SCAD X The Mill - Eaza Shukla

 My first priority this week was to address an important note from the mentors. It was pointed out that the car paint looked very ambient and the range of values between the highlights and shadows didn't have enough contrast. Initially, I thought the problem might have been with the Ai Car Paint shader and the way I was using saturated colors for Light Facing Color and Flip-Flop in Specular. But upon further inspection, with Professor Gaynor, we realized that it was because of the way the HDRI was set up in my Lookdev rig. After I used the following .hdr setup with a clamp on a geodome, the shaders looked better. I then moved on to setting up HDRIs and lighting for all the shots with the latest layout and animation. Since our team felt that Shot 05 was the highest priority shot, that's the one I approached first. For this shot I wanted to try using a skydome with the HDRI, so I plugged an HDRI exr file into the Arnold Skydome Light. I tried adding an aiClamp node but I liked th...

 Our first task this week was to shoot the final live-action plates and HDRIs. Based on test footage and notes from mentors during the preceding weeks, we decided to shoot during the night on a neon lit street- a night sky would really help exhibit the FX and the reflections of neon signs on the car made for a beautiful scene. This is what our previz looked like with the plates shot by Camilo- Since Shot 01 and Shot 02 have a static camera, I aligned the CG camera using a reference plate with a wooden cube. I then moved on to continuing work on the Lookdev for the car. I first wanted to try to resolve some noise issues I noticed creating the turntable for Week 2. It seemed like a lot of noise was originating from the Flakes in the Ai Car Paint shader I had made and after adjusting its Density and Roughness I was able to reduce the noise. I also started testing how the Ai Car Paint would interact with the saturated HDRIs and what the reflections would look like. Based on that, I mad...

To work on the clarity of our idea for the car commercial, where a toy car transforms into a real life-size car that can fly, I made a storyboard animatic so we could breakdown the actions and screen direction before working on final previs. We then assisted Camilo in shooting some test hdri and plates. Using these hdri I started working on the look development rig and turntable. I collected specific references for the materials and created shaders to get a general sense of the base attributes of the car. Turntable-  

Our team brainstormed ideas for our pitch for a car commercial. We all wanted to create something that had a child-like sense of wonder, making use of fantasy elements. Some references we looked at early on were the following clips from Back to the Future and Ant-Man. We decided to go with the idea of a toy car transforming into a real life-size car that can fly. We proceeded to collect references for the vehicle, location and time of day. I created the following concept sketches, based on previs by my teammates Elizabeth and Camilo, to figure out the colors and lighting. This was our pitch deck-