Week 9

Final Goals:

• Sparks refinement (make base smaller)​

• Flash refinement ​

• Render lighting on pen separately for tracking​

• Roto or key areas that flash would appear on for more control over fall off and track​

• Flash reflection on shiny objects – choker​

• Glow refinement (pace. color, layers)​

• Shadow refinement (add another layer for darker areas)

November 13th, 2022

Today we finalized the colors for the glow. We went with purple and orange.

Below is my final render (not final color grading) along with my final node graph.

The only thing I tweaked from the other renders to this one was the colors, noise, and roto of the glow. The purple and the roto were only tweaked slightly. I wanted the glow to take up the entirety of the lines and have a better movement on the right side. I adjusted the noise more drastically because I was getting this dark blue that I didn't want. I adjusted the octaves, gain, and gamma until I got it where I wanted. I also adjusted the movement of the noise. A couple of weeks ago, I was keyframing z in the noise to get the movement, but that is not really an efficient way if you want to change the speed later. So this week I replaced that with the expression (frame/100). Then if I wanted to change the speed, I only had to change the number I was dividing the frame by. After all this was developed, I sent it off to the rest of Team Eva so we could stay consistent with colors and movement.

Below is how the noise looks. The noise is connected to a constant with the purple color. The yellow is inside the noise. That way the purple is the more prominent color.

November 11th, 2022

Today I was able to get my sparks back in and working. I cleaned up some of the roto around the pen and added a shadow in back of the arm piece. I also added that darker shadow from the pen back using a keyer node. You can see all that progress in the color tests I did below. I personally still prefer the red, but this orange one would be my second choice. I sent all of the following to my team so that they could have a good idea of what the different color combinations would look like. We agreed to use the purple and yellowish orange combination.

my second favorite:

Here are some more color tests I did:

Monica suggested hot pink, so I tested that out as well. I think it goes with the color scheme of out video and could work out. I like the ones more on the purple side with a hint of blue or orange the best.

November 10th, 2022

I got my render back from the render farm today, it the sparks are a lot more pixelated than I anticipated. I don't remember changing the samples in my file, and the size didn't change so I'm not sure what went wrong. I'm going to re-render them, but here is the old sparks compared the refined ones:

I made a lot of progress today on the flash refinement.Instead of re-rendering the pen, I just rotoscoped it and match moved it onto the real one. I was able to get a good key of the fingers so that I could fake the flash on them without having to deal with any tracking. The most difficult thing for me was getting the flash working on the floor. In prior renders, you can see how the floor lighting was overlapping on the fingers and the pen. The easiest thing to do would be to render out a pass of the floor without the proxy objects in there. However, the maya file only works at Montgomery Hall since all the textures are being referenced from the I drive. I have tried re-pathing them before, but a texture always came up missing. So I instead used the proxy pen and the keyed fingers as mask to go on top of the floor. That way they covered the unmoving proxy objects while also ensuring that the floor lighting only hits the floor. I also have a subtle flash working on the choker.

With all of that working, tomorrow I will be focused on glow refinement and exploring different color options.

November 8th, 2022

The first thing on my priority list is refining the sparks. I didn't get a chance to get to it last week, and it really important that I get them into the scene. I went back into Houdini and scaled emitter a lot smaller than it was before. The sparks now all look like they are coming from one point.

1 thing that was mentioned during class, was that the flickering on the table didn't match what was happening on the arm. I had forgotten to put the expression under the arm piece. Here is how the flicker looks before being merge(plus) over everything else.