With the 3D Camera Projection & HRD Image created and export in Nuke it’s now time to adjust my CG assets in Nuke.
Setting up assets with 3D Camera
Having successfully programmed the 3D camera projection in Nuke, I spent some time working on bringing in the CG assets and ensuring the camera was properly set in the correct position along with spending time working on the ground planes along with the camera tracking points in Maya to ensure that when I apply shaders to the models, they will all work.
Using Hypershade to create and adjust Surfaces and Meshes
When selecting my CG assets for this project, I found that I underestimated how difficult it would be to use the hypershader to ensure that all of the AOV’s actually worked on the models. However, after some sage advice from my module leader I was able to successfully apply a range of Arnold shaders to both assets and have been able to appropriately adjust these to create the desired look.
Getting around how the Hypershader tool did result in my having to back and rewatch the YouTube tutorials along with using the support provided by my lecturer, however the end results are work, and most importantly have a range of data that can be used when I bring these back into Nuke.
Applying HDR Image as Skydome
Completing the application (albeit with some difficulties) of the shaders and AOV’s the Skydome was brought in. However, I did notice that the initial lighting was a bit low, so using the Skydome settings I boosted the exposure of the lighting to ensure that the metallic shine on the Tie Fighter asset was more prominent.
Animating CG Asset Movement
With all the set up of the Assets completed, the final thing to add before setting up the render is to add movement to all the assets. To reflect the basic narrative I have, where by one of the ships is complete a search-like fly over before the larger ship takes off and flies out of the scene. To do this, I used Maya’s Keyframe feature to track the movement of both CG assets over the 350 frames that are coming from my undistorted footage – the aim here is to ensure that the animations for the assets line up with the timings of my footage to reduce the need to retime the CG Assets when rendering them back into Nuke.
Final Render Settings
Final render settings are designed to ensure that the shadows for both CG assets come into Nuke with their Alpha channels set up without any other AOV’s and render layers using the absolute override to remove each of the rendered layers. I also used this tool to ensure that the ground plane, which was reduced from 2 separate planes to one due to shadow casting issues, would render without being visible when brought into Nuke.
