Yuhang Han made some crystal stones with Bifrost in Maya, he also made a blooming metal flower. He also rigged the diamond female and put it inside the flower. He made an animation that when the flower is blooming, the female stretches and gets up.
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Yue Liu modeled these plants, after I got the models from her, I applied diamond texture to it and lay out the the first scene and set up the lightings.
I duplicate special to create the other half part of the body. I combined them and merged the vertices of the center line. And then I applied diamond texture to it in the presets of the texture library.
I tested out the IOR settings in the texture attribute. I found that it actually has so much influence on the transparency. When the IOR is turned down, it looks like metal. When it turned up, it gets more transparent and more reflection.
This week, I finished up the quad draw of the diamond woman’s whole body. Originally, we wanted to keep only the upper body and place it on the hills or mountains, to make it feel like the body grows out from the mountains, and they should be one part. But we just want to finish the whole body in case we need to rig it later. Yuhang wants to rig it and do some animation for it.
After last week, I’m more familiar and fluent to draw the points. I always keep in mind that the faces cannot be too small, otherwise it’ll look too messy under the lights.
The most difficult part is that it is hard to draw points and connect the faces for the hand and the foot. The fingers are too small, the gap between each finger is to narrow, so that it gave me a headache to turn around the cameras to find the points. Sometimes when I tried to connect the points, it just went through the model and connected to somewhere else. So I have to get close enough to it.
Firstly, I undistorted the shot with lensDirstortion node. I used the lens grid to detect the distortion and solved it. It’s very important to undistort the scene because there is always lens distortion with modern cameras, and there is no lens distortion for the cameras in Maya.
I tracked the scene and solved it, exported the scene+. After I got the camera and scene, I created sphere and planes as reference in 3D space to see how my tracking works.
Once I make sure the tracking is good, I exported the camera and pointclouds into Maya as FBX files.
After I rendered it out, I found that the tracking is messes up, the machine is moving too much.
So I tracked two more times, and it worked well in Nuke but not good in Maya. I imported everything again and again, and check all my attributes, it just didn’t follow the track.
Until I saw the framerate in Maya was 24 fps, I realized that why it moved a lot. Finally, the tracking works well in Maya with 25 fps.
I added a red highlight for the background so that it matches with the red light of the picture.
Firstly, I used keyer to increase the contrast of the alpha. And then I used grade node to add red to the highlights, I masked to the keyer so the alpha is like a mask. Then the color correction will only be applied to the white areas of the alpha. And then I added blur to soften the edges of the alpha mask.
After I rendered it out, the lighting is completely wrong. Nick told us that there should be one light coming from the left corner, and the other light is coming from the right corner which hides behind the wall. The left light should be pointing down. And we should look at the shadow of the stones on the ground as out lighting reference.
The shadow is very solid and has hard edges. So I created a spot light on the right side.
I used CTRL+T to change the target of the spotlight. And I put a cube as a reference to see how the light works on the shadow. I also turned down the shadow density to modify the darkness of the shadow.
After I’ve done everything with the machine, I imported the scene as a reference to a new scene for importing camera and locators. In this way, I could go back to the reference scene and make any adjustment, and it will update automatically in the new scene. Then I imported the camera and locators that I exported from Nuke as OBJ files.
I locked the position of the camera in case that I touch the tracking information on camera accidentally. And then I imported the foortage as image seqence from camera. It’s important to check the box of Use Image Sequence, it’s the reason that my backgound image didn’t move at all in the beginning.
I lighted the scene, and I found that the texture of meters is black. I search on google and saw someone said that it might be the transmission in the render settings. So I checked the render settings and the transmission is 0. When I turned it up to value 2, the glass is not black anymore.
We came up with an idea that we are going to make an diamond-like female statue, and place it on mountains. The statue can be a part of the mountain or it just lying on the ground.
We got this idea because we saw a sad news which happened in China, and it just came out recently but it is very shocking to us. It’s a mother of eight children who has been trafficked to an remote village, and she got locked up in there with a chain. I cannot believe that this happened in nowadays society. Then we thought we could create a female statue, and combine with some elements that indicates female.
I did this female crystal statue in Maya. In the beginning, I had no idea how to make this kind of hard and flat surfaces. And then Nick told me that I could use Quad Draw Tool to draw the surfaces on a model.
First, Yuhang sculpted this female model in Zbrush. And I used this model to draw the surfaces. My first problem was that the surfaces I drew were too small and too dense, which increased the reflection and the model looked too messy in the render view. It’s always good to start from larger surfaces, and I can cut more surfaces later on. So I started all over again, this time I intended to draw larger surfaces. I tried to draw as irregular as possible. This tool is so easy to learn and so convenient. I can delete any edge or surface but it still keeps the faces together, so I don’t need to bridge or fill the hole.
Yuhang did some smoke effects to the bird cage. We abandoned the old idea which is to fill the cage with marine animals. The cage can be related to the mother in the news, it could be the symbol of no freedom.
