The storyboard was drawn by hand as I left my pen tablet in london, the drawing is really just a sketch to have an idea of what shots will i need, with simple stickman drawings.

Storyboard:

After the storyboard I began creating the scenes. The store was the one that took more time as I had to set it all up, I modeled the wall with the showcase and door as well as door handle, in the end I added a few lights as a test, I might make a few changes later.

Interior of store:

For the exterior I made a basic set up and added a street lamp to be more aware of shadows and build up environment, using the same hdri image for both environments.

For the cafe, I used the corner street environment available on the resource share and added some assets to create some sort of “terrace” from the cafe on the street. I deleted the windows from the ground floor of the main building so i could add a material to look like window glass and some reflection. The only light source of this scene is the skydome light with the hdri. This is how the cafe scene looks:

When testing the materials and light with an arnold render i noticed that my character, amanda has some sort of light attached to her so I’m still trying to figure out how to solve that.