SCAD X The Mill - Eaza Shukla

This week I wanted to work on the mentors' suggestion to turn on the headlights and tail lights of the car. I selected geo inside the headlight and turned it into a mesh light. I adjusted the Intensity and Color Temperature to get the desired look. Adding this light brought some noise to the render, so I also increased the Samples for this mesh light. After that, I created another render layer that would help add the effect of this light on the road in the live-action plate. I applied a black aiStandardSurface shader to the ground plane. I increased the Roughness of this shader, since the road wouldn't be reflective. I turned off the Primary Visibility of the car and Light Visible for the mesh light as Layer Overrides. I used a mesh light for the tail light as well.  This is what the renders looked like, with the headlights and tail lights turned on, in Camilo's comp.

This week I wanted to work on refining the lookdev for the tire region of the car because it occupies considerable screen space in Shot 04 and Shot 05. I added a bump map to add some logo details and extra ridges to the camera facing side of the tire. I used aiNoise to procedurally create another bump map to break up the surface of the tire so it didn't feel uniformly smooth. Next, I added some details to the shader for the brakedisc. I created an opacity map to make the holes that would be caused by the brakes. To make circular scratches on the brakedisc, I connected aiCellNoise with Worley1 pattern to aiNoise and used it as a map for specular Rotation. This is what these lookdev updates looked like. Before   After

My first priority this week was to troubleshoot some of the render issues that came up in the latest batch of renders. One problem we were facing was that in Shot 01 and Shot 02, the motionvector aov was empty even though Motion Blur was turned on in Render Settings. I tried turning on Deformation and that seemed to give some information in the motionvector aov. But it also caused the wheels to shrink in the beauty render. I tried checking in the Maya scene to see if the rig was working and the scene was assembled correctly. Everything looked fine. So I decided to select all the controllers and bake the animation. And this seemed to fix the issue. The other problem was in Shot 05, where the car disappeared from the render after a certain frame even though it was visible to the camera in Maya. I checked if there was enough light at the car position, if the car was going through an image plane or if the car was outside the skydome region. None of those seemed to be the case. So I switche...

This week I created another render layer to capture the reflection of the car on the windows of the building in Shot 05. I created a plane and matched its position to the position of the windows in the live-action plate. I applied a black colored aiStandardSurface shader, with 0 Roughness, to this plane- so the MergePlus node can be used in comp to add this Reflection pass. I turned off the Primary Visibility of the car geo as a Layer Override.  Since this plane was also reflecting the HDRI from the skydome light, I used light-linking so the skydome light only affected the car and not the plane. I added extra area lights to this render layer to brighten the reflection and provide enough light information for compositing. This is what the reflection pass looked like on the live-action plate.

This week I had to consistently set up the maya scenes for all five shots and render them on the farm with the latest animation. I imported the referenced car rig and latest animation file into my scene where the lighting was set up. I added the car geo to the Beauty render layer and turned off the Primary Visibility for the ground plane with a Layer Override. I also added the following AOVs that would be necessary for compositing. For the Shadow render layer, I applied the aiShadowMatte shader to the ground plane. I used the Attribute Spreadsheet to turn off Primary Visibility of all the car geo and create a layer override. I used the File Path Editor to make sure all the files were pathed correctly and then submitted all the shots to the farm. This is what our commercial looked like at this stage.