Week 3 Day 4 - Richard

Today I helped out in doing the breakdown of Samson's Staircase shot using after effects.
Thank You!

Week 2 day 4-5 - Richard

For these two days, my modelling plan has been changed, I've been asked to damage the building instead of a very clean new look building, hence the intensive modelling for the damage of the buildings take place. I had spend time on the detail of damages of the walls by cutting it, and bending cylinders which are metalic poles for building structures that are damaged. I've also added detail to the ceiling which looks falling as well as the ceiling tiles with protruding wires.

I've also cut parts of the concrete from the stairs to make it look chipped off, as well as texturing and assigning shaders. I've really spent alot of effort in this model and done alot of research on damaged buildings.

Also I've spend time on experimenting on how to solve a problem which is how to make a broken concrete inner part look. After numerous tries with things like displacement maps using fratual noise, I've settled on bump mapping fractual noise.

Thank You!

Week 2 Day 3 - Richard

Today I've textured and assigned shaders to the buildings, playing around with different textures to see which fit. Heres the render of the main building look.

Last day! - Samson

Yay! Last day of SP! Did some colour grading in nuke for the shots! Then noticed something was up with the blending of the real and CG staircases. Due to the feathered mask and the sairs not lining up perfectly, semi-transparent double edges could be seen. I solved this by warping the edges of the original staircase slightly with GridWarp. And that's all folks! Really learned a lot this 3 weeks!

Week 3 Day 3 - Richard

Today I've spent alot of time helping out with refining the apocalypse shot Rotoscoping as well as adding stock footage of fire, smoke and explosion to composite.

Another summary (Shaheed)

Alright here's another of my accumulative post. I couldnt have the time to update it day by day but ya this is what I've done so far for studio project. My previous post has been clearly laid out for the first two weeks so in this post it will be for the last week and abit of the second week. So apparently, I've took a part in the role of roto-ing in in for my groups' second shot. Samson our leader assigned me to do a touch up on the black marks that seem to be appearing in our second's shot. So it took me frame by frame slowly to roto out the whole black marks. Apart from that, I actually planned to do an animation on my Lion Structure model for our first shot but it seems that the rendering have taken place at an earlier timing. But nevertheless, the textures have been done so it could match the scene appropriately. I've helped my group to do all the turntables for the models that are present in both shots. Another model that Ive done is also the Fire Hydrant. Used Photoshop to add some dust effects on the texture of the hydrant so it fits perfectly in the second shot. Textures of both models(my lion structure and fire hydrant) are executed with the help of various reference pictures from the net and also I've used Maya Software's features like for example the bump mapping, UV Map Texture Editor etc. Acting, Roto-ing, Models, Texturizing, Turntables are my roles done for this project.

Week 5 Day 5

OMG Its 3:22 here. Oficially Last day of the final Week. Even though this post is about day 4. Today I added shadows on both shots as well as some light spill in the scene. for the first shadow, I used the actual shadow data from the first scene as my reference for the shadow. Thus I referenced the colour of the shadow and the shape and with a few color correction and roto nodes, i finished the first shadow. For the second shadow, I used the alpha channel of the actor and superimposed it with a few blur nodes. this effect is used too in the second shot for the actor as well as the richard's wall. Moreover, I added the lighting caused by the flames in shot 2. using a color correction node and a ramp to give its radial diffuse. Finally, I animated it with a random expression on the opacity of the radial node.

Moreover, I assisted with Richard's rotoscope as he was having a lot of difficulties as well as compositing in both shots.In the first shot I was the main compositor with all the rotoscoping keying as well as blending the 2 shots together

01/09/2011 - Samson

Today was a very busy day!! Felt more like chiong for sp day than teacher's day..

Anyway seems like everyone is rushing like mad. First time in 3 weeks I've seen so many people at 10pm.

I did compositing mainly today, trying to further blend the real and CG staircases together using colour correction and roto masks。There was great improvement from the before and after! I removed parts of the real staircase from the start with Joseph's roto masks, replacing it with the CG staircase.. I then colour corrected the staircases so they matched each other closely. I then feathered the roto mask so the transition from real to CG staircase would be a smoother one. At this point, there was a pulsing aura around the actor, as there was a slight difference in the colours of the real and CG staircase. This was not obvious when viewing a single frame, however, when the video started playing, it was very obvious. Richard then suggested using a static roto mask instead so the colour difference would not be so blindingly obvious!! And finally, after MORE colour correction, it works!! YAY!! Tomrrow's the last day! Yay!! and we still have breakdowns to do..

I also worked on compositing all the render passes for the post apocalypse shot in nuke. Some problems I encountered with ambient occlusion and shadow passes for both shots were: the passes did not affect the background plate because the alpha going to the colour correct node did not include the ground! So I had to set up some nodes to get the alpha of the AO pass and combine it with the alpha of the beauty pass. This allowed the AO pass to affect both the beauty pass and the background plate.

31/08/2011 - Samsson

Today, I finished all the rendering, and started compositing the 3d models into the shot. Initially I thought I it would be easy, however, I found out otherwise! The real and CG staircases did not match up perfectly, and I had to color correct the top and front sides of the steps separately so they would match the real staircase.

 Before Colour Correction

After