SCAD x Harbor Picture | Collaboration Project | SANM 560 - Week 09

This is the last week of production. This week's feedback is mainly focused on our Superhero Shot, which is Shot 4, but they also have comments on other shots as well.

For Shot 1 and 2, the mentor said that they quite liked the light trail movements in shot 1 and shot 2, but right now, shot 2 looks too noisy and flickering compared to other shots, so we need to find a way to solve that. But the good news is they like the DOF we have in Shot 1 right now.

And for shot 3, they said they quite like the DOF we have right now, but it would be better to have more fog in the background.

And then comes the most important shot, shot 4. Mentors gave us many suggestions, including:

1. The foreground needs more fix at the ground plane

2. Middleground needs more fixes on the fog (The right side needs more fog and light & The left side has too much fog)

3. Image compression issue for the background.

4. Denoise the bottle.

5. The overall color of the foreground looks too cold compared to the background, especially when the will also make the glow of the light.

6. Optional: Adding the Moon may look better for the overall scene.

So these become our main fix to the scene in this final week.

So based on the instruction, I have tried to adjust the DOF and fog density for shots 3 and 4, and at the same time, do the color correction in the post-processing volume.

By changing the saturation in Post Processing Volume, I tried to make the shadow look more tinted to pinky purple, but not the dark black color so that it could bring more real-life feels to the scene. The key here is to change not only the density of the fog but also the direction of the light since that is how fog would actually work in reality. Since the left side of the midground used to be too bright, I turned the angle of that directional light more toward the right.

Above is my new background render for shots 3 and 4. As you can see, I also keyframed the fog, so it would make the background look more vivid compared to the still fog in the previous version.

After I finished adjusting the light and the fog, I and Coleman have talked a lot about what we could still change for our foreground, As a result, he used multiple ground plane to make the ground looks more detailed, and I helped him to added more rocks to the foreground so that the edge and the seam between each ground plane would look like a whole, but not the desperate pieces. Above is the final result for shot 4's background.

And here is the final render that we have. As you can see that I changed the lighting of Shot 2. In the past, what made shot 2 that noisy and flickering was not only because of the AA Sample issue but also the light was too intense and too close to the bottle, so it would be hard for the path tracer to get it correct. Right now, it looks much better than it looked in the last week.

This is the black bar version. In this version, we tried to add a black bar at the top and the bottom of the screen so that it may look more cinematic.