This week our team was working hard to get renders completed for our next mentor meeting. Last week there was a problem with rendering, the sequence wouldn't render locally or in the farm. This was my fault because I hadn't cleaned out the files and set correct relative paths. So after cleaning them up with any unneeded nodes and connecting files, it was able to render! Our team also worked on our organization more and we all made a folder called WORK together, so we know anything uploaded in that folder is the newest version and old versions are stored somewhere else.
This week I was responsible for adjusting the shaders on the bike to make it look less plastic and flat based on feedback from the mentors. Additionally I worked on rearranging the set extension buildings based on the proxy geo of where Mich had placed the buildings in Nuke. We also decided on making the logo shoot out towards the camera instead of waiting for the bike to stop in front of it, so I worked on fixing the ending logo in Adobe After Effects.
My first iterations of fixing the shaders, the motorcycle body still looked not as bright and shiny enough as compared to the reference images that I had. Fiberglass is similar to plastic, but not as flat.
After deciding I should go with a lighter color, for the main body, I adjusted various parameters. I adjusted the IOR and disconnected some substance painter maps that were making my roughness a bit too dissipated. I also added coat in order to make it shinier and used aiFacingRatio with a ramp into the color of it in order to try and get additional highlights on the edges.
This week was also the start of getting our set extension prepared for comp. With the proxy geo that Mich had given me from Nuke, I was able to place the 3D buildings that she had also given me in the scene. I assigned them a chrome shader with some roughness and for some buildings a simple aistandardshader that was brown to break up the shininess in areas. In the first pass I rendered, the reflections of the other buildings in a building were black, so I adjusted the ray depth in the render settings of specularity to a higher number in order for them to be seen in the reflections of other buildings.
New Old
For our ending title, we decided to have it shoot towards the camera based on a suggestion from Professor Fowler. In Adobe After Effects I used a png of the Ducati logo for our ending title and key framed it so it is lined up with the logo on our CG bike. Then I made it come towards the camera. Additionally as it comes towards the camera I changed the opacity to be black for the video plate so our view gets directed to the logo coming towards you. To make the edges of the plate become black first, I used a layer solid and masked a circle around it. When I inverted the circle mask, it makes the edges black and the center visible. I feathered the edges of this mask and then keyframed it to come towards the middle as the logo comes towards the screen.
Ending Logo Visual Test
Also simply just for visualization, I used Mich's nuke file she had set up and then keyframed a feathered roto to make SHOT 1 be inside of the portal.
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