For resubmissions, I've decided to redo Project 1 aka Wilson. This is because it was admittedly my lowest grade but also I had several rendering and shader issues I wanted to fix. As I am writing this post, the frames are being rendered on Google Zync. Meanwhile, let me talk about what I changed.

Original Shader

I had originally created something overly simple in Substance Painter. It was pretty much a white layer with 3 layers of a hand print. It wasn't my best work and I remember doing the texture last minute even with knowing what I was going to do. So, I went back into Substance and completely over haul the layer. I gave it a more leathery feel to it.

When using Substance Painter, I always start to like what I have in that view port. When I bring the textures, in to Arnold, that's where things get interesting. For example, I liked the specular difference between the blood and ball in substance, but in Arnold, that all went away. The one best addition I did do was add a displacement map to make fake stitching. Since Wilson isn't going to be that close up, I can easily get away with a ton of dots (I had to hand paint, click by click, all over the geometry). Anyway, I wanted the shader to be better than before and I definitely accomplished that. It's not ideal but I'm happy where its at now.

Shading Network

Previously, I had Wilson and the grey sphere just round around in frame. This time, the grey sphere stays in place while 5 Wilsons dropping from the sky and bouncing around. I wanted to Alembic cache the Wilsons, but every time that I attempted, I got a "rigidBody## is an unsupported type of kRigid error up to frame 120". When I import the animation back into Maya, each Wilson was off in space. I tried redo this several times on different computers, deleting history and freezing history, but no luck. I'll have to see how the animation turns out when it renders.

1. Volleyball​
   1. It's really small in frame. I can either add more volleyballs or scale up the current one.
2. Shadow Projection
   1. The shadow color looks too grey. This could be because I was not using a shadow plate of sphere to compare shadows.
3. Anti-aliasing
   1. I mentioned this in a previous post. The issue hasn't been resolved.

One issue I'm having that hasn't quit been figured out is with my anti-aliasing. No matter how high I increase the camera AA samples, the render looks the same. The only difference is in the render time.

Due to time constraints and seeing no visible change, I opted to keep the samples low.

Today, I had a pretty successful work session. Between this post and the last one, there will be a huge jump in progress. But really, I've been making really rough progress all week. Now, I have perfected them.

the diffuse color, but I know what the real sphere looks like and that's a light grey color. So when I took the picture, the sphere is actually being blown out by the sun. In the end, I favored making the CG sphere feel more integrated over completely matching the light. For the next class, I will see what suggestions I should try to get them to match better.

There's no better feeling than aligning the camera with the cube plate. This is after a long battle with the CG camera focal length,  CG Cube scale, and slight tilt on the Z-axis.

The focal length of the cube plate is slightly different than what I used in my clean plate. The cube plate has a focal length of 24mm while the clean plate has a focal length of 20mm. Otherwise, the angle of camera is exactly the same. I think that in the future, I might have an issue with the scale of my objects.

I had an interesting time taking my plates. I went out a mostly cloudy day knowing that the main goal of the shoot was to get hard shadows. I would have sunlight for about 30 seconds before a large cloud came over and blocked the sun for several minutes. Each time the sun was out, I'd scramble to get the right exposure settings on my camera and taking each photo. It was actually interesting seeing just how fast the sun was changing.

I used an auto-bracketing feature on my camera to get several images with taken with different shutter speeds. Since it was so bright outside, most of the picture became blown out. I could have adjusted my camera to a higher ISO. I did not because I had already finished taking the other photos, and I was afraid of loosing the quickly shifting sun again. I used Photoshop's 'Merge to HDR Pro' to combine all the images into one.

And then I bumped the tripod... But here's more a scope of the location.

A new school year, brings new projects. This is the start of my breakdown blog for Technical Direction/Compositing or Tech Comp for short.

For our first assignment, the goal is to composite a CG object into a photographed or filmed scene. For the background plate, strong and varied shadows are required and the CG object must take up at least 25% of the frame. The idea in this project is to learn how to composite CG shadows with shadows from the plate.

This model was found on TurboSquid and was created by Rocket Sales Studio. The model was created in 3Ds Max back in 2013. Click here to visit the page for more information. I choose used the FBX. For a free model, this wasn't too terrible of a mesh to fix up. There are holes in the mesh that did not connect and the UVs are interesting...

The fixes were fairly easy to fix. I selected 3 nearby vertices and used the merge tool to bring them together. When projecting UVs, the model was created in a way that each strip's face could be easily selected.

After the first class, I have much better idea of the goals of the project. For now, I will be focused on making a simple texture (probably made in Substance Painter) and finding a location to shoot my background plate.