Week 2

September 25, 2022

I ended week 2 by testing Keen Tools with a video I recorded of how I see shot 2 looking. The little box in the right corner shows how the the pencil looks from the side view. As you see, it isn't moving the way it should from that view. I am going to be doing more RnD with Keen Tools during week 3. I'm going to try adding a tracking marker to the pencil and seeing if a user track will help the movement.

I also worked more on the stack of books. I want to make it so as the stack grows, the books build right on top of each other with no spaces or overlap. However, they can be used how they are so it is low on my priority list.

September 22, 2022

During week 2 we presented our pitches and got feedback from our mentors at Powerhouse VFX. Here are some of the things they suggested.

• Have a proxy object on the arm for reference of the arm panel being open.

• Bring extra lighting to the set.

• Test the lighting of the key shop because florescent lights may cause flickering.

• Extend the tip of the welding tool so it goes more into the arm instead of just hitting the surface.

• Have some type of camera movement in shot 2

We have decided to split the compositing shots as followed:

Deja - Shots 1 and 2

Joleen - Shot 3

Nick - Shots 4 and 5

Eugene will be doing majority of the modeling, but I have some procedurally modeled books that can be used in the scene either horizontally or vertically. I will need to further model the books as they are just cubes right now.

I have been doing some RnD with the GeoTracker Keen tool. I got a video from pexels that utilized a pen, wrote it out as an image sequence, and brought the first frame into Houdini. I then modeled a rough version of the pen. I brought both the image sequence and pen model into Nuke. I followed an example file and a tutorial from KeenTools in order to figure it out. One thing that I had to make sure to do was center the model.

I plan to use this technique for shot 2 so that I can import the moving pen into Houdini and use the tip of it as a the source for the sparks. I also want to use this technique to have a proxy object for the arm to collect the lighting information from the sparks and possibly add the depth and interior onto the proxy object.