What Vitus can do ?
Author: Vitus Lasrado
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Week 10: Closing the Book.
The closing of the book was the hardest part of the whole project and I am still not able to ace it. This was into two main parts, one was the 3D card node and the other was the corner pin 2D.
So the 3d card node and the card node are two different things. The card node needs to be connected scene and later to the scanline render. On the other hand, 3D cared works without any scene or the scanline render. For the book to close, I had to match the speed of the book closing and then animate the 3D card to that speed.
For the fake page to stick on the real page, I had to track the markers, then later export it as 2D corner pins and there and one more corner pin to make sure that it doesn’t move. For the other side of the page, I just gave a roto to match the closing of the book.
In the end, colour the footage and gave a defocus and I used Davinci Resolve to add some background sound.
Marauders Map.
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Week 11: Final Touch.
This week, I received the refraction pass and now things have started to look better. First, I added the screen which was missing and started giving it defocus and fixed the colours to match the plate.
I wanted a deformation of the footage when it goes in the hologram. Gonzalo helped with it and later, I played around with it and made it better.
I had to match the colour of the CG to the OG plate so that the walls look like they are in the same room.
Later, I gave a little shadow to the window frame, so it falls on the glass of the window and this will make it look more realistic.
I added a little bit of blur to the glass floor because the glass was reflecting everything perfectly like a mirror and not like glass.
Next, I added the fish and the spaceship outside the window and played around with the exposure, and then I added soften to give it a dreamy look.
The next step was to relight for this, I used the position pass and choose a few areas which needed lighting like the clock which I felt was too dark, the library, then the wall near the hologram and even the floor I added extra blue light. The planet near the right-hand side wall also looked a little dark, so I added some more light there as well.
I also had to animate the lamp flickering light, but the problem was that the CG was so heavy (150GB) that I couldn’t playblast it so I had to render out the whole sequence and then animate. I used the Normals pass to give an even-out colour throughout the CG plate. Then I added a light ramp to give it a sun glow, in the room.
I then animated the depth of the video so it looks more realistic. This is how it looks.
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Week 10: Precomp and DMP.
This week: I started off by precomping the clean plate so that the file runs smoothly. This week, I got the digital matte painting (DMP) file. When I put it into Nuke I couldn’t see the DMP from the window. Later, I realized that I had to lower the opacity of the window. For this, I used the crypto matte node to select the window and then make it more transparent.
While rendering the sequence, the mirror on the window was picking up the light reflection and the CG lighter want to me to lower the reflection in comp. So I used the crypto matte and there I masked it to specular and lowered it. The other problem was that when I try to fix the reflection, the screen on the right-hand side could not be seen, so we had to render out the screen separately.
When I was making the windows transparent, I realised that the object out of the windows didn’t have crypto matte so I had to tell the CG to render that separately and later marge it.
The team planned that we will keep the walls on the left-hand side and overlay a texture on it to make it look more old. So I again used crypto matte and then used multiply to control the transparency.
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Week 9: Cleaning up the red box and Logo.
Cleaning up the red box was quite tricky, and not as easy as I had anticipated it to be. I thought that I would use a 3d card and clean it up, but the problem was that the table would overlap the box.
To fix this issue, I had to 3D project it first and then clean the red box and then add the table on top of the 3D card.
The vent was transparent and I had to place a card to make sure that the vent had an off-black background.
We had to add the university logo to the frame. I used Photoshop to make the logo and added some paint and spots on it. I used new cars to project it on the wall. This had the problem of the over-scanning and I changed it on scanline render. The white and black helped the alpha.
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Week 9: Ink Transition.
This week I started off by making small rotos and cleaning up. There were some places where the finger was visible over the page, and I started off by fixing them.
To make the page stick to the book I used a tracker node and then tracked the corners of the page and then later exported a corner pin node.
The next thing I started working on was the Ink Transition. This took up a lot of time as I had to think about how to make it work. For the transition, I downloaded a video from Mixkit. I multiplied and merged the video with the page and gave it a switch, so I can animate the transition timing.
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Week 9: Thesis Proposal.
This week I completed my this thesis proposal. I had also shown it to Nigel when we had one on one station. He said it looked fine and I should submit it. The only thing he said to do is to add the page number of the references. I did the changes and this is how it looks.
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Week 8: Animation.
This week I completed the animation of the footsteps and the name tag. I used after effects to do the animation. I imported a frame from the plate and then I animated on that one frame.
First, I made a footstep by using the pen tool and then gave it a roughened edge and set matte. Then I duplicated the print and then the fractal noise. Later, I made a mask layer and animated the footprint by scaling it.
For the name tag, I used a puppet position tool to move the name tag.
This is how it looks.
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Week 8: Render Problem.
This week couldn’t do much because there was a rendering issue. One of the models had a lot of faces and the rendering was taking 6 days. Now the CG leads have removed the model from the frame and when they tried to render it, there were a few textures missing too.
But the team gave me 60 rendered frames to play with AOVs and see if the thing was working.
The first problem was that the render files were not premult and the whole sequence was broken into 4 parts and it didn’t look right at the end.
Later I found out that there was no transmission pass and because of that the video didn’t match up.