Week 4

Week 3: R&D

This week, my team and I started dividing up our tasks and finalizing our shot lists. Earlier last week, we were able to all go out and shoot some HDRis and Camilo was able to get some preliminary background plates filmed for shots 2 and 3.

We all really liked the pink/red glow that we got from the neon signs outside of Leopold's and Trustees Theater, so we did decide to stick with location. While we enjoyed the cars on the sides of the road for giving our miniature car a sense of scale, we agreed that it would probably be best to come back in the early morning while it was still dark to avoid the Broughton Street crowds and traffic.

Once the shots were broken up, we were able to form a better list of what effects were needed for each shot. I'm currently responsible for the tire mark transfers on the sketchbook pages as well as the exhaust and smoke coming from the miniature car, both in the first shot. I started with the tire transfer and developing a solution for how to add them in. First, I started with a very simple rotation on the tires and a basic keyframed movement on the car body to be similar to our references. My first instinct was to start with an attribute transfer between the tires and the paper using a color attribute.

Obviously the tire marks need to be permanent rather than just under the tires. My roundabout way of doing this was by scattering points based on the color attribute that I used for the transfer, then selecting only the points that corresponded with where the tires made contact with the paper (in this case blue) using a group expression node. I then added a particle trail node with the length set high so that the points scattered would stay across the pages.

This result was very sparse, so I added a point replicate node after the trail node to get more detail. I then promoted the color attribute to primitives and added a color node after just to give the points some more saturation.

My other approach to this would be using a SOP solver node to keep track of the transfers from previous frames, but then realized it might be more efficient to do this effect in compositing/post production. So, I tabled this effect and moved to the exhaust.

For the exhaust, I found a few up close references (mainly this one, found here). For the miniature, I figured it would be important that the exhaust looked like it was coming from the actual exhaust pipe. I grouped together the geometry for both exhaust pipes and tried using the actual geometry as the source for my smoke using the pyro nodes volume scatter, which worked okay, but I thought I might get additional control by using a particles as the source for the pyro.

Using the same first approach, I used the grouped exhaust pipes as the source emitter for the particles. Since the car was animated, the particles moved along with the car; however, I was getting some strange "puffs" or banding, even with a high number of particles. Increasing the substeps slightly on the POPnetwork fixed this. Once fixed, I added a bit of noise using a POPwind node and some slight variance in the y and z axes in the attributes tab of the POPsource and I was ready to feed the point into a pyro node.

Substeps: 1

Substeps: 4

To feed my points into the default shelf tool, I used a dopimport node, fetching only the geometry from the POPobject node, then set the node in my pyrosource node to keep input. From there, it was just a matter of experimenting with the parameters inside the pyro look node and the pyro solver itself (the incoming visual is strictly to see how the pyro is behaving, NOT for look development).

Of course this still has a long way to go, but I went ahead and rendered this take using the HDRi Camilo made for us. I added some proxy geometry that mimics the table we plan to use to shoot this plate (both shape and material) as well as the sketchbook pages.

There's definitely a lot of work ahead of me, but I think I have a solid start to the exhaust on this shot. Next week, I plan to continue developing this, as well as start some trial runs with the workflow from Houdini to Maya so we can utilize Eaza's texturing work. Our team also plans on further developing the overall aesthetic of our commercial to be more cohesive.

Week 2: Ideation and Previs

My team, Team Future, has been working together over the last week to create a cohesive story. Our commercial, "The Power of Imagination", focuses on the imagination of a young child. The child's drawings are full of magic and bring their toy car to life.

So far, we are drawing reference heavily from Ant-man and the Wasp and Back to the Future for general guidance on look development. For a closer look into our ideas, I've attached our pitch below.

My goal for this week is to focus on the magic particles arising from the sketchbook pages. I added preliminary particles in our previs video just for the sake of showing where they would occur, but they are far from perfect. Our team as a whole will be shooting the background plates and hope to have a more clear and solidified previs as soon as possible.