Vitus's VFX Journey.

This week’s goal was to make sure that all the CG was added to the plate and do the colour correction. 

First, I rendered the play button and the node. I rendered the background separately because there would be some deep in the scene. After rendering the GC with the same pass which I added to the background. Then I added it to Nuke and started lighting it up.

Next, I had to render out the move tool and the mouse. I render it out separately because it would go on top of the actor.

So, after all the CG was added I had to render it out and put it in Premiere Pro, to add sound design and do the master colour grading. For the sound design, I picked around audio from YouTube and I made sure that it was royalty-free music. (I don’t have the price for this because the WMware is not woking.)

This week was focused on the render and making sure that the render looked fine in Nuke with all the passes.

Adding the ambient occlusion was a little harder. It was not as easy as the other pass, so I took assistance from YouTube and found this video to do it.

I planned to use Render Farm for the rendering, and this would be my first time using it. I had a few problems with the frame. The first was that it was not rendering and it was displaying an error, then when it rendered only the AO pass was there. I asked for help from the IT team and the problem was solved. When it was rendering I forgot to tick the marge AOVs, so now all my passes are supported.

I have not worked with a supported pass before, so I thought the workflow would be different, but later when I was working I realised that it’s the same but the only difference is that we do not have to use the shuffle node. 

After joining the passes the alpha was missing from the passes and luckily the AO had alpha and I had to use the alpha from that.

I started working with the passes and colour-correcting the CG and I also used the crypto asset to isolate the parts of the object. The CG is broken into 3 parts. First is the back which contains Lego Man, next is the play buttons and the last is the mouse and the move tool. This would help give more depth to the senses and I also used Z Defocus to help with this.

I am still having the same problem with the green screen, I am trying to fix it. Next week I am planning to finish rendering all the parts and colour-correcting them and hopefully my greenscreen problem will be solved.

DSZarts (2021). Ambient Occlusion Pass in Maya – 3D Tutorial (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6rtyBpLNds&ab_channel=DSZarts [Accessed 25thNovember 2023].

This week I tried to finish the animation and the removal of the green screen.

The first thing I focused on was the button animation, so I had to make the button switch from the selection tool to the move tool. I had to make the button go in and out by using extrude. The hard part was making the textures switch. I came across this video on YouTube.

This is how the texture of the toolbar moves, it jumps from one face to another.

When I was editing the texture of the move tool, I thought it would be nice to also add animation for the Lego man’s face when the character is moving around. So I found an image on Google with the different reactions of the Lego man’s face. Then I took a screenshot of what I wanted to use.

I wanted to do something when the character was walking close to the Lego. I thought that the Lego could wave his hand to the character and make this hand move when the character moves around, and this is how it looks with all the animations.

Next was to animate the move and the mouse, before doing this I had to remove the green screen of the video and animate it and later export the video to Nuke and then animate the move tool and the mouse according to the video.

When we shot the green screen shot we took a clean plate, so it would be easy to remove the green screen. 

When removing the green screen, I had to treat the alpha separately and then later merge it into the main plate, then I used the spill replace to divide the green screen and then merge multiple it to the main plate. I also added a bit of colour cartoon and motion blur and defocus. 

To do the animation I had to use the transform tool and then move it and rotate the the image. When I did this I had a problem, the background was cropped, I tried different things but it didn’t work. So I asked Gonzalo for help. 

That didn’t stop me I exported that to EXR and then added it in Maya and started the animation with it.

The goal for the next week is to render out all the models with all the passes and try to fix the green screen problem.

Interactive Media High Tech High School (2021). Creating 2D Animated Textures in Maya (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QVI8HbWRA8&ab_channel=InteractiveMediaHighTechHighSchool [Accessed 23th November 2023].

This week I had to fix the 3D tracking and complete the roto.

I told Kay that I would need his assistance on Tuesday to fix my 3D tracking, and he showed me a few things that would fix the track. He also showed me how to auto-track, but the problem with my track was that I had put a lot of tracking points and I didn’t know that would have been a problem. After removing a few points my track was working fine. I had also shown my previous track to Gonzalo he said that that one also looked fine and the shake was minimal.

My next goal was to complete the roto and keep the plate ready for the CG. The roto took a lot of time and I didn’t have a CG to see if the roto was working or not, then I remembered that Gonzalo had given us a roto gizmo which came in handy. So in a few frames, I have not roto her out because no CG is going behind her.

Later that week I shot the greenscreen part. The goal was to make her move around the scene feeling like she is floating in the air and this is how it looks.

For next week, the main goal is to make sure that the animation is done and remove the green screen also try to render out the CG with all the AO pass.

This week was not smooth sailing as compared to the previous 2 weeks. I had a problem with my 3DE tracking and it took most of my week.

So when I was tracking the footage in 3DE the tracking looked fine, but when I exported it to Maya it was not working right.

So I had 90 points and they all were working fine and my calc was also low, I didn’t know what to do. Later I started adding more points on the right of the footage because there were a few fewer. After adding the points I exported it to Nuke to see if the tracking was working fine, I added a few cards and cubes to see if the tracking was working fine.

After rendering it out I saw that the tracking was still sliding very little, but it was bothering me that it was not perfect. So I asked for some help from Kay and on Tuesday he said he would help me. So till then, I started rotoing so that I could finish something off by Tuesday.

For next week I want to finish tracking and the roto. Started off with the animations or removing the green screen.

This week I had to complete the shooting of the plate and then start tracking the footage in 3dequalizer. 

For the plate, I wanted an urban region. So Roos and I started walking around the college and we found a small football court. We thought that this would be the right place for the shot. The upside of shooting in the court is that no one will walk into the frame.

After taking around 15 to 20 takes I narrowed it down to 2 options A and B. 

Option B saw the Tube in the background moving and the house gives a very urban feel. 

Option A is what I chose because it shows different people walking around. Then Roos falls down the man on the right looks at her and it adds to the feel of the video to make it look like she is falling out of nowhere.

While shooting I also made sure that I captured 360 shots in different F-Stops so I could combine them into an HDRI and this will help me to light up the CG. 

So I took all the images and then combined them in Photoshop to create an HDRI image, I had to fix the bottom part of the image because I was in the frame.

After the HDRI was ready I put it in Maya to see how the models looked and they looked pretty good. 

The next step was to 3D track the footage, for this I used 3dequalizer and this took more time than I thought while I am updating this blog I am still working on this and hoping to finish it by the end of the day. 

Dom had taught us how to use 3DE, But I forgot how to use it, we also didn’t have recordings of the classes. So I had to watch YouTube videos and refresh my memories.

For next week I am planning to add the camera tracking in Maya and see how things are working placing the models in the right place and start working on the animation of the Lego man and the move button.

vfxexpert (2022). 3DEqualizer – 3D Equalizer Tutorial Start To Finish | Camera Tracking in 3D Equalizer (online). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8q2r24VwW4&ab_channel=vfxexpert [Accessed 20th October 2023].

This week’s goal was to finish all the 3D work, so I had to complete a few models and texture them as well.   

I started modelling the Material Viewer which took longer than I expected because the bases of the Material Viewer had a lot of bevels, but I managed to finish. Now I don’t know what colour it should be.

Then I started working on the hypershade nodes to give more of a Maya UI feel. To create the connectors  I used the EP curve tool to make the line then used a cylinder face to extrude on the line.

When I was working on the texture of the models Roos suggested that it is better to have Outliner as well, so I quickly created that. 

The next step was to texture the things and the textures took about 4 days to fully complete. and now I have also added a Lego man which I had made in term 1 to fill up the spaces.

The goal for next week is to finish shooting and get start compositing.

This week I wanted to start off with my UI modelling. I began by modelling the move tool and it was a bit funny because I was clicking on a random box so I could see the references. I just selected the box in the centre of the move to match it right.

Next, I worked on the view box which did not take long just added a bevel and rounded corners. After that, I started working on the modelling tool kit, which took a bit longer than I thought, because of the UV’s.

Next, I modelled the toolbox, the shelf bar, the timeline, and the play and stop buttons. Then placed it around a person so I can get a feel of the layout  

For next week I need to model a few more things and start texturing.

I wanted to do something that involved compositing but I hadn’t quite figured out the specifics. For my first presentation, I spoke about what software I wanted to use and a few things about the project but nothing was set in stone.

Over the next few weeks, I started to look out for different compositing artists on Instagram and YouTube trying to get some inspiration that I could base my idea on. After a couple of days, I came across shutterauthority on Instagram and he had made a video which was really eye catching and it had a lot of comping limits.

Looking at this video I was inspired to do something with the UI of Maya and wanted to play around with it. 
Now I had an idea of what I needed to work with. So I wanted to 3D model the UI of Maya and then make it interact with a real-life person but I didn’t want to use green screen for the whole act. 

The storyline goes something like this: a person is walking into the scene and looking around and they will start walking towards the move tool. After they press the move tool, the move tool will appear on them and the mouse will click on the person and move them. Then the software will crash and drop them. Then it will zoom out and go to a room where the person using the software is.