Match to Live Action
"Campbell's"
October 2017
Which soup can is fake? Left or Right?
Assignment
- The goal is to match a CG object with proper lighting into a photo with same object in the photo.
- Shadow of the primary light source should be quite evident. Avoid soft shadows.
- Bounce light between the object and the surface that it sits on should be evident.
- The object must have animation (roll, fly, bounce, etc.) and must last from 3-10 secs.
- The lighting must be consistence as the object moves through the scene and feel integrated
Modeling & FXs
Wireframe
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Fluid SimulationThe fluid simulation was created using Maya's BiFrost plugin. I chose the can to be the emitter and decreased the voxel size to about 0.05. From there, I cached out fluid as an alembic file and imported that alembic into the separate saved version without BiFrost.
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Lighting
Key Light
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Key Light & Reflectors
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Dome Light
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Problems & Solutions
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One of my biggest problems was when it was time to composite the fluid simulation in with rest of the image. I use Maya's BiFrost plugin to create the fluid. I duplicated my fake can and placed the new cans in the position of where the other cans in the image would be placed and made them colliders. The fluid simulation interacts with the 3 nearest cans by going behind and in front of the cans.
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One of my earliest ideas was to render out a beauty layer without the cans and a layer with only the extra cans to act as a mask, but I realized the mask would still affect the fluid that comes in front the cans. By starting with this idea, it taught me that I have to somehow render the cans within the same layer.
I though of turning off Primary Visibility, but that would mean not being able to see the extra cans completely. Some of my other ideas were to use Arnold Shaders that I learned about in class such as the Surface Shader, aiUtility, and Ambient Occlusion. With each one, I could create a flat color of mask cans and would work properly integrated, but with each shader, they emitted a glow onto my main can.
After doing a little research on the Solid Angle documentation, I discovered my solution within the aiStandard all along. Right above the Diffuse tab is a collapsed tab called Matte. By enabling this and set the color to black, the cans correctly masked the water. What this Arnold is doing is setting the alpha to 0 and by rendering out .exr files, the cans seem invisible.
I though of turning off Primary Visibility, but that would mean not being able to see the extra cans completely. Some of my other ideas were to use Arnold Shaders that I learned about in class such as the Surface Shader, aiUtility, and Ambient Occlusion. With each one, I could create a flat color of mask cans and would work properly integrated, but with each shader, they emitted a glow onto my main can.
After doing a little research on the Solid Angle documentation, I discovered my solution within the aiStandard all along. Right above the Diffuse tab is a collapsed tab called Matte. By enabling this and set the color to black, the cans correctly masked the water. What this Arnold is doing is setting the alpha to 0 and by rendering out .exr files, the cans seem invisible.
With More Time...
I feel as though my bump map on the can label is a little too strong. However, I have the bump set to .001 which is the lowest Arnold will currently allow. Another option around this issue was to model in the waves, but I wanted to test around with bump maps. This lets me know that I need to do a little more research on how to properly make a bump map.
