Week Six

Posts arranged newest to oldest.

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

Final Project Two

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2/15/25

Today was all about finishing up my project and putting together my press kit for project 2.

Here is my final nuke tree for this project:

Final render layer breakdown for the big bunny:

Subsurface
AiVolume
Glass Veins
Glass
Fresnel used as mask
Glass Shadow
Specular
Occlusion
Reflection mask
Reflection
Shadow mask
Glass shadow

Final render layer breakdown for the little bunny:

Subsurface
AiVolume
Glass Veins
Glass
Fresnel used as mask
iridescence
Specular
Occlusion
Reflection mask
Reflection
Shadow mask
Glass shadow

If I have time to go back, I would like to retrack the camera of this, or just cut the tracked camera part out as I noticed a little bit of sliding in my plate. As this is my first time 3D tracking and I had a decent amount of issues with it, I am still happy at the product I did have.

After completing the project, I really wanted to go back in and comp it on top of one of the other plates I originally shot. I couldn't use this plate because I didn't have a proper mp4 of it due to the SD card not processing the video correct, but I still liked this still plate the best. Therefore, I took my watermelon quartz crystal bunny layers and re-rendered them with a camera to match this plate and a proper key light and HDRI for this plate. I then comped it onto the background, not changing many setting from my previous comp and finished with this alternate plate:

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2/11/25

Today I started work by wanting to fix my render farm issue that I detailed last post where my file was being sent to the render farm with all the right settings but the farm was not registered that I had multiple render layers. Because I am using legacy render layers, I knew that there was a chance the problem was just a glitch due to the unsupported Maya method and I decided instead of spending hours troubleshooting, I would move my layers into two new files. I spent some time making that move and after my little bunny and big bunny were separated, both new files were working on the farm.

After this issue was fixed I began working on my layers once more. Last work session I realized that the shadow of the bunny was traveling onto objects into my file. For the crystal tower and the felt bunny, I modeled simple shaped in Maya myself. For the amethyst however, I needed to come up with a way to get that shape. I looked for free models online but nothing was close. I came up with the idea to use a free app on my phone to scan the physical object and import that into Maya since it didn't need to be perfect but just needed to create a believable shadow.

Here is the full setup I currently have for this shadow layer:

Next, I began working on setting up some new render layers for my file.

First, I added a reflection specularity pass. After analyzing my clean plates, there is a very faint reflection of color and specularity reflections from the other objects in the scene. I will still be using a reflection pass for color and adding this specularity pass on top.

Next, I added a pass so that I can play with the shadow of the bunny. The reference image I have has a very very faint slight peak of orange through the shadow of this crystal. Therefore, I created this fresnal shadow pass to play around with that:

Next, I added a shadow glass pass. This is to make the whole scene look more believable and show the bunny's shadow reflecting back in on itself. This will be merged in with my glass passes in my composite.

Last, I added my occlusion layer to the ground. It is very small and slight as that is how my reference photo is.

Here are all my current render layers for my big bunny.

Here is my current nuke tree (very very messy and how my brain is processing all this right now).

I am having one issue with my volume pass where there is this glitchy line going through it. I need to look into that. As well as the fact this pass still has a lot of noise even though my settings are up very high.

I am also having another issue I noticed in my Nuke comp where my glass crack layer is flickering. I think this may just be an animation issue but I need to look into that as well.

Here is a current rough comp with my tracked camera:

Note: I am still working on my small bunny as well but I do not have a full comp ready for it yet, but I have created all the same new render layers for that bunny as well.