All Assets are Done!

I have finished all the assets! I was able to use PF track to get all my footage into Maya. Also I took fast renders of the geometry to see how they would look in the scenes and to plan out the timing of the trailer. This up coming week I will start comping the shots! I may even finish a week early if I stay on track!

Compositing Project Previs from James Spadafora on Vimeo.

Now that I have all the assets done the next step is to render them. I will first do short sequences to check the lighting so that I am not wasting my time. An example where this was not done was the last shot which is much to dark so I wasted a ton of time.

I will not make this mistake again.

Also I began to analyze my shots as to what needed to

get done in nuke. I also began to research how to do what I need to do. One example of some thing I had no idea how to do was the atmosphere. After some poking around some forums I found the nuke master class from 2009. In the second video from Maya to nuke, the presenter shows how to use a depth pass from maya to control a noise node. He also uses the depth information on a Zblur node to make an interactive depth of field, something usually (except for renderman) expensive to render. Another thing I could do is use the Zdepth extractor in PFtrack to use geometry from the video to generate a better depth pass. This video proves the PFtrack is magic:

http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/product.php?productId=2&cId=6

At the bottom of the page look at the Zdepth extractor