30/08/2011 - Samson

Toda I set up render passes for both the staircase and post apocalypse shots, with Mr Leong's help, and further refined the post apocalypse rotoscope with Joseph. I also tweaked the lighting for the post apocalypse shot.

One of the problems I faced today was that I needed the CG model to reflect the environment, however I did not want the image plane to be rendered. This couldn't be done with the camera's image plane so I had to set up a plane and project the image on to the plane as a texture.

29/08/2011 - Samson

Over the weekends, I did the lighting of the staircase shot. By adjusting the directional light in the scene so that the shadows of the CG object aligned with the shadows casted by the objects in the footage, I achieved 80% accurate lighting. After that, I added a dome of spotlights to simulate global illumination, then adjusted the colour to match the footage. I also set up an ambient occlusion layer for the scene.

Finally, the problem of baking the textures has been solved! According to mr Leong, it turns out that the UVs overlapping are causing the bake to not work properly. However, at this time, I had already finished moving the UVs, one by one, over a cropped frame of the footage.

I also shifted the object in the post apocalypse around to get the correct composition and adjusted the textures on the building and car so they looked realistic.

26/08/2011 - Samson

I spent the whole of today tweaking the lighting of the post apocalypse shot, and mainly trying to solve the problem with baking my staircase textures. However, at the end of the day, even with Mr Leong and Mr Pang's help, the problem remains unresolved... Hopefully Mr Leong will be able to solve it during the weekends.. I might also try to render the projection and cut out the images in photoshop, then assign them to the steps as textures.

A problem we encountered for the post apocalypse shot was that the sides of the portable green screen were still visible after the screen was keyed out. This meant that I had to manually rotoscoped it out. This
used up a large portion of my day as well.

Staying back until 9, I animated the signboard, tweaked the textures and found some textures for the pavement.

Result of failed baking (Oven exploded according to Praveen):

25/8/2011 - Samson

After working on the staircase shot for the entire day yesterday, I decided to work on the lighting and texturing of the cg elements in the post apocalypse scene. First, I lighted the scene using a directional light as the keylight picking the colour of the light from the sky in my footage. I placed a sphere in the middle of my scene, using it as a reference to adjust my lights. I also added a dome of spotlights emitting only diffuse to represent the soft lighting coming from the sky.

I then proceeded to light the rest of the scene, but no! The tail of the helicopter was completely unrealistic! After adjusting the textures and lighting on the helicopter to try and make it look at least convincingly realistic, I decided to just remove the tail and instead put part of the rotor in the foreground, very close to the camera. It would then be blurred using depth of field.

I then surfaced and textured the signpost and signboard, using the sign texture made by Richard. The signpost was initially too smooth so i added a brownian to the bump channel to break up the specular on the surface. A marble was also stacked on top of the base shader to dirty the post slightly. For the signboard, I needed an alpha channel for the area where the paint was supposed to have fallen off, however, the gray in the texture was made by overlaying a dirty texture onto the text and colour. Hence we were not able to generate the alpha using photoshop, so we tried using the keying tools in nuke to key the gray/silver areas out, effectively giving me alpha channels where it was required. I also added an area light, picking the colour from the road, to simulate bounce light from the ground.

After receiving feedback from Mr Pang on my staircase's perspective being off, I realised some of the steps were intersecting with the cg wall. I then shifted the vertices of the walls so they did not intersect with the steps. I then rendered out the walls, put them into photoshop and adjusted the perspective of the matte painting. This completely resolved the perspective problem! I then noticed another problem with the steps: when the steps moved down, the texture projected on to the front of the steps did not follow the steps. Perhaps the texture would have to be baked so they would follow the steps.

I suspect the next few days will consist of frantic rushing, later nights and people becoming crazier than normal.