Day 12 of Studio Project.

As usual today i worked on my individual well shot, by continuing to try out the green "essence" particles, playing with their lifetime to see if it works or not, to give it the flickering effect.
However no matter how i try the flickering just looks wrong, but i still choose to put it in to see if any other nodes in nuke can help to improve the look of the glow and the movement.

I also helped with the rotoscoping of the actor in shot 2 to place the actor in front of the landing robot and trying out ways to remove the trackers in maya by projecting a perspective image of a clean plate of my shot onto a plane and it being matchmoved, should move accordingly with the camera, however the plane seems to be going haywire and i'm still trying to remove the trackers by placing other objects like cylinders and other planes to cover up the trackers in maya.

I've also tried to remove the trackers in Nuke by using a roto to roto out the trackers and replacing it with a clean plate behind, but still proving to be unsuccessful.

Day 14 of Studio Project.

Finally, today is the last day of work.
In the morning i started with composition for my well, i blurred my well according to my shot as my original footage itself was blur to begin with.
i also added more nodes to my composition to make the well blend more.
Mr Leong taught me a method to make my ambient occlusion on the ground darker but not affecting the well's ambient occlusion pass itself by using the beauty pass of the well and subtracting the ambient occlusion pass of my well and floor, and i will get just the ambient occlusion of the floor, and from there i can add a grade and adjust it darker accordingly to match my scene better.
After i'm finally satisfied with the look, i proceeded to do my effects breakdown video in After Effects, one by one, i took out layers and passes and render images so that i could use them for my breakdown video.
After finishing my well shot and its breakdown video i also proceeded on to do rotoscope of removing trackers for my second shot and helping my groupmates to finish their breakdown videos as well.
The final look for my well shot, shot 1 is below:

Day 13 of Studio Project.

Today i finally more or less finished my well shot, i test rendered particles to composite and see if it looks correct, but the group and MrLeong still said that the green "essence" particles didn't look nice so i decided to take it out of the shot.

i finished the ambient occlusion renders for my well as well and composited them in for the latest results including a layer of fog in the foreground covering the whole of the shot.

The rest of the day was spent supervising the other 2 shots about their lighting and texturing.

i also managed to finish rotoscoping the trackers out by clone stamping frame by frame as putting a plane and projecting my image on it in perspective did not work.

Below is the shot that i've finished compositing.

Day 11 of Studio Project.

Today i did alot of particle effects, including smoke coming out from the well, adjusting the fog settings to make it move faster and less dense and compositing of the green glowing particles in nuke.

I helped out in the rotoscope for the main actor in the 3rd shot as well as there were some errors in the rotoscoping going haywire.

I also did the dust simulation for the second shot where the robot is landing, as Sankar wants to see the simulation tomorrow morning.

Day 10 of Studio Project.

Today i started on my particles in the well shot. I wanted to give a feel like the well is giving off an "essence".
So the particles i decided were green and must be glowing.
I made a directional emitter made it emit in the negative Y direction and tried to contain the particles within the well.
I also added fog but due to the lights in the environment the Fog was too strong and looked as if it was glowing, so i decided to remove the fog for now.
The particles that's emitting from the well looked like this after putting a glow on it in Nuke.

I also had to illuminate the inside of the well because the glowing particles should be lighting up the well from the inside. For this i added a point light inside the well and gave it a tint of green.
After this i had to roto the particles because the front part of the well had to be in front of the particles and after rotoscoping out the well and compositing the particle, the footage and the well in Nuke for a test shot, this is the result of one frame.

After this i tried to take out the trackers in the shot but i had alot of difficulties so i decided to wait for next week before i ask MrLeong or MrSangkar again.

Studio Project Day 9.

Today, i composited my test well shot in nuke but the well was shaking so badly on its own so i had to solve the problem of the shake first.
I asked MrLeong how to solve the problem and he asked me to render in separate layers to see if it works.
I started rendering my well shot after that but maya's batch render crashed on me several times, and after i solved the problem i started rendering again in 1280x720.
I also helped out in Rotoscoping for my shot 3.
I also got the animation correct for the motion capture for the robot with SangKar's help.

Studio Project Day 8.

Today, i worked on my well again, just when i thought it was finished, Mr Leong found out my crashing problem was due to my textures.
Then i had to re-texture the whole well again using the "correct" method and not by applying textures to faces.
I also modified my well and took out a few items to make it look older. I also used photoshop to modify my texture to make it look darker and green-ier to blend with the surroundings.
Hopefully, it's gonna be the final look by adjusting some of the lights.

Currently, it looks like this:

Studio Project Day 7.

Today i retracked and matchmoved my first shot again because the well we realised, was moving way too much in my previous maya file. So i had to do it again this morning.

After that i finished texturing, and MrLeong asked me to displace all the textures, which was what i did, and then realised that the displacement mapping did not work for all the materials. I then replaced those that didn't work with bump mapping and light the well properly.

I changed materials for some of the objects as well. 

Later in the day my maya kept crashing on me every time i rendered my scene. 

The end result was this:

Studio Project Day 6.

Today i finished the model for the well by adding edge loops to all the parts of the well, the wood, the pail the metal, well the whole model to be exactly just to make sure that they're not obvious sharp edges for the well model. It'll probably look more realistic without sharp edges.

I continued on the well shot, and re-matchmoved the trackers as the perspective was still wrong and the other reason was that one of my group members did the tracking wrongly by only tracking till frame 84 when we had 194 frames. I then brought it into maya and try to match the perspective manually by moving the grid.

The end result hopefully looks like this:

I then batch render the maya file out as an iff sequence and put it into Nuke to try compositing with the background which is the original footage. However in Nuke the well was shaking really badly on its own but it didn't happen in maya so i'm still trying to find out what happened.

Other than that, i helped Janice out with her lighting of the fence for the field to get the shadows correct based on Shaheed's shadow.

Today was mainly getting the model, the scale, the placement and the textures of the well correct.

That's all for today.

5th day of Studio Project.

Today we started the day with tracking our new footage, and by afternoon we finished tracking both shots 1 and 2, both shots were successful in getting the perspective and matchmoving correct so i think we were quite on schedule for this whole week.
After lunch we already exported the matchmover file to maya and placed CG objects inside our scene including fences, benches and gates, not the main objects but objects we decided to add into the scene. The robot wasn't finished with the rig so we couldn't put it into maya yet.
For me i spent most of my day supervising others with matchmoving, tracking, getting IBL panorama and some lighting while the rest of the day was spent to finish the textures for my well.
In the end it looked like a little like this with bump mapping included:

4th day of Studio Project.

Today in the morning we tracked the video that we shot yesterday just to make sure that the trackers worked well for us.
In the afternoon after lunch we decided to reshoot our videos as we chose not to use the videos we filmed yesterday as it was not good enough and the sun was not strong enough as well.
We shot all 3 videos yesterday and started tracking at around 5 when MrLeong came in to guide us and made sure objects weren't sliding around.
The main part of today was reshooting and finishing all our 3 shots.

Day 3 of Studio Project - 15.2.2012

Today was a pretty much unproductive day. In the morning i continued to track our trackers in matchmover for our second shot, but with the same result as yesterday, the grid just keep shaking for some reason. Later on Mr. Leong and Mr. Sangkar came to help out as well, but after hours of trying the problem just cannot be solved.

In the end we just decided to reshoot our second shot after lunch.

However after setting up the markers for our shot, the sun was blocked by the clouds and the sunlight was completely blocked out. We waited for quite awhile for the sunlight to reappear but the dark clouds became larger we were forced to shoot with no sunlight. This shot became really dull and flat.

We went to the field after that to shoot our third shot but similarly, the sun was out and the whole shot became pretty much dull and flat. After which it rained and we had to pack up and go back to the lab.

I did not track the footage that we had because i just thought it was pretty pointless since we're going to reshoot the next day.

Back in the lab i decided to start modelling the well that's gonna be used for our first shot and modelled according to a reference.

That was day 3.

Day 2 of Studio Project.

This morning we started on our well model, and i tried to download a model but i couldn't find a decent, detailed model of a well, so we decided to model a well ourselves.

After lunch we went to shoot our second shot, where the main character is walking and he sees the robot landing in front of him.

We took awhile setting up the tracking markers and had issues as to whether we would be able to track them so we had alot of takes. We even took this shot from different angles to try out different perspectives and wanted to ask Mr Leong which one would look better.
I also decided to take images for the Panorama for our IBL lighting of the robot at the scene.

After coming back from the shoot, we consulted both Mr Leong and Mr Sangkar to ask for opinions about both shots that looked like these:

first angle

second angle



In the end we decided on the first angle as the perspective is much better and both Mr Leong and Mr Sangkar agreed on the shot angle.

We started to track the trackers and other points in Matchmover immediately and found difficulties like the grid not matching the perspective and we had to retrack a few times with other points in the background.

When we finally found the correct tracks to matchmove, the grid found the perspective immediately after but the problem was that as the video goes along, the grid moves in a different way from the camera, alot more shaky than the camera itself. We retracked a few times again but the same problem just keeps coming up. So we ended off here by saving the file and wanting to consult Mr. Sridhar more tomorrow about this problem.

First day - 13 February 2012

First day of SP.The first thing after the briefing, we split up into our groups and discussed our idea. Regina and Janice thought about the ideas last week before SP started, so when we met up with Mr. Leong, we could decide on the idea fast.

After we finished our story idea, we discussed in our group and thought about the problems we might face and decided to find some solutions to our problems, especially location problems and some story ideas about how to establish our characters but in the end realising that it wasn't important.

I also started on a word document which contained all our ideas and references for our robot.

In the later part of the day we went to scout out places where we could shoot at as well.

test test

hellos