We had an online meeting with my teacher over the past three weeks, from which I made some adjustments to the paper and documented the results of the final term 3 paper and the next steps in this post. The essay also successfully completed the Literature Review, Draft Chapter 5, and Draft Chapter 6 sections, and the Literature Cited section also documented 21 valid references in standard form.
This Word file below is the document with more words than required, but given the three weeks is more than enough time, a shorter version will follow, for example, eliminating the section on the main point of conflict in the work (150 words or so)
This week I completed the entirety of the Fall of London project, successfully synthesising the flames as well as tweaking the values of the various values such as the nuke explosions, and had my assignment critiqued by Gonzalo in class, who asked me to make a few tweaks later on
Here’s the full video presentation
I added the nuke fallout cloud and made it appear behind the nuke mushroom cloud, here I used the built-in tools in the node to make a change in the order of the masks.
Then I made smoke trails on the windows, mainly using the Grade node and the Roto node, and imported the flame material into NUKE in 3D mode
I then made a Glow node for the flames, but I found a softer alternative that automatically calculates the environment around the object to generate a more realistic effect
It’s a smoky wall effect.
What follows are some minor corrections I made after my teacher’s critique of my work in class. Firstly the nuke explosion, Gonzalo noticed on the big screen that some of the debris ran through the mask and into other places
Then there’s the flaming windows, and I’ve augmented the effect of the flames on the surroundings
Then I redid the trace on the shard building, which is now jittery, and the changes will fix some of this
There’s also the bright part of the bomb when the nuke explodes, and Gonzalo and I said that flame compositing is one of the most complicated steps in NUKE because we don’t know how this flame will actually look to the human eye, especially with explosions, and it’s generally hard for designers to match the brightness of the centre of the explosion. But I still think the centre of my explosion is currently too dark, and then the rest of it is too dark, so I tweaked it again
I mainly used the Keyer node to draw in the brightest part of the inside, and then used the Grade node to control the brightness and colour of the brightest part.
Then I found that the ColorCorrect node would cause white edges to appear on the edges of the screen, and by looking at the Blue channel of the screen, I found that it was because changing the value of the highlights would make the black part of the edges turn blue (because the original value there was not 0, so it would be very obvious when the contrast was adjusted upwards), so I cancelled the adjustments related to the ColorCorrect node.
This post is about the creation of the mobile plant and the NUKE compositing, with a video of this stage (at the moment this clip is 100% my personal production)
Our team uses GITHUB to record every time a team member makes a change to the project and uses it for important questions (within the project). Here is the link: Issues · Sturmt1ger/The-Bag-Choice (github.com)
First, I converted the video to EXR format because I wanted to export it as a background and Redshift doesn’t support PNG sequences.
Then I 3D tracked the camera and subtracted the character mask I created at the beginning to get an unmasked scene data. (I also masked it to expand it, since NUKE still reads the extra data. Finally I tested the 3D scene in NUKE
in NUKE
Then in Houdini I made a simple material because I needed to test the Redshift renderer (this was the first time I used it, the renderer is extra software in Houdini so I spent a lot of time installing and learning it)
Then I found some models of flowers and grasses in Bridge, and I tested the materials in C4D first (because the models contain multiple subdivision levels)
Then I integrated multiple models into Houdini.
Here you’ll see that this haystack contains multiple models because I wrote a function expression when converting particles to something else, and in the expression the particles are converted to three integers, and the three integers point to three different OBJs, so we get a random haystack!
Then I tried to render a frame and I can see that the first image has strange colours, this is because the Redshift render window uses OCIO colour grading. However, I didn’t find where I could adjust it, and I’ll need to keep working on it later, as I have no way of seeing what the colours actually look like on the monitor. The second image is the result after exporting to EXR compressed format, the colours are now correct
Then I added an expression on the liquid emitter about the time, $FF> to indicate that it works when the number of frames is greater than X, because the environmental scene is in the second half of the shoot
Then I added steps to the scene and adjusted the position (this step requires patience because you don’t know what the adjusted things look like in the render window, because these items in the picture are not rendered, they only exist as volumes (hidden) in the scene)
Looks better now!
Then I started to create the lawn under the character’s feet, I still used the same technique but switched an emission source and modified the viscosity values
Then I adjusted the position of the various parts for a long time to get the right trajectory in the video
I then put the two videos into NUKE and composited them and adjusted their colours with some depth of field and motion blur effects.
I then spent a lot of time on the rendering and eventually I imported the result into NUKE
Then I noticed that there was no shadow on the ground when the character was walking, so I shifted the original character mask and recoloured it
This video is the current progress of this clip, all the following visual effects were done independently by me (There’s currently a bug where part of the Flood Plants fluid is supposed to flow behind the tree, not in front of it, which I’ll tweak at a later stage)
