VFX 420 Technical Direction Compositing WIP BLOG

This blog is dedicated to my work-in-progress on the various projects I will be completing during the class VFX 420 Technical Direction in Compositing. I am taking this course during my winter quarter this year at SCAD.

Project 1 - Integrating a CG object into a real photograph.

- Day One -

Here are the original images, one with a cube and one without. I will use this cube to match the camera perspective in Maya.

Original Image Above, below are the reference images with the cube and the maya interface of the perspective set-up.

- Day Two and Three -

Day Two’s Model

Worked on lining up the lighting within the viewport and building up on the geometry of the stairs for future rigid body simulations. I decided on apples for the object I will place in the scene, and the goal is to have them cascading down the stairs. The apple model was both created and textured inside of Houdini and were transferred to Maya. The model was created via a combination of soft transforms and mountain nodes, and the texture was created inside the Copernicus node network.

Still have a lot of work to do to refine the model and texture in Maya, and work on the compositing aspect. Below is just the rough render from the viewport directly on a background. The occlusion layers and shadow layers still need to be created, as well as the grading of all layers.

Day Three’s WIP Rendering for Shadow/Lighting Set-up