Audi Car Crash Project - Car Updates

Since the last session I made more progress on the car, mostly on the car shaders. I was able to update the shaders I already had on the car, as well as add new ones with aistandard shaders to cover the exterior of the car.

Updated Car Aistandard Shaders

Updated Car Aistandard Shader Attribute Settings

Updated Car Turn Table

In addition to updating my car shaders I was also able to fix my render camera so the car is no longer positioned behind the image plane when set at frame 1. This new adjustment allowed me to better position my car and I was able to create a more accurate composite in Nuke.

Old Camera Set Up ( Camera Set At Frame 1 )

Old Camera Set Up (Render View Frame 1)

New Camera Set Up ( Camera Set At Frame 1)

New Camera Set Up ( Render View Frame 1)

One of the comments I heard repeated last week was that teams needed to be using motion blur on their cars, and with the car moving so quickly in my assigned shot it would make sense to have motion blur on my car as well. So I went into the Arnold Render Settings and enabled the Motion Blur and applied the AOV only in the Fill Light layer.

Motion Blur Settings

Motion Blur Render in Nuke

With my newly added shaders I also updated the render layers to include an occlusion pass, a ground reflection, and an updated shadow pass for the key and fill lights. Once my render layers and render settings were in order I submitted my file to the renderfarm, then afterwards I uploaded my rendered passes into Nuke. At first I had a little trouble because the farm kept rendering out all my render layers for each AOV, but I was made aware by my classmate that I had to merge the AOVs in the Arnold render settings. Once I did that all the exr files for my render passes contained all the active AOVs.

Within Nuke I set up my new Nuke Tree for my updated render layers. Some of the issues I ran into were that my occlusion and fill light shadow pass images were not visible when I started to make my adjustments. I thought that this was probably a merge node issue, so I played around with different settings, but I still could not find the problem. I was able to get my key light shadow to work though, which lead to my other problem of the double shadow on the ground. After speaking with my teammate, she suggested that the problem was in the fact that I had no shadow plate. Unfortunately, when my teammates took the plate photos the sun was too bright and they couldn't get a shadow plate, so they had to make their own in Photoshop. The other big problem I ran into is that the environment shadow pass that I made in Maya wasn't showing up very well in the composite and again with some help from my teammate we figured out that the problem might be that I didn't have a ground reflection in my key light renders.

Updated Nuke Tree and Renders

Updated Car Composite

Changes I want to make for next time

- increase the amount of motion blur on my car

- add a ground reflection in my key light render layer to try and make my environment shadow more visible

-adjust my key light position so give a more accurate lighting on the car

-make my occlusion and fill light shadow visible in the composite

-add a dirt texture on the lower half of the car to give my realistic texture

- composite in a shadow plate to try and fix the double shadow on the ground

-adjust my general Nuke Tree to give a better composite

-adjust my car window shader