Finals week has come and I wish we could have more time but nonetheless we still have our videos to submit before we all leave for winter break. Since the last session I was able to fix the more urgent issues on my car shot. One of the first things I did was adjusting my camera position in Maya. I also, through Bridget's guidance, changed the scale of my car and that gave a better result as well.
Old Camera Position
New Camera Position
After I got the camera position adjusted, I also made a couple of adjusts to a few of my car shaders.
Adjusted Car Shaders
One of the last adjustments I made in Maya was adding a new render layer for an alternative method to my environment shadow pass. Instead of applying a black and white surface shader of the ground shadows onto the car, I used the paint effects bush to paint some trees along the side of the ground plane by my car. I then converted the paint effects into polygons and deleted all the pieces I didn't really need like the branches and tree trunks leaving only the leaves. After some position adjustments of the tree groups I was able to render out a new environment shadow pass.
Maya Environment Shadow Setup
With my new renders I changed gears and switched over to Photoshop to work on my shadow plate. I wasn't there when my group took pictures of the background plates because I was out of town for a family emergency but they explained to me that they couldn't get a shadow plate because it was too sunny and they didn't have time to take the shadow plate. With that being the case I had to make my own shadow plate. I took my clean background plate into Photoshop and tried my best to make a somewhat usable shadow plate. I used a combination of the clone stamp, spot healing brush, image adjustments (levels, brightness/contrast, shadow/highlights, exposure), and the paint brush to put together a shadow plate.
Clean Plate
Shadow Plate I made in Photoshop
With a shadow plate, I brought my new rendered layers and my plates into my Nuke file. From there I made more adjustments to my composite including adding a node called the Firefly Killer Gizmo to get ride of some unwanted fireflies.
Firefly Killer Gizmo Node
VectorBlur and Shuffle Copy Settings for Motion Blur
Composite Breakdown
Final Composite