Sunday, 26 February 2017

Green screen shooting with the 4K PANASONIC DVX200

Filming with the 4K Panasonic DVX200 in the green screen studio at DJCAD.
Malcolm Finnie was absolutely brilliant and so was Kerry Flemming.
I printed off my storyboards, including the timings for each shot. Once the camera was set up, I filmed all shots that included that particular camera angle (therefore the action wasn't shot necessarily in sequence).
I had a copy of my Previs on a pen drive, so could have it playing on a loop on the TV monitor,
This was particularly for lighting changes, where the sun comes out in the time-lapse footage, in case I needed to shield the lights (red heads) with a lighting flag.
In the event, I didn't need to do that, as the lighting effects will be done in post production, but none the less it was good to have it as back up reference. I used one stand alone red head light (as shown in the pics) to give a rim light to Kerry's face.
At one point I asked Malcolm if the tear in shot 19 could be created in post-production. "No." was the answer. So it was up to Kerry to produce a tear.....which she did!!

I'd allocated 2 days for filming, but with a great actress, Malcolm Finnie and lots of preparation we wrapped in 1.5 hours!
Next the shots were downloaded from the camera (bottom right pic) and uploaded into Adobe Prelude. 
Backed up onto two computer server systems at uni, plus my portable hard drive.
All of this will be comped together in Nuke....
Paper copies of the shot lists below were on set, so all of us could refer to them for shot set up, and where the CGI elements would be in comparison to the live action. Plus these lists were crucial to give Kerry a good idea of eye-line and how long to hold a pose for...





Sunday, 19 February 2017

Modelling a 3D tree

So on reflection, the idea of having the ice men on top of a snowy hill doesn't work. The hill would also need to melt and I then miss out on the shots of the dripping ice men onto the ground.
So I've decided to place a model tree, into the silver cloud time lapse footage...

And! Have managed to model this tree - sooooo simple, using cylinders, lattice deformers and duplicates of the same branch...all snapped onto the main tree trunk with the 'make object live' command...

Now to UV map it and make sure the resolution is the same for all the branches....


Friday, 17 February 2017

Snowscape textures in Maya

Applying a Blinn material and Stucco 1 texture to create a displacement map. At the default imported scale, the stucco 'noise' is too much.
To scale the map, select the texture node in Hypershader, and find it in your viewport (hard to see, but should be a dark green cube) and then scale the texture node to scale the size of the map. The bigger the pattern the less the disturbance.
Change the stucco attributes in Hypershader, to change the red/blue to black/white
 Applying a snow node in Hypershade. Quick render test, placing the mia physical sun in a similar location to my original footage

Maya rigging complete: hierarchy in Outliner

Rigging completed!
Showing the joint and controller hierarchy in Outliner, foot rolls, finger rotation and all controllers...
Now for the bind...




Thursday, 16 February 2017

Maya sculpt tool: sculpting a landscape

Defining shapes, against a referenced image plane....
Using a polygon primitive plane, and component mode, soft selection 'B' button, to create peaks and troughs....

Soft select the plane edges; and scale down on the Y axis, to make sure the edges are flat. (this is good practice, if you need to duplicate the mesh to create additional landscape.
Triangulate mesh. Select Y axis + CTRL to lock onto Y axis, adjust the soft selection brush size [B button] and move (whilst Y axis is locked) to create ridges

Duplicate the mesh and sculpt additional landscape, to suit the camera set up

Wednesday, 15 February 2017

Creating a landscape in Maya; using a polygon plane and the sculpt tool

I've checked that the footage I shot at Glenshee at the weekend is suitable, both from a script and technical point of view...and it is.
I'm following the tutorial below (Stathis, what a star, sent me the link) and am recreating the snowy hill using a polygon plane and the sculpting tools in Maya....and a still from the footage, imported as an image plane for reference...


                                           


Monday, 13 February 2017

Timelapse footage, OnePlus 3T

I shot some extra timelapse footage at the weekend...to keep things simple, and rather than trying to film snow laden trees, my idea is to use this shot as the background for when my character has a sense of shift and turns to face the light...
I'll recreate the snowy mound in Zbrush and Maya and then light it to match the real thing...