This week of work was mostly considered to be fixing past errors from before or refining something from previous iterations.

HDRI FIXES

First I set my sights on fixing the HDRI from before. I forgot to take off the levels adjustment I placed on the image to paint out the tripod and shadow, thus making the image much darker. I fixed this problem quickly by just deleting the layer and exporting the corrected version.

Exporting the HDRI out as a PNG to use for this blog has severely darkened the image.

PHOTOSCANS

Now after that I took another stroll out to Tybee Island, GA to take another, higher quality, photoscan of the beach. Hopefully the plan is to place a small layer of sand over the top of the geometry and sell that there is a large amount of sand. Thus saving on sim times later on….hopefully.

RENDER LAYERS

REFLECTION

Finally my last item this week was starting with pipeline and render passes. Starting to get these laid out for the compositor is going to be vital to the finishing of this project.

I started working with getting reflections of the water onto the car as a proof of concept. This was completed by simply placing surface shaders onto the ground, projecting the rendered frame from the camera of the water renders form FX onto the ground plane. Thus giving the reflection of the water onto the bottom of the car.

FRESNEL

After this I started working with Fresnel. Allowing the compositor to easily pick how much reflection/refraction is going to really help sell this as photorealistic.

This will allow the Compositor the select the color value they wish to use as a selection. Therefore changing the reflections of lets say green less, because it is facing the camera more, or having red have more reflection because it is facing the most level with the camera.

This was done by placing a Maya Surface Shader on the car and plugging a ramp into the Color Out. Plugging the Facing Ratio from the “SamplerInfo” node into the V coordinates of the Ramp gives this effect on the car. Allowing the compositors job a little easier.

TO DO:

Next on my list of things to do is gather rocks for the foreground and get those into the light rig, as well as the compositor is getting a list of objects she wants grouped together for different Render Layers using roughly the same method as with Fresnel, but with solid colors instead.

With time passing like cars on a freeway, we had to get to work fast! I set out after our first meeting with The Mill to get the car model, take the HDRI’s for the light rigs, and rig the car for animation! All in all I stayed busy.

The Model we chose was a newer model Range Rover Evoque purchased from online ready to go! It has all the bells and whistles, minus it being UVed it’s just what we needed. Once opening the file sent to us I quickly found out however, nothing was named at all. Therefore I carefully took two hours to label each part, only to have the save not work and fail to re-open. So after a short…let’s say cool down, I set off again. This time saving as I went.

Next, my sights were set on getting the car rigged. This was something I have never touched before, but a few tutorials later I was a rigging pro, at least for cars. The car rig is nothing special. A NURBS curve acts as the controls for the objects I defined by groups. There are controls for the individual front tires, then the set of them, the rear tires, and the set. The top control allows the animator to control the body roll, and the control around the middle of the body, the root control, allows the animator to move the car front or back and the wheels will roll with the car the correct amount. Then just a world control at the bottom so it can be easily placed in the scene.

With our plan to do something on a beach at golden hour I drove out to Tybee Island at sunset to take some 360 degree photos with a classmate. We took the photos with an 8mm lens spinning the camera about 4 times taking 5 different exposures. After I got back I threw the photos into PTGui to stitch them together. Giving me my lovely HDRI’s

It’s only week one of production and things are starting to get busy. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the time will hold!

If at first you don't succeed,: Try, try, try again