90%!! Let’s Do This!!
Holy. Crap. This week has been such a busy one - take a look at our accomplished list on the second slide. My initials everywhere!
Here’s some stuff I did;
- completely redid the first telescope sequence
- composited/integrated both Meteor FX
- I taught myself how to use Arnold shaders properly in Maya, resulting in a beautiful pistachio which I built the shader for! (interesting the displacement shader plug into a different one than the surface)
- built a new cranberry asset for Maya - our other one was for UE5 and not photoreal
- I started shot 03b from scratch and finished it in one day (this is my blog, I can brag a little bit)
- a rough color grade on all the shots (learned every aspect of OCIO colorspaces to do that which helped me transfer all the CG shots in correctly. I am grateful to understand colorspaces even at a beginner level now. Thank you to PIXAR on youtube.)
- comped out a shadow the actor had on the LED Volume wall for the entirety of shot 01A
- timing adjustments
- worked with our sound designer on step noises and logo twinkle
and whatever else I forgot, all to bring you this, Trailblazers Sahale Spot
Something fun I did was make sure the background of the telescope shots interacted with the objects properly, so I wrote an anti-twinkle nuke script which correctly got rid of star spikes from behind objects when the star isn’t visible. Watch the stars near the center when the cashew ring passes over them, their star spikes will dissapear!;
I also had to invent a way to get all of our CG telescope shots to act as if they were on the same background - that was a lengthy script, and motion blur saved my butt a little.
Look at my easy peasy nuke script - keeping things clean makes working in Nuke so enjoyable. Ignore my manual chromatic abberation at the end - chromatik was having a kernel error so I reinvented it in my own way. Only seven nodes, but I think I can merge the merges and do six. We’ll see. It’s like Minecraft’s redstone, and optimization is key.
Did you see Cassini in the background of my pistachio shot? She’s my favorite space probe and I was able to find the model on NASA’s website! I just had to build the shaders and materials for it. The pictures from her descent into saturn are beautiful if you get the chance to look.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/cassini-3d-model/
Thank you NASA.
Very importantly, we also need a credits slide at the end. Our additional cast list is as follows;
- Gahui Han, Cashew, Almond, Pistachio https://www.cgtrader.com/designers/strube-han-digital
- Jacob Kreppeneck, Sound https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-kreppeneck-768165251/
- Zoey Ball, Original Rock Props https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoey-ball-066a6b261/
- Professor Fowler & Professor Gaynor
- And of course, our invaluable selection of mentors from The Mill.
Something else fun was this custom cloud shader I built… Had to scratch it because it wasn’t possible to make it not look like mold in time. I think if I went more stylized and more volume to the clouds it could’ve looked like pretty clouds, but still not appetizing.
