Month: March 2021

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.

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.

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.

During the first week of March we focused on finishing the tracking in 3DEqualiser and setting up the scene in Maya. The three of us all attended another few sessions with Dom, where we all tried perfecting the track of the shot. After looking at the footage followed by an advice from Dom, we decided to cut down the shot by a thousand frames and have it last for 44 seconds, rather than 68 seconds. This way the attention of the audience would not get lost and the shot would be more interesting.

The tracking information was then exported into Maya, after which we placed cards to represent the wall and the floor, as well as few cubes to represent the black stands. We also added lights, position of which was based on the light pattern falling on walls and the floor. Test objects such as cube and few copies of a torus were placed around the scene for a render run.

Earlier, during the project planning stage, Jane found an Egyptian statue. When we met last week, we decided to add sequences of dancing characters (Keith Haring inspired) to the texture of the statue. Proceeding with the task, Jane created a png sequence of those with the transparent background. She also re-did the animated painting of the her earliest work with the newer characters.

As the clip was cut down we had to adjust the plan for object placement and question if all the original pieces should be placed in the scene. Since we all equally liked the Egyptian statue, it was decided to keep it but we did cut down the amount of pictures from 3 to 2. The first one to be the painted version (by Jane) of the Van Gogh famous painting “Bedroom in Arles”, whilst the second to be the animated painting. The classical statue was kept in the same place and the display case with the fire to be placed between the two paintings.

Giulia was the one who collected most of the free assets for plants, as well as modelled the pyramid shaped display case. Furthermore, she put herself forward to model the neon signs which would be positioned around the classical statue by the black stands. Various tests for quality of neon lights were carried out by her, which we all later discussed during our recent call and came to conclusion of what look we all preferred.

For the particle work, I organized a session with Mehdi, who guided and helped me to understand how to use the object as boundary for the fire simulation. After achieving the fire look that I wanted, I also played around with material and colours of it, to found what we liked the most.

One of the difficulties that I came across was how to read the VDB files inside Maya and later how to export the volume material from Houdini and read that in Maya. Still in the process of finding the solution, my next steps will be trying out the methods I found in various forums, contacting Mehdi and, if all fails, exporting the render from Houdini rather than Maya. For that, I would need to export the tracked information again from 3DEqualiser to Houdini, export the objects and lights that were set in Maya to Houdini, such that the scene set up would be exact as in Maya. The display case would also be needed to get imported to Houdini and be rendered there as well, as the light is interacting with the glass properties of the case.

Other than figuring out the proper way to render the fire, my next steps involve finding all the references for particle movement around the Classical statue stand and setting up the node network in Houdini. For those, I believe, placement of material would be easier, so that could be rendered inside Maya.