WEEK 5
- Shannon Taylor
- Feb 11
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 22
SETTING UP THE SHOT...
The mentors had great advice this week, especially with with shot 1. To start, I want to arrange shot one to be less busy as suggested by Kyle, but I want to maintain an interesting composition. I think this is extremely important because the first shot sets the mood for the rest of the ad. In addition, Billy recommended thinking about a top-down view of the scene to better understand how each object sits in the space.
I began this process by assessing the current set from a top-down view.
My first impression was that everything is set up in a very narrow and short orientation.
I then noticed the flowers are put together fairly densely and close to the camera.
I decided that the spacing of each prop next to each other would be my first priority.
I made some initial changes, spreading the flowers out more and rotating the branch. I then looked at how everything sat in the camera. This time, the shot is opened up more, but the upper right felt off. I wanted the flowers or branch to go all the way up to the corner.
Iteration 1
Top-down view Render view
Iteration 2
Top-down view Render view
Iteration 3
Top-down view Render view
Iteration 4
Top-down view Render view
FLOWER SHADER...
The flower shader needed a lot of work. During the last week, there were many issues with getting the animated flowers to go through to the render farm. Everyone on the team gave suggestions and tips until I was able to iron out the bumps in the render settings. With that out of the way, Wei added thickness and fixed any normal issues on the flower, then sent me a lower poly version for texturing.
The biggest concern with the shader is the subsurface scattering. The mentors observed that there was something making the petals seem dirty, which is where I need to find a work-around. I started out by adjusting the vein texture map, as suggested by Professor Gaynor, so that I could have more control over the map when making adjustments.
Original map New map
I started with trying opacity and observing the clarity of the render.
Test section Test with front lighting Test with back lighting
After seeing the renders for this week, I'm severely disappointed with the bump mapping on the petals. Unfortunately, our render times were very long - the average time being ~1hour 45mins, and many frames hitting the 2 hour kill on the render farm. For this reason, I was unable to re-do the shader in time for the final submission for critique.
hen made many iterations of the texture map to see how they affected the renders.
Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3
Iterations 1 and 2 continued to have issues with the "dirty" appearance in the petals, so I tried to make it more simple with iteration 3. My new problem was unwanted lines around the edges of the shader. I then rendered again with higher sampling to see if anything would change.
Iteration 3 render Render with higher sampling
Sampling wasn't the issue, so I removed the texture maps completely to see if it was something caused by the shader or the map.
Seeing no strange lines, I went back to the texture map and got rid of any additional lines aside from the main veining, and get rid of any gray values.
I then put applied the new map one at a time to transmission, SSS, and bump to look for any issues.
Transmission map SSS map Bump map
Pleased with the results, I then rendered with all maps plugged into the shader, then once again with the HDRI without color correction.
Shader under color corrected HDRI Shader under non-corrected HDRI
Next, I rendered the shader on the actual flower model. The render time went from about 7 minutes, to over 50. This was unsurprising, and we plan to figure out ways to optomize the flower model in week 7 to prevent more renders hitting the 2 hour kill.
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