Author: Yafang Zheng

Personal

After we had done many test renders, the renders would always show noise, or flickering lights. According to our step-by-step troubleshooting, we had to pull the specular value very high in order to have no noise because of our material. But this would make the rendering very slow.

Personal

Critical Reflection

When I look back at my project, I see some key issues with it. Firstly, I must admit that my inexperience in shooting led to a lack of consistency in the tracking during the compositing process. This created some instability and an unrealistic feel to the overall visuals. Also, I realised that I had handled the roto part rather roughly. Due to the lack of time, I was unable to devote my energy to detailing, which resulted in some of the edges and contours of the images looking less than fine.
However, I would also like to mention some of the highlights of my project. Firstly, I put a lot of time and effort into the pre-research work. I carefully created storyboards and carefully planned the entire storyline and shot design. This gave me a clear direction for the subsequent filming and editing work.
In addition, I think I achieved something in terms of editing. I spent a considerable amount of time organising and editing the material to achieve a smooth and engaging storytelling. My editing work resulted in an overall well-paced project.
Despite the shortcomings of my project, I have also learned valuable lessons from it. I realised the importance of filming techniques and post-processing, as well as the need to allocate time and resources wisely. For future projects, I will focus more on training and practice in filming to improve the consistency of compositing results. I will also make improvements in time management to ensure that I can allow enough time to perfect detail processing, such as roto.
Overall, I am satisfied with the results of my pre-research work and editing, but I also recognise that there is still room for improvement in terms of technical execution. Through this project, I not only learnt a lot about 3D plus compositing and skills, but also realised where I was lacking in certain areas, which will help me become more professional and better in future projects.

Personal

Editing

Group

Render

For the handover to the compositor’s work, the compositor requested some aov channels to facilitate the final adjustments and compositing.

The Crypto-object channel is particularly useful in complex scenes containing multiple objects or elements that need to be processed individually in post. It makes it easy to select and separate specific objects in post-processing without having to manually create complex masks or use other techniques.

The ID channel is a special channel used for rendering that assigns a unique identifier (ID) to each object in the scene.

The Z channel is a channel that records the depth value of each pixel in the scene. It represents the distance from the camera viewpoint to each pixel. During rendering, the Z channel is usually rendered as a greyscale image, with light colours representing positions away from the camera and dark colours representing positions close to the camera.

Group

Lighting

Based on all the comments and the refinement of the textures and the gradual completion of the layout, my final version is a blue-green tone, not too brightly lit and to keep some parts from being too bright or too dark. I have adjusted the object of the light in the lighting control layout.

Personal

Compositing

Based on the last test and subsequent testing of several other shots, I changed some of my production methods. Originally I was going to use 3D tracking for the production. But later on I found that none of the shots had moved except for the one used for testing, so 2D tracking would have been better.