March 8, 2020 | 100%

Week 10 is here everyone! We finally completed our final car commercial for our Mill Collaboration. It was a very intensive learning experience. but it has easily become one of my favorite projects to work on. This project really started to come together as the weeks went by and seeing how far Team Ocelot has come since the beginning of our journey makes me very happy and excited.

This week we just had to fix a few things in each shot. Personally I was in charge of re-rendering shots that had inconsistencies and helping problem solve little issues when it came to some lighting and compositing things.

Here is our final video...

Final Critiques

Overall, I believe that our project was fairly successful for the time that we had and considering all the speed bumps we encountered along the way. If we had another 10 weeks to make our project more efficient and improve the overall quality of this project, I would've liked to change our pipeline. I think rendering out in Arnold Maya using the VDB caches for the portal FX would've made the project more cohesive and help drive lighting better especially in shots 2 and 3. I understand that this process would've taken twice as long, but I believe that it would be more successful.

Learning to really manage the project and the pipeline helped me understand the in's and out's of the pipeline as a whole. I learned what files work with each other across various software, how to problem solve layer/AOV issues, understanding technical compositing tricks, and most especially working on a team and making sure everyone is happy and gets their assets ready for handoffs.

March 2, 2020 | The 98%

This week was our 98% check-in. We made a lot of progress over the last week making sure that everything was cohesive and had nice quality. We had some new elements in there such as the leaves and improved transitions. There were a few problems when it came to rendering on the render farm and getting renders to compositing on time. Some of our elements didn't make it to the final edit this week, but we will make sure to get those in for our final.

Some of the feedback that we received from our mentors was fixing the sparks shape and color, as well as increasing the exposure. Some lighting issues were addressed as well to make our composition less flat. There were little critiques here and there that we need to fix this week to get our project "just right."

Here is our most recent edit of our project Timeless...

Final Thoughts

This is the last week we have for iteration before our final presentation. We have ran into a few issues, but this week we are going to work quickly and diligently to get it done on time. I'm very excited to see how much improvement we can make by our final and to have an amazing project in the end.

February 29, 2020 | Cheating the Headlights

One of the biggest hurdles our team has faced since the beginning was getting the glass of the headlights to reflect in the tunnel. Although it was a minor detail, we thought that it was something very important to include. All of us tried to look dev the headlights and for some reason, it would not reflect anything. Using Thin Film, Coat, or even experimenting with ramps in the transmission did not make any difference.

What I did to mimic the headlight reflections was to assign a chrome shader to only the headlight glass and I turned off Primary Visibility on everything else in the scene.

I duplicated a set of area lights from the tunnel and positioned them to a place where it would reflect off the headlight glass.

Here is what the render looks like composited into the scene for shot 0...

Final Thoughts

I'm not entirely sure if I like the outcome of this technique. It looks a little out of place, but it also kinda works to mimic that reflection. I will keep problem solving this issue.