This week we all worked on adding our objects to our scenes and making sure everything worked and looked right. For my corks in the scene I wanted to use rigid body effects so they could roll and bounce through the scene. I struggle with it at first but was able to get them working after multiple tries. I also animated my ball to roll through the scene so you could see it pass through the shadows and made it a passive rigid body so it could interact with the corks. I also cleaned up how my nuke script was set up. We set our renders up with multiple layers in order to have more control in compositing. Here is my node network for this composite.
I had my render split into 8 different layers. On the left side of my graph is where I assemble the layers making up the objects. On the right is where I assembled the background and shadow layers. For the layers on the left it’s broken down into direct diffuse, direct specular, and indirect which are all breaking down the different types of light on the object and shadow projection, bounce shadow and ball occlusion which are all being used as masks for color corrections, usually to create shadows. I also used the indirect’s alpha to fix a premult issue I was having which is happen at the bottom of the left graph.
On the right side I have the clean plate and the clean plate in complete shadow. Then the shadow pass and ground occlusion renders that are being used to create the shapes of the shadows. For the shadow pass its being used with the full shadow picture, its essentially placing the picture of the ground in shadow inside the alpha of the shadow pass. Then I used a color correction to make it match more closely and a ramp since there is a slight variation in the darkness of the shadow of the wheel, it seemed to be darker toward the bottom and lighter towards the top. The the ground occlusion is just being used the darken that shadow when it’s closer to the object. Originally I had the occlusion only inside the shadow pass but I found it was giving me really sharp edges where the shadow pass would cut it off. I felt it looked much better not being held in by the shadow pass.
Here is the final render of the whole project.
