SCAD x Harbor Picture Company: Week 1-10
- Julian Schenker
- Jan 9
- 9 min read
Updated: 20 hours ago
Week Nine:
3/11/25
I am using this last entry to show off the breakdowns I have done for the comp of this project. I will be using shots 1, 2, 4 and 5.
Week Eight:
3/01/25
As with the last weeks, this week has been all comp work for me. Majority of it has been spent tightening up shots, removing distracting scuffs and marks on the stage and assets, and working towards polishing out our piece.
For shot 1, I did work on making the shoes look less like straight gloss. I added a noise map to the shoe normal map to create a more natural looking light falloff, as well as bringing down the highlights on the shoe so that it wouldn't blow out more than the rest of the scene. Here is a before and after.
For shot 2, I have been working on rotoscoping the back wall so we can add a new and more 3 dimensional looking curtain to it.
For shot 5, I have been removing undesirable objects and distracting elements from the stage and audience (Like the bright orange chair in the first image). In addition, we have decided to crop in the scene to be more focused on the shoes.
Week Seven:
2/23/25
Today's update shows a breakdown for an invisible effect. In our original shoot, our actress couldn't fit into our reference shoes so we had her wearing a pair of normal black pumps (shown below). Other changes needed are to change the floor to remove tracking markers and brighten the actress's face.
I started first by comping the floor to stay more consistent, removing tracking markers and making the shadows less obvious.
I then started brightening the actress. I brightened her face an extreme amount and then lightly brightened her arms as well.
Since the shoes needed to be replaced, I removed the old shoes and comped in new shadows (that need updating).
Jingxing Liu animated a modified version of our shoe 3D model so that they would fit the shape and follow the pathing of our actress's feet. I then lit and rendered them for compositing.
Here is the current comp. I need to study the lighting and shadows more for the CG elements as well as the comp for this shot.
2/19/25
This week, I will be working on comp, primarily on roto and masking.
I have been working today on incorporating 2D comp elements into our live action footage. For instance, while we did have flashing lights on set to simulate the effects of a flash camera, the lights were not picked up by the LED Volume (nor did we want them to be). So today I have been working on adding flash effects on the wall as well as shadow effects.
Here is my progress.
As per the mentors instructions, I also cropped shot 1B to be tighter in post.
Finally, I did some work on our hero shots by adding light reflections on the stage, warm light bounce on our actresses legs, color temperature corrected flares and better incorporation of the confetti effect.
Week Six:
2/16/25
Today I have done more work iterating upon combining our effects and new footage in comp. Here is a breakdown going into how I split up shot 4.
Here is the background plate, put together by Yejin Eom and Tianze Xu.
I created a mask on the stage that will give the illusion of two different shadows diverging from where our actress will be standing. The idea being that these are cast from the directional spot lights.
I did a fairly simple greenscreen key and some color correction on a plate that we captured of our actress on one of SCAD's greenscreen stages.
I created a reflection of the actress on the stage by just inverting the original greenscreen plate, distorting it to match perspective better and color correcting it to blend better with the stage.
Finally I added a layer of Jingxing Liu's confetti overtop. I am waiting on an updated version of this confetti effect.
2/15/25
This week, Team Rouge completed a "final" film shoot for this quarter. We have a lot of new footage to work from iterating upon what we have been told by the mentors.
Here is a test of our new footage in context with some loose comp.
Here are a sample of the Nuke scripts I have been creating to comp shots (like shot 4 and 5) together. As with most aspects of VFX, I feel like there is a more intuitive way to be constructing this but I went with the way that made sense to me.
Week Five:
2/6/2025
Today was an exciting day for Team Rouge. We got to go to SCAD's LED Volume stage to do a loadout test for our UE5 scenes. This is also exciting for me because now I have live action footage to work with for editing and comp. There is only so far you can take the edit when using a 3D model stand-in. Having live action footage to review is also helpful since now we know where our focus points should be when working on our Unreal files.
Here is a still from a sequence I have been cleaning up from our shoot today.
As you can see, parts of the shoes still very much need to be cleaned up.
Here is a breakdown of my layers to create this.
Week Four:
1/31/25
This week has been the start of my doing composite related tasks. For our theater sequence, we need to populate our audience. However we determined that it would be impractical and too time consuming to create a 3D digital audience. With guidance from professor Gaynor, we decided that doing 2D audience cards in our 3D UE5 file would make the most sense, both from a production standpoint and for an optimization standpoint.
I was tasked with finding greenscreen cards that would work for our purposes. I found and edited this plate in Nuke. As you can see, it is not perfect. However, when in the context of a darkened theater (as well as being blurred with depth of field), it looks quite nice.
Below is the node tree. The clip has been duplicated, flipped and retimed to create the illusion that there are more than just the 4 people on the original greenscreen plate.
1/29/25
Here is a status update of the new cut of the ad. As you can see, the shots have been extremely cut back and made more precise.
1/28/25
Coming out of this weeks' critique session by our mentors, our main notes are to switch from CG shots to basically all virtual production LED shots and to cut over 3 shots off of our short. This is great news for me as I was beginning to stress about the CG shots as well as the sheer amount of work that was starting to pile up.
Now my focus goes from look-dev to comp and lighting for our Unreal Engine scenes.
Week Three:
1/25/25
Today was a big day. I finally had a chance to composite work from two different software renderers together in Houdini. Katherine Nitti has been one of the FX artists for Team Rouge and since I am lighting and look dev, I had to work our renders together. Luckily we had one gelling medium which was Jingxing Liu's animation.
Here is a first pass of what this effect will look like.
1/24/25
Here is an update on our full visualization. The shots are marked with the initials of those working on them.
1/23/25
Today I worked on importing our virtual production asset of a red carpet runway into Unreal Engine 5. I originally created the file in Blender 3D so I had to rework the materials once in UE5. However, I am very pleased with the results. The scene is also incredibly lightweight so it renders in UE5 with good frames.
Here are some frames from the scene file. I am particularly pleased with how natural the velvet shader looks in UE5.
Here is some previs for how the virtual production sequence will look!
1/22/25
Today I have been doing more R&D on the skin shader. It has been a real struggle trying to tone the right values for the subsurface scattering and the normals. I do believe I can get it if I keep plugging away at it! Here are some of my tests.
Here is the the model using a lighting rig and HDR image more accurate to what we will need in the film.
As you can see above, the shoes look very believable with their scuffs and surface imperfections. The main issue falls with the skin materials. I have been looking at a lot of online reference of legs and ankles but nothing beats real custom reference so as soon as the real shoes come, I want to get some video reference for shading and lighting ideas.
Below I have another gamut of iterations on the same sequence. Here are more versions of the shoes with iterations on the skin's SSS, specular, and bump.
As you go down the list you can see the highlights getting smoother and longer, the bump become less extreme and the sheen becoming more subtle.
Finally, I wanted to test some AOVs for Z Depth so I can see how depth of field will work on the model. I have compositing the image below in Nuke.
I have also attached an image of my Nuke script . It is really simple as of right now but it got the job done for some simple DoF.
1/21/25
After our meeting with the mentors, I started work on applying the lighting rig I created to some rough animation of the shoes. I am very happy with how the smudges and surface imperfections on the shoes catch the light. Here are early results:
Week Two:
1/18/24
Further iteration of shoe look development.
1/16/25
Today I spent many hours creating a custom set for one of Team Rouge's virtual sets. The scene I worked on creating is based off of a red carpet ceremony walk.
Because this scene is for a virtual production set, I didn't go too in depth with most of the background since it is mostly walls. However I spared no expense with modeling high resolution assets, like the fancy velveteen crowd rails.
The materials on these will all change when they are ported to UE5. These are just demos of the custom materials I created in photoshop for the proof of concept renders that I created in Blender.
1/14/25
Having set up my shaders and textures in Blender yesterday, I today ported them all to Maya. Here are several more iterations I have been working with using Arnold renderer.
1/14/25
With the start of the week, I have started doing look development for materials. Today I have been working on setting up materials for our product, which involved creating a material for our shoes (seen below).
Stylistically for our advertisement, we have decided to change the iconic red to gold as to avoid trademark issues and so we can present our project in competitions.
For the look-dev, I assembled a look-dev rig. This was a simple set up. For the HDR image, I used a Poly Haven image from Venice.
Here is my current setup and materials. I have (from top right to left) Black Shoe Gloss, Shoe Leather Interior, Gold Shoe Bottom, Skin Color Leggings, and Human Skin.
For the skin shader, I had to make a custom seamless skin material since I could not find one online. This is just a backup in case the legging material doesn't work out (and vice-versa).
Week One:
1/11/25
Our product is going to be a Christian Louboutin advertisement. I am on the team as a lighter and compositor. In addition, I will be adding my expertise in regards to virtual production, since this team, Team Rouge, is going to be utilizing SCAD's LED Volume stage.
I will be in charge of lighting our Unreal Engine 5 shots for the LED Volume shoot. For these shots, we will be creating a Parisian street, lit for golden hour.
Below are my lighting references. Currently I am waiting for Tianze Xu, our UE5 level builder, to work on the file and get the layout more fleshed out so I can add lighting to it.
I also created a document with a proposed layout for our French street.
1/9/25
As of this date, I have officially been added to the virtual production team!
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