Technique used

• Maya polygon models
• Base SSS shader used for character
• useBackground shader used to extract shadow on floor plane via alpha channel.
• Beauty pass: Mental Ray using IBL & raytraced shadows.
• Occlusion pass: Final gather occlusion
• Composited in Adobe After Effects CS5
• Color corrected with Red Giant Colorista on render passes and final correction pass on composition.
• Added Grain to match photo plate
• Faux depth of field on photo plate using box blur and lum key gradient layer
• Basic roto on photo plate to subtract foreground elements from blur
• Vignette using Colorista and lens flare  using AE.

here is a short workflow / write up on my experience working with image based lighting and final gather, hopefully you might find something useful out of it.

It all started when I created this image.

The cg was rendered with mental ray’s final gather and a dodgy image based lighting setup by mapping a 8bit image onto a sphere all in the one pass. There are obvious problems with the lighting and also there was no alpha matte which captured final gathers ambient shadows. The image was very roughly comped in photoshop and I had to manually mask in the ambient shadows, if you look closely at the hi-res image you will see what I mean when I say it was dodgy.

So it was decided that I should fix this image with a realistic lighting setup and to be able to get an alpha matte straight from maya which included all the shadow information.

Here is the final result with color & level correction, beauty pass rendered with Mental Rays IBL node using a 32 bit HDRI + an occlusion pass using final gather.

In my opinion the result is a much better composite with realistic lighting that matched the background plate. So onto how I did this;

[..Read This Entry]

Its been so long since I updated my blog, but lots has been going on!

Firstly I’d like to thank John Eyre and Diana Tu for their work in the Tafe project to remake the trap door in 3D. Unfortunately things did not play out as we all intended but I know we have all learned a great deal.

Now to some updates, I have successfully finished the music video for the track Narayan by The Prodigy, this was an epic project but Im proud to present the result.

On reflection there were lots of things that could have been polished more, however given the deadline and the length of the video in the brief I feel I did the best I could.

The 2nd completed project is the art gallery pre-viz / fly through. I had to model and texture the gallery model in under 1 week. The gallery is inspired by modern architecture design.

For the final semester of my Diploma in Screen and Media I will be creating my own short trailer for a animated pilot called “Zloki and Ze Pengs“, currently in production I will be posting more updates soon on the project, characters and design.