We learned a lot in our Compositing and Scene Finishing class, the first two weeks was learning the basics of tracking in SynthEyes and Nuke, for better CG integration. Because SynthEyes was new to us, the assignments were pretty basic. But in week three, we got to go back to Nuke and have a lot of fun with assets that, when put together, make an awesome result.
The assets given to us were like a bunch of puzzle pieces that create this shot of a women in a spacesuit turning her head. We had some technical requirements we had to meet, but we also had a fair amount of creative freedom, so long as it felt realistic. Lets see what I was working with.
Many of these assets were provided to us but I decided to use some of my own in a few instances, like the suit textures. I used a metallic red to get the look of Samus's suit from the Metroid series. She also has orange on the shoulders, but I didn't need to find another texture, I just had to isolate the particular areas in nuke with a roto and apply a hue shift. This theme came up later when I made some changes to the HUD sequence.
This was probably my favorite part of the project because I made the HUD adjustments in After Effects and Photoshop and it was really fun to try and match the style of the original HUD, from the font of the numbers to the pulsing of the icons. Even getting all the adjustments in the right place was a challenge because you have to take into account some of the distortion of the UVs. Something I chose to do that really helped get me close was overlaying the UVs on the HUD and then seeing how they all line up in the render, I also drew them out flat on a piece of paper to get an idea of how much room I have to work with (this is a very quick and dirty way but I found it to be quite helpful). After all the new additions were in place I took it back to Nuke to see if they lined up. It took about two tries until I got all the pieces to line up but now it all looked good, and in not too much time.
All the things I've mentioned above don't necessarily have to happen at the beginning of the project, in fact I didn't do them until the near end, because of Nukes node based workflow, you can just replace assets and the result will update on the fly. You can work on the comp with proxy assets while others might still be working on different textures and HUDs, say for a shot where you have multiple factions of soldiers with different camos. This does have a limit though, because when it comes time to do color correction and getting everything to match a certain tone, you need the final color in there.
So let's see some of the parts of my Nuke node tree on this project:
On the left I have the original image sequence of the girl in the suit getting shuffled out into four different passes, Diffuse, Reflection, Refraction, and Specular (the main comp backdrop node extends pretty far down). To the right of that is the indirect illumination, a lighting effect that can be done in Maya, but would add a lot to render times. It can be faked in Nuke so long as you have the proper passes to work with.
Next to those I have the diffuse color which is the camo and carbon fiber that is directly visible by the eye. Remember earlier I mentioned changing the shoulder pads without needing a new texture, this is where I did it (I boxed the two nodes that helped do that).
The scratches that are visible around the suit are created using the same method as the textures but they are used as masks for the spec because in real life scratches would disrupt the specular highlights. In CG not doing this would give a "too perfect" look that could break the immersion of the film.
After the four main passes the visor finally gets merged in. Adjusting the mix in the merge node can give the effect of the visor switching on, which adds more life to the scene. Using Hue Shift nodes here can change the overall color of the visor, this is how I changed the reference from blue to green. You can choose to take this even further by rotoing certain areas to add more colors to the visor, exactly like I did with the shoulders.
Once you add in the background you can then get into the finalizing process. This is where you add color correction, white balancing, clamping values, lens dirt, lens distortion, chromatic aberrations, and other finalizing steps. This section will be different for everyone and it's a lot of tweaking until you find what's right for you, or the production you're working on. In this step I made the footage a bit too blurry somewhere, this is the main thing that stands out to me. When working on this step you want to get a variety of eyes looking at it and on a variety of monitors, because this is the final result people see.
I learned so much with this project and in this class, and I'm still learning, because even though compositing is not my main focus, I see the importance of it in all disciplines, and value of having a good understanding of these skills.
I'll see you all next time with some animations I've been working on the past few weeks.
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