This week I’ve been organising the project files and doing the rendering tests. I chose the following rendering settings.
After that, I recreated the exterior of the base and we envisioned the whole base as a tomb, with Steven walking inside. As before I used world creator to create the terrain, the base was a simple box. I then expanded its UV and imported it into the substance painter for the texture mapping. Finally, I set up the lighting. The scenes are as follows.
For the wine bottle project, I worked on the bottle material this week, set up the lighting and did the initial rendering, I also made a box according to their requirements and added a velvet effect.
It is a bit tiring to work on two projects at the same time. But when I saw that they were very satisfied with the renderings, I was very happy and I felt like a dream realizer.
This week I’ve been doing some compositing tests, we’re not sure of the final result so far, so this week I’ve been working with the director to sort out the footage and cut a final film without effects using PR software. we will follow the footage from the finished film, which will reduce our workload a bit.
Firstly I did a camera inverse on a motion shot in 3DEqualizer, which is exactly what dom taught us last semester, and it allows for very accurate camera inversion. The tracking results are as follows.
The value of 0.2 in the lower right-hand corner shows that the inverse result is relatively accurate, and Dom says that a result of less than 1 is acceptable. I then imported the inverse camera into Maya and placed it in the base scene we had built earlier.
The results look good now, but there is still a lot of work to be done before the film is ready. I also added some light effects to the scene in the first shot to give it a more detailed look. This also multiplied the rendering time.
The deadline is coming and I feel so much pressure because we still have a lot of footage to produce. We have to speed things up. Next week I’ll continue to optimize some scenes and get a render farm to help us render them.
In addition, This week I was approached by branding students who wanted to work with me on a group project. They are planning to make a Chivas bottle, they have designed the concept and the general image of the bottle, I am responsible for modelling, materials, lighting and rendering. This week I have been modelling based on their sketches, after a thorough discussion.
Project description:
Today’s young people are more discerning than ever, they generally like to share their lifestyles, try new things and show their infinite possibilities. Chivas Regal now wants to establish itself as an ideal choice for the new generation of luxury consumers and it is in need of a design that expresses a young identity and distinctive taste. So we will give the next generation of hustlers a better reason to love Chivas Regal.
This week I have been concentrating on making models of the base, both indoor and outdoor. Initially, I discussed with the director that the interior scenes did not need to be too complicated and that the backgrounds should be as black as possible, but after we shot in the green room, the lighting conditions were so limited that we had to change the scenes we had designed before to match the lighting. This increased my workload considerably. As before I searched for a large number of references, some of which are as follows.
There is a little trick when modelling in Maya, I found a standard mannequin to put in the scene and used it as a yardstick to build the interior scene. The initial result is as follows:
Obviously, the result was not satisfactory, firstly the space felt very small like it was in a corridor, and secondly, we had planned to put a bunch of plumbing-like parts along the wall, but it didn’t seem to have any real meaning in the picture. So I continued to modify it and got the following results:
The result looks good. Then I have since created an outdoor model of the base, which is shown below.
I’ll probably continue to work on these two scenes next week, but it looks like we don’t have much time left, we still have a lot of shots to finish, and I’m not sure how we’ll end up with a composite. Go for it!
This week we finalised the final script and the dialogue lines for the cast
Furthermore, we booked the green screen classroom for Thursday and on Wednesday the group worked together to set up the classroom, finalise the camera and cast positions etc.
Here are some photos from the set
On the 10th we took a day of shooting. Here are some photos from the set
As you can see from the pictures, I was mainly responsible for making sure that the actors were surrounded by the green screen, and due to lack of staff, I also took on the radio duties. This was my first time working on a production and it was a lot of work and a lot of fun. I learnt a lot from being involved in the whole process. At the end we had the actors do individual dubbing to ensure the sound effects in post.
This week we have contacted two professional actors to act for us for free. They were very professional and enthusiastic and they helped us to modify our dialogues. As for me, I focus on scene modelling. According to our story style, Leo and I find some references
Based on these reference images, I modelled the scene using Maya. I mainly found some architectural models on the internet and placed them in the scene. With the following results.
The effect was not satisfactory, we felt it was not shocking enough as the scene was the first shot and we wanted to have a more powerful shooting, so we changed our mind and recreated it. I spent half a day briefly learning the basics of this software, and then I edited the terrain according to the reference images. With the following results.
The effect looked better, but the image still lacked impact, so we continue to find some references, like these.
I have added some details to the previous terrain and added a large robot to make the image more relevant to the theme. Also, the director suggested that I make the camera lookup, which really makes the image very powerful, and I think it’s very nice.
Next week we will be shooting in the green screen classroom. Let’s look forward to it.
