Week Six

Daily logs arranged newest to oldest.

10/20/2024

Alice comped in the CG background to Shot 1 today as seen below. After seeing it comped, my biggest issue with it is I think the chair looks not proportionate and needs to be bigger. That is one thing I want to change going forward.

Today, I also submitted a request to have a crew call posted on the production office's website. Drew originally thought he could find a sound designer for the project but the people he knew fell through, therefore we are now lookin anywhere for a sound designer. When the request gets approved, hopefully someone will see the post and reply as I think strong sound is very necessary for the project to come together. Our current back up plan is to have Alice work on the sound but I believe she already has enough work to do.

---

10/19/2024

Today I worked on the shaders for all of the shots. After troubleshooting together in person and Min taking a closer look at the file, the pipeline issue we were having was finally solved! I can now work in the file Min uploads to me and we can properly transfer lighting and shaders for the shot.

The first thing I did was address the feedback given to me from Natasha and look at the lighting or the scene as the truffles were looking off in last weeks vis. I threw in a white sphere to test the lighting and changed the HDRI and the spotlight values. Through the transferring of files, and the scale, I ended up changing the settings quite a bit but ended with this lighting. I also adjusted the truffles subsurface values and colors. I made them a little more reddish to better match the references.

After adjusting lighting I still had to make some adjustments to the cookie shader as when it was scaled down to fit into Min's FX file, the shader's got a little warped. I played around with the subsurface values as well as tweaked the displacement. I am not happy with how the uv is stretching the displacement map on the sides of the cookie and that is something I want to look into going into the next week. In addition, since the displacement is geting scaled down so much, the previous maps I had made were not working out. I originally had a base squashed sphere model and had displacement that layered both the crack and the bumps of the cookie. This was not working on no matter what I changed the settings to so I ended up downloading a base simple cookie model from online and then only layering on top the cracks. Below is the cookie shader I settled on after a few hours of work this week.

I then moved on to adjusting the shaders of shot 5. Since the FX was redone this week, Aaron was still having issues with the UVs on the new liquid sims so therefore, the gelato shaders were not adjusted much. I will further add some texture to the bump map in the following weeks when the UVs are sorted. I mainly focused on the cookie crumbles of this shot. Before, they were spheres with the mountain node. Now they are plain sphere with their form coming from the displacement in the shader. I tweaked the colors to match my reference more and also gave them more of a reflective property to match the Talenti commercial where the cookie crumbles are more shiny rather than matte.

---

10/17/2024

After receiving professor feedback and talking with Aaron, I finally settled on a camera for Shot 5. Professor Fowler suggested finding reference and shooting real shots on my phone. I briefly did that during class work time and came up with an idea of what I wanted. The final camera came to fruition with the really great advice from Professor Gaynor to only include the first and last keyframe and nothing else. This is what we ended up with. It is not just a push in like the mentor's did not love, but it is also not too much and too CG like the mentors also did not like.

---

10/16/2024

After last week's feedback from Professor Fowler, I wanted to focus today on relighting the CG room and reworking the overall scene to make the CG background more seamless.

Below are the original CG shots that Alice began putting together.

Upon opening the file and taking a look, I thought that the proportions may be off with where the back walls are in relation to the island counter. Below shows how the CG room was originally set up when handed off to me. Everything around the island and laptop was not proportional to the island. I needed to change up the scene and use the island counter geometry as reference as that was the only geometry I knew was scaled correctly with the camera.

After doing some proportions math, the below image is what I changed the scene to be. This more accurately represents the real room that we filmed in and will more accurately integrate with our live plates. Alice and I talked and I believe there was confusion as the file was set to centimeters though Alice believed it was set to meters. I think this may be where the perspective issue was coming from in earlier weeks and it was not the camera that was the issue but rather the scene placement.

After fixing the proportions, I took some time to tweak the objects in the scene, as well as the materials. I spent a good amount of time downloading different 3D models from online and placing them into the scene to see if they looked good or were usable. I wanted to adjust certain parts of the scene to make it fit more with the overall aesthetic of our commercial.

I also worked on lighting the shot better. I set up a spotlight in the same spot as one of our main lights we set up during filming day. I then also set up an area light and positioned it at the top of the room to imitate ceiling lighting that would be in a room.

Here is what my adjustments look like:

I am also playing around with removing the shadows caused by the spotlight. I want to get professor and group member critique to see what they like best. Here is a quick render with the shadows from the spotlight.

I also worked on tweaking the Shot 5 camera today after hearing feedback from mentors that it felt CG and like too much is going on. Here are the rough keyframes I have created. I need to talk to Aaron in person to hear how he wants to change the timing of this scene before I can revise the camera as that is another thing the mentor's suggested.

---

10/15/24

Today was a mentor feedback day. My group went first which I think has a lot of benefits since I feel the mentors tend to talk to most on the first group. Here is some of the feedback we received and will prioritize this week.

• For shot 5 consider simplifying the FX, more fluid, less chaotic

• Room integration looks a lot better

• Shot 3 - look at the lighting as the chocolate truffles are looking blown out

• Shot 3 - eye line needs to match - lift the FX up so that she looks at the ingredients

• Shot 3 - Fluid feels too chaotic - tone it down, try minimal particle scale so 0, etc

• Shot 4 - ingredients are behind her even though in shot 3 they are in front of her, think about how to rework the FX or the cut to fix that

• Lose the slow motion shot and slow the amount of motion in shot 5 - should be beautiful and composed

• Shot 3 dof davinci depth so get better balance

• Comp in shadow of the particles onto her in Shot 3, will make it more integrated

After hearing feedback and really starting to get everything together, Alice and I put together a to do list for each shot to keep organized.

Shot checklist:

Shot 1:

• CG room shader and lighting, render high quality (GS)

Shot 2:

• Aaron render out EXRs

• Fake website for screen and comp in (AY)

Shot 3:

• Shader issue fixed

• Change FX to be more eye level

• Get rid of slow mo shot

Shot 4:

• Cutting it earlier (AY)

• New particles (smoother and new curve) (MS)

Shot 5:

• New camera, too much going on

• Match blue to blue of end shot

• Smoother/timing of fluids

Shot 6 and 7:

• Tracking (DD)

Shot 8:

• Lower exposure, play with lighting

Overall:

• Color correction (AY)

• Sound(DD)

Here is our pipeline schedule for the week that I put together for my group.

WEEK 6 Pipeline Schedule:

Today - Friday: Drew - texted sound person

Wednesday: Gracie new camera to Aaron

Thursday: Fix shader issue with Gracie and Min

Friday: Gracie shaders and lighting to Aaron

Saturday evening:

• Gracie: Shaders and Lighting to Min before 10pm

Sunday 10:

• Aaron: Hand off hero shot to drew, EXRS for particles

• Min: Hand off shot ¾ FX

• Drew/Alice comp work.

Sunday 4pm: Everyone edit slide with you initials

SUNDAY 5PM: PPT VIDEO