Jack Kilyan - Digital Matte Painting Projection Project

#21

Good progress, keep it up! Looks like you’ll have a fair bit of patching to do to fix all the stretching / texture duplication, but it’s on the right track.
Hope it’s still going well, keep us updated!

#22

Hey Panupat thank you very much! I’m glad you are enjoying seeing my project evolve! :slight_smile:

Hey again Nick, definitely lots of patching in this shot, I’ve realized you were definitely correct when mentioning before how having a more complex geo can cause me some issues! Lesson learnt for the future!

Anyhow here is a little update on where I am, I wish I had been able to update this thread sooner, but with a big group project going on at University along side this one, I haven’t quite had as much time as I would of liked!

But enough of the excuses :slight_smile:

So here is where my shot is at so far:-

//youtu.be/00fpgSruHko

I have all the geo covered now, but the matte work is still very rough and has a lot of patching needed, and some basic fixes with blending seams and such. I’ve also played around with creating physical clouds in Maya using the maya water dynamics, this way I could have my camera physically flying through some cloud coverage and bursting through it as it reaches over the ridge. :slight_smile:

Aswell as the clouds I rendered out a depth pass as an animation and comped that onto of my scene. It’s nice to create some world atmosphere ontop of my matte work in Nuke but I realize I’m limited to the shape of my geo for the depth pass, which isn’t really that good if I then cut out the geo shape using alphas in my matte.

Here’s my current Nuke tree:-

So it’s starting to come together now, and hell I’ve learnt so much in this process which has been great!

I’m currently rendering out some CG pillars to comp in which I hope to have in this week. I’m also heading to FMX in Stuttgart in 2 weeks time so I hope I can have this shot done by then so I can show it to recruiters!

What I feel like I have left to do:- Patch stretched areas / Improve blending between some photo elements / Comp in CG assets / More clouds but on cards within Nuke / Final grade and grain.

Does it sound like I am missing anything important out of that?

Again a big thank you to everyone who has helped me over the past couple of months, I wouldn’t be here without you! :slight_smile:

#23

Hi Jack, looks like you are cracking on, you’ll have some long days ahead to get this finished in 2 weeks, but getting it prepped for fmx is a good plan, it’s a good time for DMP again at the moment.
At this point you probably want to start focussing in on what you can do to get the shot looking photoreal. Do you have a master image that you are using as a reference to match to in terms of color and lighting? I find its usually good to have one image that captures what you are after even if your layout is very different. If you can post up a ref that sums up what you want the shot to look like we can probably help you more to get the shot looking great :slight_smile:

N

#24

Hi Nick, thank you, yeah I have a few images, I’ll explain my thought process. :slight_smile:

Originally the image I attempted to base my matte work off was:-

I really liked the saturated colours and that rich blue sky. Obviously this image is a pano and has a ton of lens distortion so I found I didn’t think I couldn’t use it for much matte work.

Honestly I found trying find suitable images (over 4k pixels) of the himalayas pretty hard. I’ve been through google/flickr and cgtextures a ton of times. :slight_smile:

So I’m not sure if I can really achieve that initial photo anymore, so I’ve been working a lot with this image:-

Very different to the original one I chose but I found I could find more images similar to this (not just in colour but also lighting and exposure).

I’d love to hear what you think would be a good path to go down from here for the next two weeks. :slight_smile:

Thank you again so much for all your help! I cant tell you how much I appreciate it!

#25

So I finished rendered some of my CG assets this morning, I used the original Sun and Sky from my initial Maya file to light them, they’re still not CC’d correctly but I figured it’s probably best to get my matte work all solid and then CC compared to that.

//youtu.be/1Gg_1vLbFiU

Just a quick comp in to help see how the shot is coming together :slight_smile:

#26

Hey all!

With FMX only a few days away I thought I’d show you my ~finished~ piece. I put finished in those wiggly bars because it’s not quite as finished as I originally had planned all that time ago when I first started this project but I think I was probably a bit ambitious with everything I had planned!

Anyway I may continue to work on this piece after FMX and try to improve it, or I may just take all the knowledge I’ve learn’t and apply that to another piece and see how much I can push that :slight_smile:

Thanks a huge bunch to everyone whose helped me on this forum, especially Nick!

//youtu.be/VRvp6xwPFPI

Thanks again everyone, hope you like the final video and breakdown, would still always love to hear critiques and comments :slight_smile:

#27

Hi Jack,

Absolutely no problem at all! As you can probably tell, I had hoped to offer a bit more support but unfortunately you embarked on this project at the time I was busy moving myself and my family across the world so time was a bit of a luxury.
Great to see that you completed it though, if you want to return to this at some point I’m sure we’ll be able to push it a step further, and you should definitely post up any new projects you start in the future.

#28

Hi Nick,

No worries, I really appreciated all the time you gave to me already!

This project was definitely a HUGE learning curve, but I’m really excited to start on more DMP projects in the near future.

I actually spoke to Chris Jaques from D-Neg last week at FMX and he mentioned to me you were moving so I have to double thank you for the time you gave me, it’s really awesome of you!

Really hoping to work my way to a runner position at D-Neg in the future and learn from the best!

To finish this thread I’ve entered the CG Student Awards:

http://www.cgstudentawards.com/student-of-the-year-vfx-anim/jack-kilyan

So to anyone who is viewing this thread if you could check out this project/my entry that would be awesome!

Special thanks again Nick, hope to speak again soon. :slight_smile:

#29

Not a problem, happy to help!
That’s cool that you met Chris, he’s a good guy, we worked together quite a lot in the past when he was still working as an artist. We actually started at Dneg just a few weeks apart… time flies!
Hope FMX was fun, i’ll definitely have to make it out there one year, it looks like a cool event! Good luck with the CG Student awards, I don’t know much about how that runs, but I hope your entry goes down well!