Project #2: Reflection, Refraction and Tracking
Week 6-2 2/18/2024
Here is my final render for the project. I’m pretty happy with how the shader on the bunny turned out. I’d maybe move some of the planes inside the bunny just due to how it reacts when the bunny is rotated. I still am having major problems with my shadow. my plates just didn’t match up so I couldn’t so what we did for project 1 and the focus point was at different places so it made the wood look blurry. I don’t really know how to fix this at this time but I am open to experimenting to improve it.
Week 6-1 2/14/2024
I was really busy with another project at this time so I did fall behind some, but I think I finally figured out how to get the fractures in my stone that I was looking for. Below are images from my maya file, but basically I got the idea from an ice shader tutorial (linked below). He used the solid shatter effect in maya to crack the ice cube and give it realistic fractures. I tried this on the bunny however I think the mesh was too high-res for the effect to work well so it failed at first. Then I got the idea to just shatter a cube, and then put it over the bunny. I put a glass shader on the bunny and then the SSS shader I was using before on to the cube. With the cube’s primary visibility turned off and the colors bouncing through the bunny’s glass shader, I was finally able to get a fractured look that I like! It gives my lights and shadows inside my bunny that I was previously missing.
link:
Solid shatter settings for the cube, the positioning as well as a test render of the outcome.
<—— Fractured layer combined with other layers
I do like how this looks now. It feels solid in areas and then transparent in others, but now I feel like I lost some color variation. My amethyst had some slight green in it so I wonder if I need to do that in my volume shader or in my SSS layer. But for now I think I’m good to move on to animation and shadow caustics.
Below are some test comps of the different color SSS and atmosphere shaders. I definitely like the green SSS shader better but I can’t decide on the volume color. I might render a pass out with both colors but right now I’m leaning towards the purple since the green volume might be too much green.
Week 5-2 2/11/2024
What I’ve noticed about my gemstone is that it has areas where it is more transparent than others. So my main focus this weekend was to try and figure out how to get that on my bunny. I found a tutorial online Arvid Schneider on youtube that was very helpful that I’ve linked below. I modified his method a bit because I’m more comfortable editing in nuke than messing with shaders in maya, so I used his method to create an alpha to composite with instead of it effecting the actual shader.
My nuke file is a bit messy right now because I was trying to see how it was going to combine, but basically I used this alpha mask on just the transparency layers, so the Volume and Glass. Then I excluded this area from the SSS layers so it got me this area on the bunny that was almost fully transparent. I think I would need to up the roughness and maybe put some off white color on the glass to make it match my reference more, but I think it’s a good solution for the look I’m going for.
Week 5-1 2/7/2024
Render layers set up in class that day to better get an idea of how the shader will combine.
Week 4-2 2/4/2024
I struggled getting the track to match on the second one I did below so I went back to my first track and tried to fix that one instead. I still ended up using quite a bit of keyframes to fix the track but I think I fixed it as much as possible. I also experimented with the shader on the bunny to see what I could do with subsurface. It doesn’t really look like my rock right now but I think the colors are close.
Below are the two tracks I did with the ball and the bunny. I tried to comp a little bit of the shadow in but my shadow plate does not line up with most of the shot so I didn’t quite know what to do with that so I just did it with color correct which is why it doesn’t look correct. I also think my bunny might still be sliding some but my ball doesn’t, however I also think I’ve been looking at it too much at this point.
Week 4-1 1/30/2024
This is a track test that was during class on Monday, there was a small bit of slipping on the dragon in the background that I could not figure out how to fix in Maya so I went back into nuke to try and track it again.
However I think I may have broken my track even more?? I once again got a weird positioning on my camera and my trackers this time when projected into the scene. I tried a couple different methods but I consistently either go a weirdly positioned camera or trackers that just didn’t feel like they matched in the scene. I also included a screen shot of what I was able to lower my error to. It’s not as low as shown in class but I started at 1.54 and this was the lowest I was able to go without sacrificing a lot of my trackers.
So it was at this point that I just decided to take the track into maya and see if I could fix it the way I did my first one. Below is me positioning the card in Nuke to try and match the scene despite the askew camera and trackers.
So this is my track into maya with two of the Stanford models placed in. The bunny is fine just like how it was in my original, but I think the slipping on the dragon is worse in this one. I honestly think I must be going wrong somewhere in Nuke when I start. I might just go back to my first track and see if I can fix that one somehow or possible run a new track.
Week 3-2 1/29/2024
Over the weekend, I was tasked with taking the photoset for the next project. I admit I did struggle some because my lighting situations would change so quickly so I ended up taking a variety of shoots, but my favorite will be shown first along with some tracking work I did with it in Nuke.
Photoset 1 Tybee Island Pier, Savannah, Ga 7:45 am
Here I combined my chrome ball photos to create my HDR for the scene.
HDR Test
I used the color picker in photoshop to make sure my HDR was good after combining. My bright whites reach around 8 and then my darks go down to 0.002.
Below are the two live plates I got for this scene. I liked the movement with the birds in the background for first one, however the camera move isn’t that smooth. In the second clip, the movement is much smoother and and I feel like the object wouldn’t fighting for attention from movement in the background.
Below are some experiments with tracking the live plates.
Photoset 2 Tybee Island Pier, Savannah, Ga 7:30 am
I liked this setting too with the object being backlit, however as I was taking photos, I lost the light almost completely so my cleanplate and shadow card look almost the same.
Photoset 3 Richmond Hill, Ga 11am
This was the first shoot I did and I made many mistakes! I forgot to picture a cleanplate or a video to use. I also thought that this was way to over exposed and the composition also was not that compelling. I wanted to challenge myself to get more creative and that is what led me to the sunrise at Tybee!