Nuke Compositing for Showreel Tracking Shots
Despite the fact that I’ve been working in matchmove for some time now, I still had yet to learn to use Nuke. For my showreel shots, I’d previously been simply rendering out a geo wireframe render, a cones render, and a polish pass, then using Adobe Media Encoder to convert the EXR sequence to a video.
As I worked on my showreel for my term 3 work, I hit a road block: rendering out wireframe sequences with the image plane showing results in a very dark background plate, as Maya Hardware Renderer cannot render out an Arnold skydome. I talked to Dom about this and he informed me that I must always use Nuke for these shots; it’s the last step to tracking, I must place the alpha layer over the background plate in order to get the final product.
For an hour and a half I took notes as he walked me through exporting a Nuke script, rendering out an alpha channel, and correctly setting up the nodes I’d need to render out of Nuke. After lots of practice rendering out my individual project (“subway shot”) and the dynamic shot (“choppers shot”) as both geo and cones wireframe, I feel a million times more confident in the software as well as my abilities as a layout artist, and my tracked shots look much more professional.
I’d say now that the helicopter shot is among my most impressive showreel pieces.
Thesis/FMP Proposal Presentation Video
Matchimation Showreel Shot
Matchimation Geo Wireframe & Cones
Matchimation Polish Pass 1
This is the product of eleven hours straight of animating. It would have taken less time, had I realized sooner that I could simply add a parent constraint on the leftmost pole and hand rather than attempting to add countless unnecessary keyframes to keep a realistic grip as the top half of the body moves around.
After a very long work day, I am unable to do much reflection, but I did learn quite a lot about how shave and a haircut works as well as how to animate a shave rig / effectively hide hairs without Maya crashing.
I had a lot of fun getting the lighting just right, as always, and my excitement was indescribable when I rendered the first test frame of what I considered to be an adequate lighting setup + hair shader combination.
I labeled this as my first polish because I do believe I need to smooth it out a bit more, in particular the jolting arm motion when he steps forward to catch his balance. It also seems to me that the right arm drifts too far behind him after the first drop from the pole, however, I’ve been attempting to rectify this only to be frustrated with the fact that placing it any farther out reveals the model in the original footage.
I have an idea to add in falling snow that only falls around Santa, and, if I can swing it, have it collect upon the seats in the original background plate. That would take this shot from good to great.
Matchimation Blocking Pass
Individual Project: Matchimation
Today I delved back into the subway shot. Launching the scene with the shave and a haircut plugin engaged worked like a charm. In a matter of an hour or so, I was able to get the rig into my tracked scene and scaled it up to the size of my model. Unfortunately, I didn’t anticipate the fact that this rig is intended to be short, so I’d have to make him rather big comparatively in order to cover the head of my model. As a result, the top of his hat is cropped off.
This is how the scene looked when I first managed to scale the model up to the correct size and completely obscure my model in the reference footage:
Obviously, there are two problems with this immediately; one being that the hands cannot correctly grasp the poles and the other being that the beard is gray- as well as the fur on his coat- it appears somewhat dirty. In contrast, when I had tried to render out the rig on the farm by itself earlier, this image had been the result:
I am not entirely sure why this issue resolved itself when I transferred the rig into my tracked scene, with the gray beard problem arising instead. I shot a message over to Luke asking why the hair appeared to be glowing.
In the meantime, I set to work building geo in the scene for those poles so that his hands could convincingly grasp them. Then, over the course of the next few hours, animated the rig, taking care to move the character convincingly in conjunction with the motion of the subway carriage while also focusing on small details and overlap. This took up the majority of my work day, despite the clip being only two seconds long- I wanted to make sure to lay down a solid baseline. My rough animation (minus the facial expression) is shown below, and I’m pretty happy with it, especially with consideration to the short amount of time it took me to complete.
After getting my matchimation work out of the way, I caught up on my messages from Luke. His response was that the fur was not glowing; rather, the plugin was not working correctly. I sent over the gray beard image, and he told me that it looked like an issue with the self-shadowing options in the fur shader, and instructed me to try playing around with some of the sliders.
Above is the gray beard issue, made more intense by my adjustment of the hair roots to be thicker (I found it looked rather sparse before). While toying with the self shadow and geometry shadow options in the fur shader had no effect on the problem,
I found significant difference in the result when varying the cast and receive shadows options in the Arnold render stats.
Above is the result of turning off both cast and receive shadows. The beard and sleeve fur are altogether too white; however, it’s a lot closer to what I want. I decided that the best middle ground- for now- is to check only one of the Arnold render options.
After bringing the rig into my scene, scaling and sizing it, completing my matchimation work and solving the shave and a haircut issue, almost eight hours had already passed, but I was determined to work on lighting and shadowmatte before calling it quits for the day. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the cards this time around. A simple skydome lights the scene realistically but not as dramatically as I hoped, and too bright of an exposure blows out the beard highlights. It will require tweaking later on.
Here is the result of today’s work. Looking at it reminds me how much more I want to do, but it’s not bad for one day.
Individual Project: Rig Errors & Data Loss
I intended to spend my time today working on scaling my character rig into my tracked scene, but unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, spent most of my work day navigating horrifying errors that threatened to erase the work I’d done on this project throughout the term.
Ready to scale my rig, I downloaded all of the necessary (and expensive) files from turbosquid and moved them into the appropriate folders, then dragged the character into my Maya scene.
Immediately upon doing so, I was met with this notification:
I believed this to be due to the fact that the rig utilizes the shave and a haircut plugin and I was attempting to launch Maya 2018 without launching the plugin first. I decided to go ahead with scaling, planning to only open shave and a haircut when I was ready to render out my scene. I applied texture to the rig, then hit the keyboard shortcut cmd + s to save my file. Immediately upon doing so, Maya crashed.
When I went to re-open my scene, I found the file corrupted.
I tried deleting the character rig and all assets related to it, but unfortunately, I found that my scene was still ruined. The geo was completely corrupted; when I tried to look through the camera lens I could only see this.
It appeared that almost all of the assets in my scene had changed and would require reworking. However, I did find this new file in my scenes folder, which, according to Luke, was a temporary file saved by the software in the event of a crash.
Dragging it into Maya, I found that my scene opened perfectly, and decided to call off my heart attack.
For a little while, though, I was confused as to why I could not save this file as a regular Maya file, and was nervous that I had perhaps lost all of my work from the term after all.
Thankfully, I found a simple answer: it was an error with my naming convention. Maya believed I was trying to save the file as a “.01” file, solved when I switched to “v1” and “v2”.
I’d grown used to using “.01” in my 3DE work.
I’ve tried a couple of times, now, to save the scene (incrementally) with the character rig in it, and am met with a crash each time. My leading theory is that it has to do with the shave and a haircut data; I need to open the program with the shave and a haircut plugin installed in order to avoid data loss. Tomorrow morning I will review my one-to-one with Luke in which we discussed using the plugin and give it another try.
Individual Project Wireframe & Geo