Week 03
- Jan 26
- 2 min read
Week 3 the mentors gave some really great advice, and really helped guide our lookDev!
Critique notes:
Sh01
The ring rolls off too fast, slow it down
cool camera animation
Develop other camera transitions
Sh03
scale! Think more macro. Don't want the ring to be massive and mess with the established scale in relation to the clouds
Think about abstracting the cloud to avoid scale issues
Sh02
Bubbles
give a ‘thicker’ look
Research nested dielectrics
Poke around the Karma docs for information useful for bubbles
Change the lookDev of the bubble
darker/more water-like background,
stagger bubbles into one another
Sh05
smooth out the animation more
Karma render tips!
make sure you don't see a clock when rendering! It means Houdini is doing active calculations, which it doesn't need to do because you should be caching everything as a USD
Noelle (lookDev) started researching nested dielectrics to help with the look of the bubbles, and created a shader using it. I think it turned out looking awesome and I'm eager to hear what the mentors have to say, as it'll only improve the look!
Previous versions of the bubbles.
Nested dielectrics initial test by Noelle Robertson
Secondary test by Noelle Robertson
Noelle also made progress with the cloth textures, and switched out the 'corduroy' fabric with a silk fabric.
Satin shader by Noelle Robertson
Silk Shader by Noelle Robertson
I wasn't happy with the camera animation, so I switched the file to be in Houdini instead of Maya. The animation curves are much better to use in my opinion, though it took me a second to figure out how to 'parent' the camera to the ring's translation.
Since we have so much FX going on, especially for the water shot, Max Jokinen and I decided it would be smart to work with cryptomattes. I then spent some time figuring out the setup for Karma cryptomattes, and made a little guide to share with my team and other teams if they decide to use them as well! I haven't used them before for compositing, only for texturing, so it's be a fun experience!
When thinking about how to incorporate motion blur, I wondered if it would be a smart idea to use the motion vector AOV in karma, so that I have more control of it in the comp. It's something I should ask during next critique!