We had our first offline rehearsal on February 23rd. This was attended by Minghong Zhang, Xiaoyan Dong, Jiageng Guo, and Zhongge Sui, as well as Wanwei Zhong and myself. The rehearsal was at college. We mainly rehearsed the first and second acts in order to mobilize the actors’ emotions and let them understand their roles.
In the beginning, we didn’t have a proper location to have a rehearsal or shoot the final video, so I thought of shooting it in college, but we weren’t sure what room we could use. I then spoke to Pav he said that we can have a rehearsal in M312 and we can shoot the final video in W108. We saw the place later and it was perfect.
The team had asked me to shoot and edit the video, so I had to make sure that everything was working before the shoot. I had to make sure that the VR and the live-action were blended well and matched each other in the post.
In the First brief, the plan was to project whatever is happening in the VR onto the background by using a projector, but it would be difficult to light up the stage for the live action. The next week in my Nuke class, Gonzalo showed us how to work with a green screen, which made me think about shooting the whole project in front of a green screen. I have previously also worked with chroma-keying. I pitched the idea to Xiaoyan and we decided to go ahead with it.
During the rehearsal, I quickly took a shot of the green screen and asked Zhang to make a short video from the VR to see if the green screen will work. I removed the background using Premiere Pro for the demo to show the team.
I started texturing all the moodle after I got confirmation from the team that the models are looking fine and they would not need any changes. I started texturing the bedroom first because it had a lot of elements.
For these models, I have applied base colours and presets from AIstand materials like chrome, velvet, glasses and hair physical shader. I changed a few settings like transparency, bump map, roughness and metalness.
For the models which are shown above, I have added texture from the internet, and then textured in the hyper shade. The UVs were a little complicated, because I didn’t know how to work with them, so I learnt about them on YouTube and after watching a lot of videos, I was able to understand how to work with them. I was advised by the VR team not to give any texture to the inside of the photo frame and the mirror.
The most complex UV was for the pillow, because it had a lot of faces. I learned two ways to unwrap the UV. The first way is to go to the UV editor under toolkit – go to crate and click automatic, cylindrical or spherical. The second way is to use Camera Based. Both of these did not work perfectly, so I had to use sew and stitch.