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