FinnRaveVFX

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Evaluation

After 10 weeks, I and my team finally managed to complete our Magic Lantern project learning more advanced settings in Maya to a completely new programme with motion tracking, render passes and colour grading in NUKE.

The Team: 

We started off as a good team, quickly coming up with ideas that would work really nice as a photo-realistic film. I came up with the main idea of this old Praxinoscope turning into this magical object that emitted a hologram or held a ghost of this dancing couple within and when turned on brings this dancing couple to life.

We worked well creating designs and storyboards at the start but then struggled to come up with how we’re going to actually create this idea where we had no idea of what we were capable of when it come to learning Nuke and more advanced settings in Maya.

We as a group started stray behind for a few weeks and become unorganised and wasn’t really communicating as we really didn’t know what to do. I also assigned them to modelling the Praxinoscope and texturing but it took a long time to complete and so I was waiting around to get started. The models weren’t created to the best standard and the outliner and hyper-shaders were so unorganised. However, we eventually got our heads around the idea and got on working hard.

The shoot took some time as the first time we got the shoot we realised our camera wouldn’t allowed us to film and the location wasn’t as old fashioned on the inside as we’ve liked it to be at King’s College Library. However, Victor found a great spot in a nearby pub and we managed to get the shots we needed in no time and we worked well as a team together.

After this we worked well as a team and worked hard to complete our project, other than a few absences and lazy days we eventually worked well together and we have created a good friendship.

The Process:

The project was a massive learning curve, from learning new advanced things in Maya to learning a completely new programme Nuke.

It was a long and tedious project overall with so many annoying errors that were difficult to fix along the way which made me hate the term and want to give up. However, once I got my head around NUKE I started to enjoy using the different nodes and editing our final footage overall.

There were many techniques to learn and I found it difficult to place our model perfectly in the scene and create photorealistic textures on the objects.

Luckily the way I wanted the scene to look helped cover a few little mistakes as we made the film look old with colour grading and a 8mm projector effect.

Improvements:

I definitely think the group could’ve improved on communication and motivation however, we eventually overcome this.

I also think the modelling and texturing of the project could’ve had a bit more thought put into it by softening the edges, bevelling and also organising the outliner and hyper-shader so I could find things easier.

I think as a beginner to photorealism and NUKE I did well to produce what I did, however with less problems along the way (such as the rendering taking a week because, we needed to re-render quite a few times) I think I could’ve put more time and effort into making the model look better in Maya so the render passes would look better when added into NUKE.

Overall: 

Overall I think the project turned out pleasing and I enjoyed being able to complete it. However, I don’t think it is a specialisation I’d wish to pursue in the future as there wasn’t enough creation involved such as animation and modelling.    

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This is the ‘Making Of’ of our project.

We didn’t necessarily work on separate shots and all worked hard together and helped each other on each shot when we needed, this also helped keep consistency between the shots.

 This shows the process of our model being made, textured, lighting and rendered out of Maya and then shows the render passes through Nuke and finally adding our ghost/hologram effects from After Effects.

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This is the final composition of our Magic Lantern.

We didn’t end up using all of our shots including our motion tracked shot in the end as they didn’t end up looking as great in the render and as we were pushed for time we wouldn’t have been able to re-render these shots. Luckily we needed to cut the footage short to fit to the soundtrack anyway so it turned out visually pleasing anyway.

With a few errors and things that could be tweaked and refined I am overall pleased with the outcome.

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Error: After compositing and rendering out the video through After Effects I realised that there was still white not fully rota-scoped. Unfortunately, in the programme it wouldn’t show this so I could find where to rota-scope it out so we had to leave it in there.

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Visit Original Link

We collaborated with a sound technician called Fionn Lucas that Victor knows through uni and work and was happy to help create a magical sound out of objects such as a bike wheel and fork scrapings along with the music.

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After Effects - Hologram Effect

Now we have our shots rendered we need the 3D hologram/ghost effect to add to the scene and make it magical.

I started with our clip from out shoot and added a key light effect allowing us to select a the colour green and start cutting it out .

Changing the different settings such as screen gain and screen balance we can start edging out the the green outline also adjusting the screen matte refining the edges.

I then needed to create a light wrap by creating two layers, both with key light effects and one with a gaussian blur. By making the bottom layer a luma matte it takes on the layer above almost merging together helping me put a heavier blur on the outer edge and light blur on the inner. This is then pre-comped and luma matted again with the original clip back in the main scene.

I then started to add some more effects to started silhouetting the dancers slightly and trying to add a ghost effect. So I started by adding the curves effect to adjust the black, white and RGB.

I then started adding a fractal noise to a masked layer which starts giving it a foggy effect, adjusting the contrast and brightness turned out quite nicely. I also added a few more small effects such as hue/saturation, glow and compound blurr to really refine the edges, bring colour and fit it into the scene.

Once I was happy with the ghostly effect I come up with a problem where I couldn’t get rid of the white background created after removing the green screen. Therefor I had to start rota-scoping the dancers out of the white using the rota tool which turned out to be very tedious.

However, after the long process I managed to rota scope to a satisfactory level and add my original clip into the project.

I then added the original 13framed animation clip that is projected from the praxinoscope and blended it in using hue/saturation and changing opacity. 

I then played around with the opacity tools of the dancers and also the hue/saturation to blend the clip into the scene more. I used the opacity tool to make the dancers appear through the wall creating a more ghostly effect.

Overall, after quite a tedious process the ghostly/hologram effect is completed and I am ready to composite the clips together.

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Green Screen - SHOOT

With our main shots graded and completed it was time to film our dance sequence.

Myself and a friend of mine Grace were the dancers in this sequence, although we’re not professional dancers we managed to make it work and half an hour later our shoot was finished.

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This is a first look at a rendered shot from Nuke that will be used in our final composition.

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Render Passes - NUKE

Using the read node in our node graph I imported my EXR image sequence from Maya and attached this to the viewer.

We then have to create our shuffle nodes which allows us to add and alter our render passes so I created 5 and labelled them accordingly. 

Error: We realised that not all of the model was showing in the render passes as we didn’t use a mia material x passes material to attach out texture to rather than a blinn, therefor these materials didn’t render out with the passes. Unfortunately, the only way to fix this was to re-attach the textures to a mia material passes and re-render is all out of Maya which wasted alot of time.

For these to come into affect we have to use merge nodes set at over and overlay for Ambient Occlusion.

We then have to add grade and saturation nodes where we can then change different settings such as gain, gamma, offset and colour.

These shots above are the different Render passes that we can adjust to make the object look better without having to re-render the entire clip in Maya.

Below is the final screenshot of the node graph showing the different nodes we used to bring this shot to life. I added a blur and radial node to help give our clip an older look and fit in the scene more, this is then attached to a merge layer which we added an old projector film effect to the scene.

I then added another grade and saturation node for these to colour grade the entire scene as a whole which is then connect to a merge layer that connects with the render pass nodes.

I then added a write node in order to render our scene out as a movie.

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Render Passes - Maya

Here I was ready to render out my shots starting in Maya, we select our objects lights and IBL and put them into a render layer but making sure the IBL’s primary visibility is turned off in attribute editor.

We then go into our render settings the correct render layer is selected and also mental ray which should already be selected.

OpenEXR must be the Image format as this attaches the render passes to the images. We also must turn final gathering and ambient occlusion in to enhance out lighting and render passes.

Here I went to the passes tab and added our render passes which were Ambient Occlusion, Diffuse, Reflection, Refraction and Specular.

After a long time rendering we are ready to import this image sequence into Nuke.

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For most of the scene the projector is emitting a flickering light onto a screen.

I created a spotlight which creates this circular light on the screen and key-framed it to make the light flicker like an old projector would.

I also created a fog around this spot light to make dusty effect and also up the visibility of the light rays.

I also added to ambient lights, one on the inside on the tube that is supposed to be candle lit and on the projector lens. These too are key-framed to flicker creating this nice glow effect around those areas.

I tinted all of these lights an orange/yellow colour to imitate candle light.

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I had to accelerate my Praxinoscope to make it look as if it’s just starting up and what I thought to be so easy turned out to be another tedious, time wasting task.

Error: When trying to spin the model it started to spin in all directions on the x, y and z axis even when I only chose to rotate the y axis. This happened because the model was not flat on the on the grid axis so I had to create a circular curve around the spinning object matching it’s co-ordinates. I then parented these together, changed the rotation tab to object and keyframed the y axis of the circle rather than the object itself. The object started to spin perfectly for my shots solving this issue.

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Placing our Model - Maya

This is the process of placing our model into one of our scenes to create our photorealistic shot. I assigned us 2 or 3 shots each.

With the usual starting process such as setting the project, importing assets and ensuring our source images and scene assets are in order, we are ready to begin.

Above shows where we left off with our motion track points and tracking camera imported into our scene. With the camera selected we go to view-image plane and import movie which should bring up the clip of my shot and match with the tracking points.

Error: This didn’t seem to work properly when playing the movie, therefor I had to put the original movie into Photoshop and render it out as an image sequence. I then selected import image in Maya and ticked image sequence fixing the problem.

We then went to our render settings and in the indirect lighting tab I created an image based lighting giving us a sphere around the scene. In attribute editor I attached the HDRi giving us out 360 panorama of the environment around the scene.

I then created a reference from our assets folder giving us our textured models which my team mates modelled and textured using Substance Painter.

Error: Where Substance Painter is quite a new programme it still doesn’t really work making the textures blurred or smeared when exporting the textures and importing them into Maya, so I had to go back into Substance Painter and take a screenshot of the texture map as high resolution as I could make it, and then import that into the model’s image files in attribute editor giving us the real textures fixing our problem.

I created a plane underneath the model to help line the objects with the real life table and with difficulty and tediousness managed to place and size them correctly. 

With the plane I added a use background material in order to make it transparent, this way we can still see the image of the table but also maintain the reflections and shadows of our objects, making it seem to appear on the table. You can do this by changing the specular colour, reflectivity and shadow masks in attribute editor.

I then created a directional light to start creating the shadows for our object in the scene by ticking ray trace shadows and angling the light properly to bring our objects to life a bit more in the scene.

I then had to start making the materials of the objects look realistic and reflect off of the environment and lighting. By tweaking the setting in attribute editor I changed the glossiness, reflectivity, specular colour and other settings to make the 3D object look realistic within the scene.

Error: Where we have been importing and exporting out assets out of scenes and on to different computers, it kept on duplicating a lot of shaders in hyper-shade causing a lot of unwanted stress trying to find the right textures for the models. We didn’t manage to fix this issues and had to work past it unfortunately wasting some time.

With the plane I added a use background material in order to make it transparent, this way we can still see the image of the table but also maintain the reflections and shadows of our objects, making it seem to appear on the table. You can do this by changing the specular colour, reflectivity and shadow masks in attribute editor.

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NukeX 3D Tracking export for Maya

This is more advanced tutorial for Nuke motion tracking which helped me improve my red track points.

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NukeX to Maya Tracking Tutorial

This is my first tutorial so let me know what you think about, add a comment and like and I will see if I can Do more!!!!

This is a quick and simple tutorial I followed to help me with motion tracking in Nuke.

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Motion Tracking - NUKE

This is the process of how I tracked our pan shot, our only moving shot in our project.

I started off by importing the clip into the node graph and connected it to the viewer. I then added a camera tracker node and place it in between the clip and the viewer to connect it and from here I clicked track which Nuke automatically creates these track points for you. 

However, sometimes the track points can’t be perfect and they show up red, so I selected the red track points where my 3D model will be placed and checked how high the error per frame was and it was at 1.43. It is advised to keep it below 1.3 so I had to solve these selected track points, set to selected and open up the auto tracks graph.

In this graph we can select our points and adjust the track errors and then click solve so Nuke can try to fix and drop the error per frame down as much as possible. Although it only dropped it down by a few decimal places, it helped to track our 3D object better.

In the camera tracker tab we then select out camera, scene and point cloud and create the nodes which automatically connect to the tracker. 

We then create our scan-line render node and connect it to the right nodes such as BG to tracker, obj/scn to scene and cam to camera. We then create a write geo node to allow us to execute this track in order to export it into Maya.

We connect this write geo node through the camera and to the viewer and execute out scene saving it as a .fbx file. 

We then export this into Maya, make the tracking points a little smaller so we can see our scene a bit better, we are then ready to set up our IBL, Image Plane, and add out 3D object to the scene. 

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Audi IBL

So to learn how to create an image based lighting in Maya we have had tutorials using an Audi car model with a HDRi provided.

So we start off by setting our project to our folder with the assets which contains the model of the Audi and source images which contains our HDRi panorama image for the IBL and our background image to set the scene.

We then create a reference and add out Audi model to the middle of the scene.

We then create a camera and place it in front of the Audi where we then select panel and change out perspective view to the camera view ready to create our Image Plane.

We then select view and then image plane to select our background image which will show on a flat plane behind our Audi.

You can then alt-click and drag to place the Audi in proportion to the background.

We then need to create our IBL by going into Render Settings and making sure you’re on mental ray select indirect lighting and click create image based lighting. Then turning on final gather and ambient occlusion to help create shadows for the scene later on.

We then need need to select our IBL and go into attribute editor and select the folder so we can then add in our HDRi panorama image to the IBL. 

This will create a large sphere around the scene and will start to reflect off of the car.

We then have to add some reflective materials to the car to start making it more realistic within the environment.

So we must assign a new material to the different parts of the car such as metal paint for the main body. The mental ray materials allow render passes and are packed with certain presets allowing you to create more realist materials, so we select a car paint material.

And in the attribute editor we select our material and adjust colours and lit colour. I chose red eventually.

You can then repeat this for different parts of the car such as the glass windows, I selected the mental ray basic material and from here selected presets, glass solid and clicked replace to give the window a reflective but see through effect.

I will continue with this Audi to correct the colour grain and also add shadows to blend the car into the environment.