Green Screen
I used Keylight to remove the green screen, and I rotoed out the lights on the top.
Next, I added background and the logos that I drew on my ipad with chalk effect pen. I keyed the scale of Tranform to animate in.
I also added a Roto to animate in and out the lower third, and I keyed the opacity of the text to fade in and fade out.
For my first house, I tried to do texture in Substance Painter but it didn’t work really well. I don’t know how to paint different textures on each part in Substance Painter. Then I tried to texture it in Maya, but it came out like this, which I have no idea why it looks so wrong in render view. It looks not bad in viewport but it just didn’t work in render view.
The second building
UV
This week I’m searching for inattentional blindness. I looked up on google to find the definitions.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Inattentional_blindness#:~:text=Inattentional%20blindness%20is%20the%20failure,task%2C%20event%2C%20or%20object.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr01/blindness
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-inattentional-blindness-2795020
I’m thinking why we cannot distinguish the fake visual effects even it’s very realistic. Sometimes even the VFX is realistic enough, human eye still cannot realize the fake spot. I would be confused by the VFX in some films.
I found a video about a test of inattentional blindness. I tried to spot the change in the video, but I didnt notice at all. I also know that lots of VFX artists used this inattentional blindness to save their time, so the audience won’t be noticed even if there is a mistake on the VFX.
This Youtube channel talks about the fakeness of the VFX in films.
I made a rough layout of how the objects and walls will be positioned in Maya. I will not model every house but only the front doors which will be showing in the camera.
These are the reference for each house in the scene, I will use them to build my alley.
I will build each house in separate maya scenes, and then import them together into one scene at the end. This is going to be my first house in the scene. I made a rough model of it, still working on the details and add more things to it.
Texture Style
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxmDBG
I don’t want to make it look too realistic, I found this kind of Japanese cartoon style on art station. This artist rendered in UE4, and it looks like that he painted the displacement map in Zbrush by himself. I will figure out how to achieve that.
First Building Modelling
After I’ve done the modelling, I learned how to use 3D Cut and Sew UV Tool from Youtube. It’s a very convenient tool to edit UVs. I used to be confused with UV editing, but I have a better understanding of cutting UVs now.
I’m really interested in Japanese style streets and buildings, especially the small alleys at night. So I want to create a scene of a Japanese alley in the night. Through this project, I want to improve my 3D modeling, texturing, and lighting skills.
Moodboard
I found some works from other people did on Art Station to decide what kind of style I want for the final render. I want to create a style that it’s in between realistic and cartoonish.
The Textures
I found some detailed textures I need for the scene. All the houses will be wooden textures.
First Shot
I drew out how the lighting and the whole environment will be. The camera will move forward and go into the alley. It lasts for 6 seconds.
Second Shot
My second shot is to show the details of the alley, giving a warm atmosphere. The lanterns will be slicely swinging. The camera is static for 3 seconds.
Third Shot
This shot will be a pair of money cats on the front desk of the restaurant. The white cat will be swinging his arm back and forth. Camera is static and will last for 4 seconds.
Last Shot
This shot is to show the food. There will be a closeup of Japanses dangos and hot green tea in the scene. I want to show some closeups of the environment to build the whole atmosphere. Camera slowly zooms in for 5 seconds.
I will model the houses which are closest to the camera. I’m going to build four very detailed houses, then duplicate and modify to make more different houses and put them further away to make my alley longer. I might download some basic models of the houses and work from that, so that I can focus more on the houses that will be showing closely in the camera. My goal is to finish one textured house each week.
Time Schedule
Week 1: Referencing & Design
Week 2 – Week 5: The modeling and texture of four houses
Week 6: The Money Cat & Food
Week 7: Texturing & Animation of money cat and food
Week 8: Lighting & Test rendering
Week 9: Rendering
Week 10: Compositing
Before & After
Alpha
Script
I used Keyer to remove the green screen for core matte. And then IBK was used to remove the green screen for the edge, and then merged them together. But there is still green on the hair, so I used Keylight to despill it.
I don’t want to remove all the green for the whole plate, but only the hair. So, I roto the head out to allow the Keylight only affects the hair area.
In the beginning, I couldn’t figure out how to connect the nodes. I didn’t use Copy node but I merged, which caused my alpha look like below.
And when I merged with background, the roto was black. And I deleted the roto and just used Keylight, my background won’t show up because the alpha is wrong. I checked Gonzalo’s node and realized I should copy the alpha to the plate after the Keylight. Then it finally works.
After I merged with core matte, the alpha is correct.
Last step is to add background, I tracked first so that the background with move with the foreground camera. The object I tracked was covered by his arm in the middle of the plate, so I had to offset the tracker to track something else without moving the original track point.
I also reformat it and color graded.
Final Compositing
This week, I worked on a more challenging shot. It has a lot of trackers in the background that I need to clean up, and the camera is also moving. So I tracked first and then roto the trackers out.
Roto
Tracking
The point I tracked was covered by the girl, so I had to ctrl click to offset the tracker to track on other points when it’s about to covered by the girl.
I also found that the plate I was given doesn’t have a rough edit yet. So I don’t know the start and end point of the video. All the plates I got are like below, they didn’t cut the beginning yet. I talked to the director and our VFX group leader. The director didn’t realize this problem before, so I told him how important is it to have a rough edit before moving on to do the VFX.
I also worked on a project outside the school. It is a project which involves live-action integrated with CG background. I work as a Nuke compositor in this team. My responsibilities include, clean up the plate, green screen keying, rotoscoping, tracking. We have meetings to discuss everyone’s progress and problems each week. Through this project, I met new friends and improved my communication skills. We discuss the problems and give feedback.
In this scene, I removed the green screen with Primate. The only problem is that I don’t know how to deal with the shadow. They didn’t shoot with a real floor so the shadow cannot be keyed out easily. My suggestion to the director is that we can crop it.
I used same way to remove the green screen. But their CG background is not ready to composite yet.
Final Render
After I rendered the sequence out, I integrated the sequence with background in Nuke.
I exported the camera in Maya as FBX and imported into Nuke. I used cylinder to project the HDRI of the sky image in 3D space.
After we rendered out, we realized that there is no depth of field in the images. I actually want to use Zdefocus to apply depth of field to the sequence. But the result turned out really bad, the edges was blurred. I don’t know if it’s because there are too much noise or the resolution is 720p. Due to the long render time, we had to render as 720p.
I also tried to add depth of field to the camera in Maya, it didn’t work at all. I changed F stop and focus distance, there was nothing changed in the render view.
Some renders with higher resolutions.
My thoughts
Since there are only three team members in our group, there wasn’t a real team leader. Honestly, our project is a little bit delayed, we don’t have a leader to really supervise the progress. I think it is actually important to have a team leader, and the leader should find out everyone’s strength and assign the correct tasks to them.
We also had a hard time to design the scenes in the beginning, because there is no actual styled elements or feature objects we can come up with. We had a small plan that we need to add mountains, water, plants. But we didn’t have a concept art or storyboard to make ourselves clear. We just searched the references and thought about what could we do to create the scenes each week. Our ideas just kept changing because we didn’t have a clear thought on the design. Obviously, some styles like Sci-fi is more easier to design. We never tried this kind of style before, we were not clear what type of elements we can place in the scene. I just realized how important it is to design the scenes first, our progress could be so much faster.