Week 30: Mastronauts - Adding The Character To The Scene

The lighting test as before, but swapping the stand-in elements for the character. This is just a free downloadable model/rig (Morpheus Rig) as our character is not fully modelled/rigged yet.

Master Layer- Character and Light.

The shadows are not on here as they need to be on a separate layer because the Use Background shaders don't work with the Final Gather on, but it's already starting to look like it's coming together! :)

Week 30: Mastronauts - Lighting tests continued

Today I carried on the lighting tests from Friday, and I've just been focusing on getting the ground shadow in.

With this it was just a case of setting up a plane to recreate the shadow of the building on the ground in the photos.

I began to look at the shadows on the wall, which was turning out to be rather tricky.
Trying to get all the shadows to line up based on the one piece of geometry blocking out the light was requiring a lot of tweaking, and ensuring that the shadows of the posts were also staying in line from frame to frame was proving difficult. The issue is figuring out whether the solution would be to move the position of the affected geometry, or if it is perhaps the position of the lights that is causing the issues.

For the test though, I may revert back to just focusing on the light and shadows on the posts and the ground plane. I may take out the plane representing the wall as, after discussing with my teammates, it is felt that the wall shadow is an unnecessary effort in this example.

I also will begin looking at the rendering processes; focussing on the shaders & materials and render layers and passes.

Week 29: Mastronauts - Lighting tests

So I've recently been looking at lighting a little test shot that Tom, Kieran and I are doing.

So far I've set up the IBL and am looking at recreating the lighting as best as I can.

Shot with the indirect light only.

Trying to match up with the actual images I set up a directional light for the sun.

I changed the shaders from a lambert to a mia material x, as these shaders are known to react more realistically to light.

Of course, the material attributes will still need to be changed, take the ground plane for example. It is too reflective.

I am still not 100% sure about it yet but my main focus is matching the shadows etc to that of the image. I will need to do some more tweaking to this shot next week but for now, I think it's coming on nicely.

Week 26: Going Live - Mountain IBLs

Using IBLs to look at lighting for the mountain.

Some of the earlier ones (not colour corrected). This is
Still without the textures etc.

                        

But I looked again at some of these as the light should be coming from behind the mountain...

Obviously a little colour-correction and messing around in comp will be necessary.

Week 23: Going Live - A Hasty Lighting Test for the Town

I quickly threw some image-based lights on John's lovely buildings...the HDR images I found were mostly lighty- daytime ones, perhaps too bright for what we need?


                               

Obviously the positioning of the buildings are not correct, I literally threw it all together to see how it would look.

 And here's how they look without the Background images...

                                      

It's pretty rough. It will require a bit more time obviously. I'll maybe look into changing up the colour of the lighting and messing around with some things to make the light a bit more atmospheric.

Week 22: Mastronauts - IBLs and Sibl Gui

Word of mouth introduced me to a program called Sibl Gui. The program is focused on creating an image-based light set up using HDR images. It can be plugged into many 3D softwares such as Maya.

Using this software, I investigated and tested IBL set ups to see the impact that image-based lighting can have on the integration of CG elements in live-action environments.

Using HDRs downloaded from the Sibl Archive online as environments, I created sphere's with specific shaders - one a chrome ball to test reflections and the other a lambert, to see the effect that IBLs have on indirect lighting.


I then used this software to test my own IBL of the DJCAD entrance.

This is an image of the same spheres, as seen above, without the reflection and indirect light applied to them from the IBL. They have not, in any way, been lit at all; I am only using Maya's default light in this example.

This is a comparison displaying the IBL being applied to the sphere's in both reflection (chrome) and indirect light (lambert) and we can see that their is a significant difference in the integration of the CG elements with the photographed environment.

After this test, I realised that I had not actually centered the horizon line of my panorama and so the image is slanted. This is a minor issue and is very easily fixed and so I will likely tweak this test whenever I get the chance.

Week 20: Mastronauts - IBL class

So today we had a class with Malcolm about how to take HDR images and using those in image-based lighting. The class was an eye opener and certainly caused me to take a u-turn in my IBL research.

In this class, unlike the VFX class I did in 3rd year, we used a camera with a fish-eye lense, tripod and a panorama tripod head instead of the chrome ball to take the images of the environment. 






The quality of the images was significantly higher than the chrome ball images and the creation of the HDRs and panoramas of the environment was much easier as we used a specialised software called PT Gui.

                                                                                           (Panorama Editor - PT Gui)

After this,  I've decided that this would be the best method for the IBLs for the Mastronauts project and this is the route that we will be taking from here on out.

Week 18: Mastronauts - looking at IBLs

 After having done the Visual Effects module in 3rd year, I have done a little work with IBLs using the chrome ball. Discussions with Tom & Kieran have made clear that we will be needing to use this method of lighting for the character in our film.

So I began looking at creating HDR of a room using a chrome ball.

                                                                             

           As this is just the first test, we only took 3 different exposures per image.