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.