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.

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.

Beginning

Middle

End

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.

The hills and grass are downloaded from Quixel.

First Scene

Second Scene

The second scene was set up by Yuhang Han.

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.

We were struggling with the design of the scene, it seems like it is hard to achieve the result we want with putting amusement park elements into the scene. After the discussion this week, we talked about how to design the main object carousel, ferris wheel, and the whole scene. Firstly, we imagined it to be transparent glass texture with ocean animals rides such as, whales and dolphins.

It’s more like this kind of glass in this image. We wanted to replace the deer with whales and dolphins. While the carousel is spinning, the animals will slightly move and they are supposed to be floating in the air.

We did more research about how to make the scene look like the style in the reference I gave in week 01 post. We want our scenes are simple and clean but it’s well designed, like the references we found below.

And then we came up with an idea to not use the amusement park as the main elements any more. Instead, we want to create a huge bird cage with glass whales, dolphins, and other fish that swimming in the cage, and it’s hanging on a huge statue of a hand, Or the cage could be holding by the hand statue.

Modeling

This week, I’ve finished the modeling of the bird cage.

Water Render Test

We had an idea that involve water into the scene, we did a render test to see how Bifrost works in Maya. It works based on a plane.

Test done by Yuhang Han.

Render Test

Reference

Since the ferris wheel is huge, if other things are too small in the scene, the overall look will be unbalanced. So we decided to put giant plants into the scene to keep the balance, such as the mushroom-like plants, or the glowing plants that can float in the air in Avatar. Also it is a way to create an atmosphere of an alien planet.

There are flowers that can release glowing pollen, this could be done with particles animation.

There could be more plants on the ground with unusual shapes.

The ferris wheel should be sci-fi style and the material is metal, so the texture is more like the metal used on rockets.

Introduction

Our idea is to create two CG dreamful scenes with amusement park elements on an alien planet. In this project, we will do modeling in Maya and compositing in Nuke, we will also discover and try different renderers such as Arnold in Maya, V-Ray or Octane in Cinema 4D, and see which renderer has the best result. 

We are not familiar with Cinema 4D at all, but as more and more people are using this powerful software, we realized that it’s necessary for us to grasp more skills in different software. We will do some experiments with particles in Cinema 4D as well. Lighting is challenging too, we hope that we can improve our lighting skills through this project.

We aim to create the scenes with some key words including, fantasy, dream, amusement Park, outer space, alien, pink.

Reference Images

We are inspired by the artist Valeria Mata on Instagram. We will use her works as references to create a dreamland-like place, a paradise, which will relax the audience. Amusement park is always a place that people can release themselves from their high-pressure works. So our scenes will be creating around the elements of amusement parks and it will be looking enjoyable and relaxed.

Main Elements

There will be one scene for Ferris wheel, and the other scene for carrousel. Large statues or statues floating in the air will be put into the scene. And we will design each elements.

Team Members & Responsibilities

• Yue Liu (MA Visual Effects):3D Modeling, texturing, lighting, Compositing

• Shuang Lyu (MA Visual Effects): 3D Modeling, texturing, lighting, Compositing

• Yuhang Han (MA 3D Animation): 3D Modeling, texturing, lighting, Animation(particles)

After talking to our tutor, he suggested us to render in Arnold and use particles in Maya. Since we do not have enough time to learn a new software, and there is no license for Octane in school, we decided to do it in Maya.