top of page

SCAD x The Mill: Weeks 9 & 10

  • Writer: Sam Gualtieri
    Sam Gualtieri
  • Nov 16, 2023
  • 2 min read

Week 9


Much of the team was sick over the weekend. We were still tackling the idea of removing the pillar, which up until that point was an essential part of our transition between environments/lighting setups. As well as creating a background transition that felt like it was part of the scene entirely in comp.

- Began process of removing pillar in comp

- Removed 3b modern Vespa in favor of continuing 3a modern Vespa without cutting

- Began planning how to smoothly crossfade between these two plates, as they are the
same model in the same position but with different lighting
-Produced alternate cuts for safety

3a-3b background transition


Modeled low-polygon proxy geo of scene
UV unwrapped the scene and arranged it horizontally, allowing the 2D wipe to appear continuously over the scene


Rendered with scene camera as UV pass in mantra

Brought into nuke and tested UV displacement with grid and temp wipe


Here is the wipe as integrated & animated by Emma:


Final touches on scene materials


Specularity, displacement, roughness.

Assisted with compositing of Vespa vehicle transition


Cut and submitted weekly edit

Week 10


This week I honed in the look of the transition. This addition has been an interesting challenge both technically and creatively, as the shot was not designed with this background motion in mind

Designed transition look


Initially, an electric edge to match the magic energy in Wei-Lin’s FX. Progressively made it less jittery. After mentor feedback, pivoted away from electricity in favor of a soft/noisy edge


In Emma’s breakdown of her excellent compositing for shot 3, the transition matte I produced can be seen:

Used red and green noise (projected onto the normal pass) as a screenspace displacement map to create a sense of depth / uneven surface in the transition wipe, especially in the distance where parallax distortion made the edge appear flat.


Composited shots 1 & 2


Focused on the specularity of the Vespa, amplifying the reflection pass, saturating the diffuse pass, and increasing contrast on the specularity pass + using a fresnel pass as a grade mask


Cut and submitted weekly edit


Designed credit seqeunce


Produced compositing breakdowns, Composited Hi-Res stills,

Comments


bottom of page