Challenges I faced
Original CG plate Background from unsplash.com
There are severe highlights caught my attention immediately when I received the file of this original CG sequence.
Firstly, the brunch of tree at the background are way too hidden. Despite the fact that our director enjoyed to play around with the fog effect, it is such a waste to put it in the thick fog like this. After I show my concern to my director, we are agreed to add slightly saturation color on it, as the layer of fog has rendered in fully complete stage that we don’t want to retouch on it further.
Secondly, the exposure of the lamps fire in scene are way too over. The models look great, very nice zen style that I think some details on the appearance can be helpful as well. And I d like to try some motions on the brightness to make it to pretend to be a flicking fire.
Thirdly, there are a layer of white dots appeared on the water surface. I had misunderstood that they are caused by the starry night background.
As it turned out, the white dots are caused by lacking of rendering quality. Due to limited time, we can only deal with it in Nuke instead of re-rendering.
Work In Progress
Depth of field added easily
It is time-saving to use the depth pass to do a Zdefocus in Nuke. If we do it in maya, it would be too render-consuming to render good quality of lens blur. And much less control of defocus in maya as well.
The AOVs I missed
Again, as all the passes didn’t be separated by objects. I might need to shuffle some channels to get my selected area to add adjustments.
However, I still missed the channels I wanted, especially the reflection on water surface. As I decided to do flicking fire effect to the lamps. It would be unnatural to add it to lamp fire only without considering the reflection. Therefore, I didn’t make this change.
No shame on using Gizmo
There are two gizmos suggested by my tutor, to deal with the rendering noise on the water surface of original plate. One is Firefly Killer by Stefan Muller, and the other one is mtPixelFixer v3.0 by Miguel Torija. Both did a great work on the plate. Instant result by a quick plugin and no flicking while footage playing as well.
Before using gizmo After using gizmo
Overall, as a compositor for this project, I should balance the work between respecting director’s ideas and creating my own design. Luckily, I gained full support by our director to try the version I want.
But stills, I believe digital compositors, especially when they are working for the industry with clients, have to ask for permissions to make changes, and show their respects to all other artists. No one wants their artworks being adjusted without asking, right? Therefore, even this collaborative unit is a student group project for us to practise, I still applied this kinds of manner and attitude to my groupmate.