Need another pair of eye's...

#1

Been trying to do this shot, it is in a bad state and was wondering if someone had ideas on how to rescue it, here it is (23MB): http://milady.reaperman.org/sequence-to-post-lovelondon-fcp-.mov

Spent ages getting the dynamics to work as Maya is prohibitively slow with its built in dynamics and the plugin I ended up with had serious limits, so the lighting and compositing has kinda gone out of the window. You will also notice what a terrible plate I am working with, that’s what happens when you end up recording the shot on a D90 because the battery for the main camera is back in the house. (Not that the Nikon D90 is a bad camera just that I am not very good with it)

The lighting for the shot (in Maya) is very flat with a high ambient light which I know is a bad idea but it got me the closest match that I could get quickly inside Maya. I can go back to the whole lighting again if you don’t think this is salvagable without it, but we are on a very tight timescale and have to get this out the door ASAP even though its a non-paid for shot (which is lucky considering how bad it is right now).

Any help would be appreciated, we are using Shake for compositing so you can be specific with your responses if they are Shake based.

Thanks for any help you can give,

Gary J.

#2

What do you have for render passes out of maya? You may be able to get away with not going into maya again if you have alot of passes.

I think is over all the black levels of the phones in general are to dark. You may want to lift the blacks a little on the phones to match. Also something you can try is this. I added a little color push to warm into the phones and faded them over the original in a test in photoshop. This warmed up the digital to match the warm surrounding the road but also desaturated the phones a abit adding to the realism of the shot.

If you have the layers you may want to feather the shadow a bit on the right of the mass of phones, if you look at your plate no other objects have shadows like that.

All of these things are and easy fix in shake, at the most a little roto. As for the animation, I think your good there. I have spent a bit of time playing with dynamics and I think its very believable for for the majority of viewers.

#3

I went into shake real quick to show you what I mean, the video is H.264 so you may to play with the gama but I think it sells a little better. The only thing I didnt add was chromatic abberations and artifacting that was either from the camera ore compression.

I did all I said in the previous post plus added a little grain to the cg and some subtle light glints on the spec of the phones. All with just roto shapes instead of having render passes.

The chromatic abberations would really help sell the cg in the integration, though. Give it about 10 minutes to upload to my webserver before you download it.

cheers!

www.blurred-pixels.com/host/test.mov

#4

Just wanted to say thanks a lot!

Really appreciate you taking the time to not only make the first post but also to put the effort in and make a completed render. Very cool.

Looks a lot better with all the work you put in. We are now trying to reproduce the work you did and get something that looks similar. (I hadn’t done render passes first time round but I am running them off now, fortunately the lighting is extremely simple)

Will send you a PM when it is all done so you can see the completed piece.

Gary

#5

Glad to help and I look forward to seeing your final comp.

#6

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