The Final Stage
Now that everyone has completed their part in preparation and creation of the assets to be inserted into the scene, the final stage was to combine everything together in Nuke. The scene ended up being quite heavy in Maya, so it took all together roughly 36 hours to render out the 1676 frames that we had in the end. Once everything was compiled together, I was in charge of compositing for the project. Jane provided the animated painting sequence, the parallax painting and the cleaned-up background shot, whilst Giulia was in charge of compiling and rendering out the scene in Maya.

I started off by writing in the passes (Beauty, Diffuse, Shadow Matte and Specular) which were then merged together and combined with the cleaned up version of the original footage. I then also added a blur effect, as there were a couple of seconds when the camera wasn’t in focus, and motion blur to match the movement. Due to some circumstances, there were missing frames for the fire render. This mistake was solved by exclusively rendering out just the fire volume with the stand for those specific frames and later merging them in Nuke. I used a planar track for the roto shape of the asset to have the perfect movement and insertion of the fire stand into the missing frames.
3D assets Noise and motion blur Fire missing frames
Upon merging the sequence of Maya models, I then focused on placing the paintings into the shot. For the perfect track of the frames it was intuitive to use the planar track, alongside with the key framing of corner pins of the drawing for subtle adjustments. Placing the parallax painting was the final missing piece and it took me a few tries to figure out the best way possible. At first I had an idea of planar tracking the painting to the shot, writing out the sequence and then creating cards and following the steps from our Nuke week 6 and 7 exercises. But it was quite hard to place the cards, as the room in the painting itself is small and it was tough to see correct perspective and imagine how such a picture would act in a physical space. Instead, I went through with a second way, where I rotoscoped out the walls and the floor on 4 various cards, arranged those in the best suitable way and then key framed the corner pins of those parts, to fit with correct perspective in the shot.
As a final sprinkle, Jane added the sound effects to give it a more submerged feel that the person is in the gallery. It guides the audience to the uniqueness of each piece, and the whole composition feels more finished.
The Outcome


Self Reflection
Coming from different backgrounds and having experience in various software, it only played to our advantage as we successfully managed to split the responsibilities and give each other tips. One of such examples that I could remember of was when Giulia explained and guided Jane how to create and import the animated sequence of Keith Haring figures on the texture of the statue. Giulia was invested in modelling and compiling everything together in Maya, whilst Jane really enjoyed providing the hand-drawn paintings and animations, alongside with Nuke work on the clean up of the entire footage. As I was enjoying the recently introduced Houdini classes the most, I was really excited to create the fire simulation and adjust it accordingly given the girls reviews.
Trying to manage the workload and organization of the project, we tested various websites and online services. But in the end the most used was the WhatsApp messenger and weekly Teams meetings, in which we would discuss questions, potential ideas and how to execute them, what and whom to ask for any problems, etc. As the resource share, it was incredibly useful to have shared folder on OneDrive, as we would drop everything there. The schedule was kept in check and when needed we would agree on excluding anything that we might have wanted to do originally, but couldn’t execute due to the lack of time.
Judging my own work, I was pleased with how the fire turned out, however it was a shame that I didn’t manage to finish the moving particles around the statue base, as originally thought of. Starting out the script in Houdini and research I managed to get to a point of having some particles moving around an object, but work had yet to be done to get the better look. Due to the time restrictions it was decided to leave it and focus on the rest of the project. With the compositing, again, the final result was satisfying, but there were a few mistakes that I only saw after writing the sequence out. One of them would have been creating the roto for the first and last few frames to make a gradient for the planes created in Maya, served as shadow mattes, which have outlines that are seen.
Houdini node graph Part 1 Part 2 Houdini viewport scene
Overall, I really enjoyed this project and am very happy with the outcome. Having not achieved everything that we wanted, it was still a great experience to go through with it, understand teamwork, communication and time management. From the beginning our group was very well balanced, we agreed upon a lot of ideas and provided great support and help to each other. It was quite easy to get a constructive criticism and we would always agree on any changes required.