(1).png)
Week 9 / Wrap-Up
- hankim28
- Mar 4
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 7
Organized by newest to oldest
Team Members:
Hannah Kim - FX
Yiyi Long - FX
Deja Smith - Compositing
Emma Wei - LookDev & Texturing
Fanchen Xing - Lighting
Week 10 To-Do:
SIGGRAPH Poster & 4k renders
Mentor / Professor Feedback:
Fog volume
Grass interaction
Fern branch faceting
3/07
Today and yesterday was spent correcting the grass. Our old vellum setup worked fine for shot01 because of the lack of velocity coming from the collisions. However, this was not the case for shot03.
The green and yellow backdrops are the original grass setup for shot03. I reworked my approached and asked a CFX student in our class, Mia Laplanche (https://mialaplanche.wixsite.com/mia-laplanche-portfo) for some pointers! She suggested rearranging my vellum nodes to 'obj' level and assigning the look through "guidegroom" and "guidesim". The pink backdrop is the new sim imported back into the geo level:
Unfortunately, this grass interaction will not be shown in our final project presentation. USD exports keep crashing and from my troubleshooting I've come to a pause that it's due to the density of the scene. It would take more time than what I current have to re-optimize. So for now, it exists in the blog and I will pivot my priorities towards our 4k renders.
The simulation was converted into a higher sample rate to get a smoother look, but it was too much for the USD. I reduced the samples to 4 points per blade and it still breaks. I would like to continue working out this after the quarter is over. Hair sim is super interesting!
The vine in shot04 was updated to not animate through the table:
3/04
The mentors visited the class in-person this week! They all gave amazing suggestions and helped us through our projects one-on-one. (It was surreal seeing you guys!)
The question of our fog was brought up. Our group's compositor was approaching it through 2D and it did offer awesome results, but the group was looking for more interaction inside the environment. Mentors suggested a simple fog volume inside the CG scene. This would offer realistic lighting, parallax, and artistic control. Here's our previous fog for reference:
This is the foundation of the fog. I will be separating each section out with VDB clips based on camera positions to optimize our scene. With the allotted time we have left, I need to also focus on our final list of priorities.
This FX was achieved through the Axiom solver. It gave me faster, more realistic solutions. It's very interesting, but I'll be holding myself back from deep-diving into the add-on until the quarter is over. Here's the setup:
I'll continue to work on this up until Friday. It will be a separate render pass for comp so none of the original scene is effected if we pivot.
Updated shot02 ferns. I tripled the geometry count so we don't get the faceting on the edge of the branches.
The mentors mentioned that the fern in the back looked stiff when it finished unfurling. I modified the wind motion assigned to the sim to increase the 'sway' of the overall fern. Here are some of the options:
Comments