Week Five

Posts arranged newest to oldest.

Project 2 Directions: https://www.gracieszymanski.com/post/technical-direction-for-compositing-project-2-directions

2/9/2025

Today I continued working on my crystal bunnies with my new plates. As I said previously this week, I realized to have complete control I needed to separate out my little bunny from my big bunny in every layer. I also needed to add in reflection layers because with these plates, I could see a very slight reflection of the objects in the reflection of the white desk. I also added a layer for the iridescence of the white crystal.

Here are images of the new layers I added that I have not previously shown:

• Reflection pass

• Fracture pass

• Iridescence pass

I ran into one technical issue while working today that I need to troubleshoot in class. When sending this file to the render farm, it is not processing my render layers. When I click render sequence locally, all of the renderable render layers will render but for some reason the farm is not picking that up. If I had to render locally for this project it wouldn't be a huge deal but it is definitely not ideal. Another option would be to throw the render layers in separate files and send them to the farm but that also would be a huge hassle so hopefully it is something I can fix.

Here is a current comp. Note that in this frame, the red bunny is in motion and floating a bit above the desk but the white bunny is on the ground plane.

Some things I noticed with this comp to work on:

• Double check the shadow, the white bunny is not looking like it is on the ground, maybe just needs occlusion.

• Possibly change the positioning/movement of the big bunny so that the shadow does not trail off to the object in the scene, specifically the amethyst as that would be very hard to model in Maya and replicate for the shadow.

• Add a glass shadow layer and re do the fractures red bunny.

For a visual, here is my current nuke tree for this comp:

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2/8/24

I took a large pivot since the last time I blogged. As I kept tweaking with parts of my project, I was having issue because I didn't have a frame of my video that was the exact same as my still plates with my cube and sphere. This was making it very hard for me to match the shadow and the camera properly. I was so determined to get a camera match working, and I assessed the time I had left and decided to reshoot my plates.

Here are the new plates I will be using going forward:

Here are the camera properties:

And the 35 mm focal length is 35.2.

I actually shot two sets of new plates I could use. I like the still photos from the new other option better but had a lot of issues with the moving video. The SD card used was a very old one (I didn't know at the time) and there was a ton of noise in the videos. I tried denoising in Nuke but it was no sufficient.

In addition, I was having a lot of issue with the color space of the raw videos. I tried color correcting in Davinci but to no avail.

If I have time at the end, I do want to put my completed bunnies into this still plate as an extra piece as I love this composition so much.

After I had my new plates and had gone through my footage, I needed to redo a 3D track for this new video. After a few attempts of having issues with the camera sliding, I finally figured out a solution. I needed to change the setting from "Free Camera" to "Rotation Only". I also noticed one of my issues was that I had trackers on reflective parts of the plate. These needed to be deleted to get a more accurate plate. After doing so, I imported my tracked camera into Maya, grouped it together, and translated and rotated the group to match my cube.

I also redid my HDRI and placement using the chrome ball plate, and used my white sphere plate to adjust the key light with these new plates. This way I am now caught up and in a better place with my project overall. I think the decision to reshoot was a good one and I will produce a better product in the end. I'm not too behind because most things from my previous file will transfer over, and because the second time you do something, it is always faster.

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2/4/25

With help from the professor, the issue I was having with my 3D tracked camera imported into Maya, has been fixed! The camera was importing into Maya in a weird way because Nuke has issues with recognizing the ground and where the flat parts of the scene are supposed to be. Even with me going into Nuke and setting certain points as the ground plane AND assigning certain points on the x,y,z of the 3d scene, it still was not working. What I needed to do was group my camera and trackers and change their position and rotation from the group level to match as closely as I could with my camera that I had aligned with the still image.

I ended up getting the camera as close as I could and then making a few tweaks but got my cube lined up with the moving tracking camera.

After putting my bunny in the scene and playing the tracked camera, I noticed that for a few frames there is some issues with the bunny looking like it is floating. I think this will be a simple fix with keyframing and not a huge camera issue. I also think that it may not be an issue at all with the fact the bunny is going to float in my final video so it is something I am noting but not worried about at the moment.

Continuing on with the actual crystal and bunny portion of the project, I kept going back and forth between these two crystal. I decided to try and use both of them in my project, time permitting. I want to prioritize the watermelon quartz but I would also love to be able to have both of them in my project.

I previously showed that the way in which we are accomplishing creating a crystal bunny is through multiple render layers comped together. Here is a breakdown of the current render layers I have:

Render Layer breakdown:

Layer	Objects and Shaders	Image
Shadow Matte	Ground plane with aiShadowMatte shadow. Stanford bunnies with visibility turned off. Key light to cast shadow.
Fresnal	Stanford bunnies with fresnal shader on using an aiStandard Surface and ramp.
Glass	HDRI, key light and Stanford rabbits with glass material. Bunnies have unique tints in the glass.
Subsurface	Key light and Stanford bunnies with unique aiStandard materials with an emphasis on subsurface.
aiVolume	Stanford bunnies with aiVolume materials. Each with a unique texture cloud.
Specular	Stanford bunnies and key light with aiStandard Surface with no base color.

Here is my current rough comp of the bunnies.

Here is my current Nuke tree I plan on organizing better in the near future.

One of the things I have discovered in doing two bunnies is that I think I need to separate out almost all the layers so that each bunny has its own layer. That way I can have complete control over them.

To do:

• Add displacement to the ground plane so that the shadow on the ground looks bumpy

• Animate the bunnies + keyframe any tracked camera issues

• Add cracks to crystals and large veins

• Iridescence on the white crystal

• Adjust shadow layer to be more precise