EP Group Project – Week 11

Since my part is compositing, I had to wait while my group members worked on the 3D parts. Therefore, there are no records for weeks 8 to 10. The only activities I participated in were joining online meetings to divide roles, share progress, and discuss the slogan and layout for the final scene. Unfortunately, we forgot to record these meetings, so there are no visible records. During this period, I focused on my personal project and critical report.

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This week, we had an online meeting to share the progress of the CG part. I reviewed the tunnel, plant effects, and neon sign. We discussed the layout and materials of the tunnel to enhance its appearance through the camera. For the neon sign, the overall layout was the same as what we discussed in the previous meeting, but I thought the word “No” looked too big. I suggested making it smaller and showed an example using Photoshop.

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I received a draft scene of the tunnel CG. I tested it with a render, but I noticed some limitations in the light and shadows on the person. To address this, I asked Vio to add a plane and parent it to the camera so that the plane would receive light and shadows from the environment. I tried using this in Nuke, but it didn’t have any curve data, making it look unnatural. If I had more time, I could have matched the video using a mannequin or human head model. I received some advice from Gonzalo on how to composite it onto the CG tunnel. He advised mainly about the light surrounding the person, motion blur, and color grading. Keeping his feedback in mind, I composited the green screen scenes using the final CG data. I still need to try another method to create natural-looking light and shadows on the person.

I wasn’t sure how the pole’s shadow would fall on the person, so I tested it in Unreal Engine. I set up a similar light direction and observed how it looked. Then, I created the shadow using the Ramp node and merged it onto the footage. After finishing this part, I adjusted the saturation and contrast to make it more vibrant and vivid. This is the result of the green screen compositing. One piece of feedback from group members was to make the shadow on the face in the front scene less intense, so I’ll adjust it later.

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For the neon sign scene, I think there was some miscommunication because the draft was different from what we agreed on in the previous meeting. Additionally, there were problems such as mismatched perspectives. I told him to render it again and match the perspective. However, he mentioned that rendering takes about 16 hours. I couldn’t understand this, so I asked Manos about it. He suggested creating the sign in 2D instead. Since this scene has a fixed angle, it doesn’t need to be in 3D. I agreed with this and tried creating the neon sign in After Effects. This is what I made in After Effects. Even though I created this, since we allocated this work to Wayne, we can try both versions and choose the better one later.

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For the scene where he comes out of the tunnel, I had to replace the sign behind him. I tried using the PlanarTracker in Nuke to track the surface, but unfortunately, his head covers it about half the time. The tracking data after his head covers it didn’t analyze well. Therefore, I had to adjust the CornerPin manually, which caused the sign to wobble, although I tried to fix it as much as I could. The next challenge was matching the light. Since it was filmed in a bright place, the screen sometimes blinks due to high exposure. To address this, I added an Exposure node and added keyframes when it blinks. To match it more accurately, I adjusted each R, G, and B channel. It looked like a subtle change, but it took much more time than I expected.

Now, our project is almost done except for the leaf animation. Although we have only a few days left for submitting, I hope I can finish everything well.