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.