Week One

Daily logs arranged newest to oldest.

Project 1 Directions: https://www.gracieszymanski.com/post/technical-direction-for-compositing-project-1-directions

1/12/25

Today I continued working on the initial stages of project one.

First, I went back in and made some quick tweaks to my camera match and landed on this final camera match:

Next, I created an initial key light. Using the pen tool I drew on where I saw the shadows from my reference photo and tried to line it up exactly.

Next, I wanted to move on to adding my sky dome and using my chrome ball photo to line up the HDRI correctly. When I went to do so, I noticed that the photo set I had chosen from the professor's options did not have a chrome ball photo to use, it only had cropped/zoomed in chrome ball photos. I didn't want to skip this step completely, so I worked with what I had and used photoshop to try and align the cropped photo exactly with the backplate so that I could use that as reference in my file.

Using this photo I created I then lined up the chrome ball and HDRI as close as possible.

One thing I noticed while lining the chrome ball up and then when I went to line up the white sphere was that the photos were taken in real life with the spheres on a little cylinder so they wouldn't roll away. To make my estimates more accurate, I moved the spheres in my maya file up a little to compensate for this.

With the white sphere, I began to match up the shadow with the sphere's shadow in the photo. I noticed a problem here as when I went to match up this shadow, the shadow created from my cube became quite skewed:

I looked at my backplate, white sphere photo, and cube photo to see if there were any differences. I found that the cube photo was a little different than the other two, framing wise. The chair leg on the top right is much more cut off in the cube photo. I decided since the sphere photo was closer to the backplate, I would use that the line my key light up.

I found that the cube photo was a little different than the other two, framing wise. The chair leg on the top right is much more cut off in the cube photo. I decided since the sphere photo was closer to the backplate, I would use that the line my key light up.

After completing these steps in Maya, I went into Nuke to start assembling a Nuke tree and see how I could go about creating a realistic rolling object.

I wrote out this simple rolling ball:

To adjust/take a look at:

• key to fill ratio

• proper shaders

• soften shadow

• refine rolling object

  
  

To remember going forward:

• Camera match is not perfectly exact

• Cube photo versus white sphere photo were off a bit, white sphere was more accurate to clean plate

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1/8/25

This week, we're starting work on our first project in technical compositing that involved create a scene in which a spherical object rolls through a scene with interesting shadows. We had the option of choosing from photosets already given to us, or to shoot our own shots. Since I don't own my camera and couldn't rent out one so quickly the first week of school, I opted to use one of the photosets given to us.

Image from Josh Shelton, Winter Quarter 2020

Here is the data for the photograph taken:

I researched the Canon EOS 5D Mark iii and found that is has a crop factor of 1 meaning that the 116 mm focal length should be the same number I use when trying to match the camera angle in my maya file.

Here is my beginning attempt to match the camera.