Integration Simplified

I made you guys sweat (a little, maybe) over inserting a virtual object into a real photograph. Here is a system that can do the work for you:

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

To be presented next week and not yet available. These techniques do make it to market in a few years...

Final Project "Traum"

These are the sketches for my final project. They part of my short animation which I called "Traum" (Dream). I scanned the pages from my sketchbook.

On the first page are the concept sketches and structure studies for the main tower in which most of the story takes place. The tower is based on "Tatlin's Monument for Third International" which is a Constructivist Architectural monument that was meant to be a symbol for Modernity but it was never built because it wasn't really practical.


On this page I worked out the title sequence, the middle and the end of the animation. I flipped the establishing shot for the first scene and drew the sculpture that will be at the top of the tower. I also roughly sketched the inside view of the tower and other objects that didn't make it in the final storyboard.


This is the storyboard in one page (it's a big image).


Here is the storyboard panel by panel. In case you couldn't understand my handwriting, the story is a dream set in an alternate universe inspired by German Expressionism and Russian Constructivism. It begins with an unknown character, who after taking a break from running up a long never-ending staircase (title sequence & establishing shot), continues running up until he gets to a gigantic tower. The reason of his running is unknown and irrelevant since this is a dream. The whole story is seen from his P.O.V. until the last scene. After, he reaches the tower, he enters, takes a second to admire the architecture an keeps going up the stairs. At the top, he is hypnotized by a shining fountain that gives off a mysterious light. He finally drinks from the fountain and is transformed into a statue at which point the camera switches from his P.O.V. to a low angle. We see him for a quick second, mainly focusing on his shadow which becomes still as the character is petrified and then we fade out. The ending is open ended.








Thank you for checking this out and let me know what you think.

Ambient Occluded Kitchen

In class today I quickly showed how to create Ambient Occlusion passes, referring to this tutorial. Building upon that, here is how to use photoshop to composite the passes, giving you more control that simply multiplying them directly in Maya
To the right you see the basic lit black and white kitchen

 

Here is the Ambient Occlusion pass, using the default settings

 

Simply multiplied on top, the way too dark ambient occlusion pass makes the entire image black. Not quite, but close

 

In Photoshop, I brightened the Ambient Occlusion render using curves. This clearly reveals the noisiness (click on the image to see that in a larger picture)

 

So next I apply a smart blur to the image

 

Multiplying the images was still making it to dark, so I added the Ambient Occlusion image to the normal render. Add is called Screen in Photoshop, and I set the Ambient Occlusion layer to 22%

 

Finishing touch: changed the outside color, using the alpha channel that was saved with the tiff images

Kitchen progress example

I showed this example in class: the black and white kitchen work in progress entry by Jennifer Cram: Kitchen 2.0"

Kitchen 2.0

Second time around the kitchen scene! I'm a little more content with this one. It feels more realistic, and I was able to get a better understanding of how to use lights to sculpt the range of values in a scene. Hopefully the composition is a little stronger as well - I slightly altered the camera angle.

As I worked, I took shots at various steps. Here's the basic progression:

1 Directional light + background color:

2 Skylight + Window bounce

3. Floor and Ceiling Bounces. Shine added to bottle, globe changed to white.

4. Wall bounces + Effects light on bottle. Adjusted camera. Rotated fan, moved bottle, chairs, changed globe back to grey.

5. Corner fill lights, transparent phongs on bottle and globe. Lots of adjustments to the size, intensity and drop off of these images were made at this point.

Voila! What do you think?