Week Two

gracieszymanski04
Jan 14
4 min read

Updated: Feb 9

Daily logs arranged newest to oldest.

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

1/19/24

I went back in to my photoshop file today to get a more accurate shadow plate with softer edges, as well as to extend it so that every part of the rolling spheres had shadows on them. Photoshop did not have an easy way for me to blur the edges of my shadow without hand drawing over my design so instead, I took an exr of the file into nuke and used the edge blur node to get my desired effect. This is how it turned out though it may need even more blur, I will have to see in the render.

Besides this, I went in and fixed a few things such as the size of the spheres and the agate texture. I don't love how the textures have a seam or a pinch so I am still playing around with those a lot. I want to stick to marble/gem spheres and have a few backup options saved that I am testing. I also still need to figure out if I need occlusion which I hope to discuss in class today.

I rendered out a new video and found two issues.

I think my shadow paint was actually too blurred so that is something big I need to go back in an adjust. I also noticed my shadow looked off. I went into my Maya file to check it out and found this:

My render camera view in the viewport is different than the render of the file. I have already flushed my caches and restarted maya and am going to continue troubleshooting.

1/18/25

Today, I spent a long time in Maya and went back to my white sphere to try and get my key light the most accurate as possible. I spend a while adjusting and then went to redo my shadow projection based on this key light. After doing a rough paint in photoshop, I plugged it into my project, but upon looking at it through my render cam, I noticed it was very off from my clean plate. I noticed that my original paint was a lot more accurate. So I spent a long time together fixing an error that didn't need to be fixed.

I decided to go back to my original key light and instead spend time on cleaning up and getting a more accurate paint in photoshop. This is the result of what I am using now.

I also key framed and added in the crystal spheres that I will be using for my final video: lapis, green agate, pink agate.

This is the video I have rendered now:

From seeing the render in nuke here is my list of to dos:

fix the faceting on the green ball
spheres look too big, size them down a little
adjust the pink agate texture - I can see a seem, and too much specular highlight
extend the photoshop painting file so that the green agate and pink agate have shadows on them at the corner, and blur the sides of the painted file a lot
figure out how to make the shadows on each ball fade as they hit the bottom.

1/16/25

Today I worked on following along the professor's instructions on how to properly achieve getting that cast shadow onto my rolling object. After projecting my backplate onto my ground plane and creating a camera in the same position as my key light, I took a still render from my key light camera and put it into photoshop. From here, I painted in the shadow as red and the rest as black. I did a very rough paint of the shadow to make sure everything is in the right place before I spend hours perfecting it.

After I had this painting from photoshop, I projected this onto both the sphere and my ground plane on a new render layer.

After comparing it with my backplate, everything seems to be in the correct place. This sphere placement stays within the shadow painting I created but when I add in more spheres, I may need to go back and extend the painting. I then rendered out this render layer and plugged it into my nuke script. During rendering, I tested my file and all my layers on the render farm early on to make sure everything was working and it came out good! I used this render as a mask for my direct specular light and my direct diffuse light.

As a test, I rendered out this sequence to see how it was looking.

There is a lot of work I have to start refining now but I feel good about having everything working!

I also decided on what I want to do for my actual render with the rolling spheres. I didn't want to do a sports ball so instead I found this crystal texture online and I am going to be doing 3 different crystal balls (not translucent) rolling through the scene. The other two I will be creating/texturing myself.