Week Eight
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Blog posts arranged newest to oldest.
To-do:
Refine flower movement
Refine shot 3 camera and ring animation
Assist compositor in any way as we go into the final weeks of the project
Press kit!
Mentor Feedback:
Flower shot - getting into the drop feels like it runs into an axis
Comp- make sure all the black levels are matching (shot 1 and 5)
In water shot, the motion graphics is covering the ring- reframe
Flower looks like you played with opacity rather than SSS - Feels ghostly and transparent
Seems like there is no mid depth of field, in real Oura ads DOF is very shallow
The ring is very blown out in Flower Shot
Flower is moving too much, it should just gently fall out of flower
In water shot, there are no white highlights in the bubbles
There's a dark line in the cloth shot that seems like a rendering issue
Ring is blending in with the water, maybe make the water seem more clear in the FG and colored in the bg - It is reflecting too much teal
Cross fade to shot 3
2/27/26
Today was one of the last days that I will be working on the motion of this shot. After fixing the bend animation yesterday based on critique, I then continued smoothing out the ring animation and the camera animation to perfectly match up to the shot before and after it, and to fix some timing issues in the last submission. Below is the final motion for shot 3.
With the motion wrapping up, I've also been helping this week with the lookdev for the background of shot 3. The lighting approach that the group took last week did not work out super well and also would need a good amount of time to fine tune. The best solution to the background, based on professor feedback, will be blurred foliage images. These can be projected behind the flower and give it more of a sense of setting.
I spent some time looking at possible options, varying in blur to give to compositor options.
All images form Adobe Stock.
The group then picked our top 3 images that I will be passing on to comp so that we have options during this crunch time. The top 3 images chosen has some leaves in focus and some leaves out of focus. To make is all even for an easier comp, I went to Google Gemini to use AI to remove these sections I didn't want for an easier comp.
Here are the images we will be using, produced from Gemini with the prompt: "remove the in focus leaves in this image"
To help with the final stages of the project, I've also begun trying to assist in the making of our press kit by starting our title and credits cards for the final video:
2/25/26
Upon working today, I discovered another technical issue that has not only been affecting my project but all of SCAD this quarter. A peer of mine in another class helped me sort through my render logs from the SCAD render farm. In the logs, we found that though the USDs and render settings are set to render the frames in XPU, the SCAD render farm has only been using CPU this entire quarter. This explains a lot of the issues that have come up with shot 2 and why small things look a bit different from viewport versus render. This also explains why the denoiser has not been working as it uses GPU, and clearly the farm can only use CPU.
Though this issue has been discovered, we will still be rendering with the same settings and proceeding with the same renders but we can now make small adjustments and understand why we were experiencing certain errors.
In regards to FX work today, I spent some time retiming and resimulating the stem sim and bend animation to fix the odd shaking that was happening in last week's submission. Here is the final bend motion of the stem.
I also began reworking the transition from shot 1 to shot 3 by making the fall in shot 3 shorter and steadying the camera so that there is no longer a weird axis move of the ring.
2/24/26
Today was our last day of feedback before the mentors from Harbor and ETC are able
Mentor Feedback:
Kyle
Flower shot - getting into the drop feels like it runs into an axis
Comp- make sure all the black levels are matching (shot 1 and 5)
In water shot, the motion graphics is covering the ring- reframe
Drew
Too much saturation in last shot
Beck
Flower looks like you played with opacity rather than SSS
Feels ghostly and transparent
Molly
Seems like there is no mid depth of field, in real Oura ads DOF is very shallow
The ring is very blown out in Flower Shot
Flower is moving too much, it should just gently fall out of flower
Hailey
In water shot, there are no white highlights in the bubbles
Theres a dark line in the cloth shot that seems like a rendering issue
Billy
Ring is blending in with the water, maybe make the water seem more clear in the FG and colored in the bg
It is reflecting too much teal
Stephen
Cross fade to shot 3
As FX is tidying up, I've spent some time troubleshooting other issues we have had and have helped with rendering. Earlier in the quarter, we had an issue with trying to render out ACES from Houdini. After doing some research, I solved the issue of how to properly render out ACES in Houdini and put together a guide for the group.
I did some tests on the SCAD Renderfarm to see the difference between linear color space (what the group has been using), and ACES. The left image below is in ACES while the right is in Linear.
There is definitely a wider range of color, especially when taking a look at specific areas of the petals. I believe ACES absolutely produces a better picture.
Due to the phase of the project, this solution did come a bit too late to implement so we will still be using ACES, but I am pleased to have found this solution so the team can possibly rerender after the quarter is over for submission to festivals and things of that nature.
