Week Seven

Daily logs arranged newest to oldest.

10/28/2024

Updated turntables and materials quilt for week seven.

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10/27/2024

With no current sound designer found, we have started recognizing that our group will have to do sound ourselves. Alice has had previous experience with sound design during her undergrad so she is going to be editing together the sound. I know there is a lot of comp work coming up so I wanted to help in any way possible, therefore, I spent today looking for sound assets. I put together a Dropbox folder with multiple options for each sound. I found options for:

• Italian background music

• Fridge opening sound affect

• Chair sound affect

• Lid screwing off sound affect

One of the issues we faced this week as a group was that the SCAD render farm was down the majority of the weekend and as I am writing this, it is still down. This caused a few issues that will have to be fixed next week. The first being that the background color of Shot 5 switches from the new adjusted shader, to the old shader, and back. Because the farm was down we were not able to fix this issue for this week.

Another issue that occurred was that the block I used to block the blue area light, was also left on for the HDRI lighting and rendered a very harsh line on the objects in the scene, as you can see below. This will need to be fixed in the coming week.

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10/25/24

Today, I focused on adding the fridge lighting, that Natasha suggested, into Shot 4. When I got my hands on the Shot 4 file, I first helped in adjusting the camera of the scene to be more accurate to what we want. This required a quick zoom in to have the ingredients appear bigger in the camera. I used a clean plate exr as the background image of the camera to help line up the scene.

I then focused on getting the lighting I wanted. I started with using just one light to get the look I wanted but it wasn't looking as dramatic as I wanted without also looking over exposed.

I ended up trying an area light on the end and a spotlight to create an additional rim light. We wanted to have the lighting fall off at a certain point to mimic how the light fall off at her shoulder like how to the clean plate looks. To accomplish that, I made a cube that was invisible in the render besides for the lights to cast the shadow. We are also going to render out a version with the blue light and without the blue light and have the fall off happen through the comp. We will see which version looks the best and proceed with that next week.

Next I started adjusting some of the shaders for this week. I adjusted the subsurface levels in the liquid caramel shader in order for it to look more realistic as it flies through the air. Before the subsurface was too high and there appeared to be a lot of white areas of the caramel. Below is what the adjustments now look like.

I then went in and adjusted the background of Shot 5. The blue needed to be lightened and I pulled out more of the blues rather than the purples in the color. Below is a comparison of the two colors with the tweaks. After color correction, I will further be able to tweak the color until we get it right.

I am waiting for Aaron to get UVs onto his new liquid sim to properly tweak the bump map of the gelato shaders. Since he reworked the FX and tried a new technique, the liquids currently have no working UVs and therefore, the bump maps were not working properly on them.

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10/23/24

Today I made some minor adjustments to the CG room. Natasha complimented the work I had done on it last week so I just needed to tweak a couple things, as previously mentioned in my last weeks blog. I adjusted the book shader to not be so reflective and then adjusted the scale of the chair to be more accurate. Here is the room comped into the scene.

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10/21/24

Today we had feedback with the mentors. Here is a list of feedback we were given that will be worked on/ noted this week:

• Natasha noted the CG room improved and looks better

• General feedback to go back to the original curve path for Shot 3. The previous version was more exciting. Also fix how the ingredients burst out before her reaction.

• Try and get more of an organic shape for the liquids in the ice cream

• Add motion blur to the shots.

• Consider adding a blue light onto the ingredients in Shot 4 so that the ingredients are more seamlessly integrated.

• Try and get rid of the distortions on Shot 8.

Next week, the groups are expected to be at 90% so we will all be diligently working this week to get it done.

After class, I spoke with the creative writing major that is helping out the class to see if she could help us find a sound designer. As mentioned before, Drew was originally in charge of finding a sound person, but after his connection fell through, I have been trying to find a sound designer. The production office never got back to me regarding my request to post on their website so hopefully this option will go through.

Here is the pipeline schedule I coordinated and typed up for the week:

Week 7 Schedule:

Thursday: group work session

Friday: First pass FX files to Gracie midday for shader tests.

Saturday: first pass from Min to Alice. Shaders to Aaron and Min by Saturday night.

Sunday: Renders to Alice before 9pm. Whenever possible for Drew that day.