Week 6

7 days ago
3 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/a8a5c1_dafe7bfcee8443bba909866fd3aa37b9/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Priorities:

Render layers and AOV's
Overall lighting is flat
Retime shot 2
- Ferns should fall earlier and offset
- Vine should move slower
- Camera should not move as far down
Rework shot 4
- Keep movement of vines consistent (moving towards the headset)
- Change the camera angle to something more dynamic
- Make vines less linear
Rotate the background flower in shot 1 to be more front facing
Try relighting in Nuke
Do a grayscale comparison
Background in shot 1 and 2 are too dark

We now have a working ID pass. We are continuing to work on getting render layers.

Kyle said I should use them after I expressed having trouble with the edges of certain objects after applying depth of field. Since my problem is edges specifically, I set it up so there is nothing behind the objects in each layer. If this doesn't work, I will try to set it up as foreground, midground, and background.

How I would like to set them up:

shot 1 (3 layers)- flowers, grass, living room
shot 2 (4 layers)- living room bg (couch and wall), table + grass, flowers+ ferns, vine
shot 3 (4 layers)- vine, table + flowers, grass, everything else
shot 4 (4 layers)- living room, grass, vines, headset

AOV passes were using:

diffuse (direct and indirect)
specular (direct and indirect)
emission (direct and indirect)
zdepth
ID
P
N
albedo

February 16th, 2026

Today I worked on updating the comp for the new renders. Having the crypto mattes helped a lot. Right now the edges still aren't great after applying depth of field. However, they are better than last week and will hopefully get better when we render out the layers this week.

Shot 1 (raw render, glow, color grade, defocus)

Shot 2 (raw render, glow, color grade, defocus)

Shot 3 (raw render, glow, color grade, defocus)

Shot 4 (raw render, glow, color grade, defocus)

Continuity quilt:

Greyscale:

I did a rough comp of how we would like the vines lighting interaction to look.

February 14th, 2026

While waiting for renders, I focused on trying to test relighting. Professor Gaynor had done a demo in one of her classes so I had a starting point. However one of the tutorials I watched introduced me to the position to points node to better visualize where the light is being positioned. Relighting works for the file, but either the points information or the camera was not in the right position. I didn't have Professor Gaynor's file, so I started from scratch in Houdini.

In some of the tutorials I watched, it was stated that the position may not be right, but different expressions are needed to fix it depending on the software used. Since we are using Houdini and rendering out of Karma, that is how I set up my test.

AOV's needed: P, N, Albedo

I got P in world space and camera space just in case.

I exported the camera as an alembic and an fbx, but they came into Nuke differently. The fbx camera came in with the proper translation and rotation and the ground plane was correct. The alembic camera came in in the middle of the world and the ground plane had the translation and rotation.

For the fbx camera, the P in world space woks.

For the alembic camera, the P in camera space partially works. It's lined up, but it is way too cropped in.

Since the fbx works the best, I continued with that set up.

Node Graph:

Another issue I ran into was that the lighting on the sphere in 3D space was not completely accurate to the render. I'm going to keep playing around with it and apply it to the renders we get this week.