VFX Student Changdong Wang – Director and FX artist Shiwang Xuan – Modelling artist Lokman Kwan – Compositor
3D Animation Student Yingyue Feng – Animator
Everyone worked on their own professional area accordingly. We did face a sudden change of our group member, therefore, we have to make some sacrifices on our original idea.
Overall, I think our group communicate to each other well with respects. We gave our comments in groupchat. And using Onedrive to upload every processes we did. It is quite transparent to see what everyone is doing.
However, with limited time and stressful workloads, we didn’t complete the works we planned on our schedules. I think if there are more working days, a better version will be completed.
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.
All passes
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.
Flicking fire effect reference
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
Final version node graph
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.
For this week, here is the CG exr that I received from my group CG artist, with all the AOVs passes that I need. My goal for this shot is to merge this CG with a starry night background, and do some color correction with it.
The AOVs passes that I received
Original plate
Background from unsplash.com
1st Version
All the passes allowed me to control my adjustment in pixel-details. According to out director, he d like to see a variety of leaves color and a lttle more bit of soften edges on my 1st render result.
Result
Therefore, here come my final adjustment for this shot, which you may see some of the leaves are yellowish, while others remained reddish. This version still didn’t show the starry night background much, and personally I think this shot would be better to extend a few second more, to show the fog spread away, and a starry night appeared in the end.
Last but not least, I wish our CG artist would separate the different brunch of tree into different exr outputs, which can provide room for me as a compositor to have some creative input in this shot. However, due to limited time provided, it is the best things I can work for it.
Also, some of the passes I didn’t use at all, which I think they did waste some rendering time and space. Personally, I d like to improve the communication between me and CG artist before pressing the render button.
After 1on1 tutorial with our course leader, Christos this week, we have to prepare a presentation to him to share our story and work in progress.
In this week, I’ve received a production timeline as well. It showed that each job position and expected time period.
With this tight schedule, it showed the transparent of what everyone is doing, which is a must for us as a team to work on. Our shots were all renamed into a series of code name, which are easier for us to communicate and name our files properly.
In this week, as a compositor, my workload is not quite heavy in recent, I spent some time to study CG compositing on YouTube Channel, Hugo’s Desk, as a warmup for my tasks in near future.
I think Hugo’s Desk is a great platform for me to learn some extra techniques as a bonus, together with my regular Tue Nuke classes.
As a compositor in this collaborative unit, I’ve received an animatic from our director, Chad, in week 2 . It is useful for the whole team to preview a rough direction in preproduction period.
Also, we have a greeting for everyone in this team to say a hi to each other by online.
After reviewing this animatic, I was worried about the duration, as it is a animation with lots of message to tell. And perhaps that’s an overestimated project for such a emotional story, as it weighted quite a huge pressure to join this team for collaborative project. With showing my concerns to our director, Chad comforted me with a load of encouragement, which I definitely need it.
