Animated Assets

May 24, 2023

Continuing to work on getting the light right as well as her shaders to include more SSS. I'm using planes with lambert shaders to create bounce light in order to reduce the amount of work needed in Nuke to get the final matching with the clean plate.

May 17, 2023

For this update, I've been working more on the lighting with trying to get a stronger fill light. I also added a little bit of motion blur and did some more color correction on the shadows so they feel more cool than warm. I still need to work more on the AOVs (diffuse direct, diffuse indirect, specular direct, specular indirect) because I've shuffled them out but I haven't actually merged them in just yet. I plan to work more on the shaders because I want to get more subsurface on the skin. Since I textured this model in Substance Painter, I have to go back and separate the aiStandardSurface shaders in Maya. At the moment, they're all in one main shader instead of separated by mesh group.

May 15, 2023

Started working on the lighting today, mostly just the placement of the sunlight (keylight). I plan to possibly add a second maybe even a third character to the scene depending on if time permits it. My main focus right now is to get accurate lighting and work with the AOVs. Once I get those elements working correctly, I will see if I have enough time to add more characters to make the scene more interesting as well as add depth.

May 13, 2023

I have finished retexturing my model from Mixamo in Adobe Substance Painter and readjusted the placement of my model as well as the timing of the video so it fits better with her animation. Maya tried to fight with me by crashing a bunch which I'm guessing was due to moving the rig around a lot but I ultimately got her in a good spot in the scene. I might go back and adjust her positioning a bit more because after watching the playblast a few times, she appears a bit too much in positive Y.

May 11, 2023

After thoughtful consideration, I decided to scrap the idea of using my own character for this project because of the fact that the UVs are not laid out properly and due to time constraints, I won't have much time to cut them and lay them out. I will be using a character from Mixamo instead however, I will be creating my own shaders rather than using the shaders provided with the model's FBX. I have continued to work on the camera tracking through both Nuke and Maya. I found it strange that the tracking points on the left side of the clean plate were unable to be solved so that being said, I will focus on keeping the animation more on the right side of the screen to get the best tracking result.

May 10, 2023

Above is the clean plate that I plan to use for my final project. I captured it using my Samsung phone camera and I had to go into Nuke to balance the exposure and gamma because it came out a little overexposed which unfortunately happens sometimes with my phone's camera. The benefit of using this location as the background is that it's a part of my dorm building so I can go out and measure anything I need to to get the precise distances of everything.

May 8, 2023

Here's the outline for my final project of VSFX 420. I chose to use my Link model that I created in a previous class as my character model to match to the scene. I modeled him in A-pose rather than T-pose because it was easier for me, however, it posed as an issue with Mixamo as Mixamo doesn't like A-pose very much. Luckily, I fixed the issue by readjusting the auto rig which allowed me to get the animation above to work without the sword and shield bending with Link's geometry.