Day 12, 13, 14

Day 12
For day 12, I helped composite the matte paintings into shot 2, I also added more smoke and tried to perfect the tracking. I used the points of certain buildings to track the pan.  I also composited the "eyes" of the sea creature in shot 1. I used the points of the creature in shot 1, I also helped to create the glow of "eyes". For tracking of this shot, I tracked the "screws" of the creature and manually adjusted them if they were off.

Day 13

I realised that the matte paintings were shaky in shot 2, so we used another approach to tackle the shot. We used different crack brushes and placed them in Nuke. I then used tracker and transform nodes to match the cracks to the different buildings. Also, I worked on shot 3, after getting the roto nodes from Chermaine. I also rendered AO passes for the buildings in shot 2 and composited them in. I also went online to look for tutorials for Z-depth blur and composited them using Nuke. First, I shuffled the Z-Depth pass, Added a Z-blur node and tweaked the settings by setting the focal plane and depth of field.

Day 14

Day 14 was more of finalising the composition of the shots and fixing the errors. I managed to fix minor errors by asking advice from Mr Pang. Mr Pang also gave me advice on the missiles from shot 3, and how they were lacking behind the plane. I managed to solve this problem by merging them correctly. I also took the explosion layers from Kasheng and Asraff and composited them together. I color corrected all the shots and made them look more believable. I also corrected the explosions and removed the debris from the small mothership. At the end of the day, I set up the presentation powerpoint which can be accessed here:

http://prezi.com/uqf4po6oxu0a/present/?auth_key=e2uvcay&follow=8_awipw3gd2o

Day 8 - 11

Day 8 & 9 

For day 8 and 9, I animated and improved the animation of the small battleships in shot 2. I used EP motion curves to animate the ships and sought advice from my team mates on how to use the curves to fine tune the animation and speed. I also separated the render layers and passes for shot 2 and 3. I then set up the overnight renders and made sure they were of acceptable render time, this was achieved by tweaking the render settings and material settings . I then went to download a free plugin for Maya called "Pull Down It", to shatter and destroy the buildings for shot 2 and 3. After shattering and destroying the building, Mr Pang taught me to texture and add details to the interiors of the destroyed buildings. I then added the buildings to renders and started to render them. I also helped Asraff with the particle effects for the fire trail in shot 3.

Day 10 & 11


For day 10 and 11, It was mostly spent on compositing work. I consolidated all the render passes from the different computers and started to composite them on Nuke. I added the different passes in, color corrected them, added blur and tried to make them blend into the scene. I tracked the footage in Nuke too. I added stock footage of smoke into the shots and tried compositing them again.

Day 6 and 7

Day 6

For day 6, I tried overlaying fire on the buildings in shot 3. I tried using emitters with particles. I then added a fluid shader to particles. Finally I added the "thick cloud puff" preset, to simulate smoke. However this took a long time to render, thus I scrapped off the idea. I then tried using stock footage for the fire. I merged different fire, smoke, debris and dust stock footage to the live plate. It turned out well. Also I tried simulating the missile fire and smoke trail with Jian Hunt. We used different omni and directional emitters for the trail.

Day 7

Today, I continued working on the missile trail. I looked at references from the internet and found out that for missiles, the trail of smoke behind is usually quite short and will disappear into the air in a short period of time. I also took the models of spaceships from Jian Hunt and started animating them for shot 2. I used EP curves and attached the spaceships to them. I also adjusted the speed which the spaceship was moving along the curve. I then added glow to the afterburners of the spaceship.

Day 4 and 5

For the past 2 days, I have been modelling, texturing and lighting different skyscrapers in Maya for shots 2 and 3. I managed to model 4 skyscrapers.. They are: CPF building, Capitol Tower, OCBC centre and Singapore Land Tower. These skyscrapers would then be later blown up and explosions would be added. I started modelling using simple polygons, I then extruded them and duplicated them. I search the web for references. After modelling, I textured them using simple mental ray "X" materials. I then added presets such as glass, matte finish and glazed ceramic. For lighting, I used the panoramas I stitched as image based lighting (IBL) I rendered out 2 different passes, the "Master Beauty" pass and the "Ambient occlusion (AO)" pass. These passes were then brought to Nuke for compositing. I used simple merge nodes, added blur and color corrected them. I also tried grading and color correcting the overall background plate to try to merge the computer generated (CG) buildings.

Day 1,2,3

Day 1


Today, we brainstormed about our ideas and came out with 2 ideas. We met our supervisor Mr Pang and told him about our ideas. He approved one of our idea and gave us suggestions on how we could work on it. We spent the rest of the days looking for references and deciding on the 3 shots. Before the end of the day, we went to Mr Pang again and approached him for help on our shot ideas. We slightly changed our shot ideas after meeting him and went to shoot on Day 2.


Day 2


In the morning, we met in school and then we went to Marina to shoot shots 1 and 3. We faced problems such as over exposed footage and also people getting into our footage. These problems were easily solved and we also captured our Image Based Lighting (IBL) images. For shot 2, we went up to Pinnacle at Duxton to shoot. We took several videos with different camera moves and different angles. We then chose the best one.

Day 3


Today was spent processing, match-moving and fixing interlacing issues of the footage we took yesterday. I also started to model the "Tentacle robot" for Shot 01. I started by using simple polygons and started extruding and scaling them. At the end of the day I think I'm 70% done with the model. Tomorrow, I will continue to work on the model and maybe start rigging it.