Week 9

Feedback:

• shot 4 fog is too fast

• shot 2 needs vine lighting interaction on table

• all shots need vine lighting interaction on grass

• physical vine interaction with grass is missing

• shot 1 flower should ease open

• shot 2 flowers should ease open and to a stop

• shot 1 foreground flower is the only one with particles. Add to other flowers

• shot 2 flowers need more variation (flowers 4 and 5 get muddy/dirty)

• shot 3 lighting interaction on floor is too green

• noise issues with shot 3

• vine and fern faceting

• vine intersecting with table in shot 4

• shot 4 can be reframed so the logo isn't on the product

• shot 4 has too much blue in the background

• shot 1 background flower has a pop

• push depth of field (shots 1 and 4)

• vines may be too bright and overpowers the scene a little

• use bokeh with a kernel for depth of field instead of z-defocus

• try neat for noise reduction instead of denoise

• add chromatic aberration

• add grain on top to make footage look less CG

• push vignette a little more 

• add cg fog so proper parallax is there

March 7th, 2026

Today, I am working on applying all the feedback for shot 1. The only specific feedback shot 1 got was to push the depth of field and refine the glow. The other feedback, adding chromatic aberration and grain, needs to be applied to every shot. Molly sent me a gizmo from Nukepedia (apGlow) that handles glow better than the one in Nuke.

It definitely allows more control, but I also found a problem in my original set up. Due to us having a magical light and a moon light, I was using a mask (erode + blur of flower cryptomatte) to keep the magic light in the center of the flower and fall off as gets to the edge. The falloff I implemented wasn't enough and paired with the lack of falloff from the glow node, the overall falloff of the glow didn't look good.

For shot 2, Kyle adjusted the work I did on the vine so it wasn't as bright and distracting in the scene.

Working from there, I adjusted the vine further. I also changed the colors of the 3 flowers on the right so they looked more like the 3 on the left, but still had variation. I applied the same set up for shot 1 to add depth of field, chromatic aberration, and grain.

I want the flowers to look similar in color, but still have variation. With how much purple there is, I am considering having another blue flower. I also changed the inner glow of a couple flowers because they felt too orange. I'm not sure if I like the blue flower though.

March 4th, 2026

Yesterday was the in person visit from Harbor Picture Company, Electric Theater Collective, and Calling All Talent. The team got really good feedback about all the progress we made in the last week. Having them visit in person allowed them to dive into our files and give more specific help. Beck and Billy looked at our Houdini and figured out why out render time was so high. We hope to have that resolved this week as there are some CG changes that can be made. Kyle and Molly looked at my Nuke script and showed me how they would do defocus and things that work along with it. They both use bokeh instead of zdefocus. They also add a kernel to the bokeh. They warned me that using bokeh is heavier, but the results are worth it.

*focal plane for bokeh needs to be really low to see (below 1)

This how they showed me to set it up. Molly put the reformat under the bokeh to ensure it was a square.

kernel --> after edge detect ---> grade of edge detect

decreasing white point of mask in grade --> red channel as alpha --> GodRays

Settings for GodRays1 - channel was changed from "all" to "rgba." red and green channels turned off. Scale was adjusted. Everything else is default.

defocus bokeh

The GodRays below the bokeh are set up the same way as above except the scale is 1.003 and it is adding chromatic aberration.