2011
fxphd
Robert Harrington
~10h
English
This course, taught by Robert Harrington, will cover lighting, shading and multi-pass rendering in Maya and mental ray. We dabble in Nuke, finding out why its good for us lighters in a way that Photoshop isn't.
This course will reflect the production reality where you are part of a pipeline. The modelling, UV'ing and animating will have been prepared already, meaning our time is focused on getting the lighting and shading correct, and providing compositing with the render-passes they need. Along the way we will cover tricks, theories and guidelines to help get closer to reality.
Harrington is a TD at Framestore, London, working in commercials. He first tried 3D while on a product design degree course, swapping marker pens and gouache for blindly clicking labels and pressing function-keys in 3D Studio for DOS. When his final year's work included an animation of a London Underground station just to show off a vending machine it became clear he'd found something interesting. He would go on to spend many years as a freelance illustrator, mostly doing stills in Lightwave.
As using a hundred lights and motion-blur on one still made way for the mass global-illumination epoch, he returned to office life, working mostly on large-scale "architectural-branding" animations and the occasional more-fun escapade too. With the demise of easy credit leading to the demise of making cities, he moved to Framestore.
Class 1: Introduction: Week one's video is all about getting up to speed, so we're covering the shaders, a quick brdf tour, projections and why we're going linear with our colourspace. There's also a lighter's tour of Nuke, as we'll be using it quite heavily and its important you know its main functionality.
Class 2: What we know from the set's lighting, and creating/calibrating the HDRI environment/grey-ball/lights, giving us our look-development scene.
Class 3: The grey ball, basically. Week three is mainly covering what wasn't in week two, with week three's original content moved back (it'll be fine). This week it's our approach to the greyball (and the effect of "Canon's look" on our reference photography), plus replacing parts of an HDRI image with CG lights to deal with those sampling issues we're getting when combining really bright HDRIs with finalgather. It will also come to light how handy a spreadsheet is versus a calculator, and how much this course relies on them to solve problems.
Class 4: Convolutions and ARBs, and what they let us do. Week four is all about trying to see how we would finish our look dev scene. We cleanup the hanger HDRI in Nuke, allowing us to make a nice diffuse convolution of the room, and then set up our environment, seeing how we would arrange two spatially aware HDRIs, one for lighting and one for reflections. After that we define the principles of our ARBs based workflow and cover how we would set that up in Nuke.
Class 5: Grading our HDRI, even when we make it difficult for ourselves. This week we've received the plates from Comp for each shot, and we've now got to grade our HDRIs to match them. We're going to work through one particular process to get there, and work around one particular oversight we had on set - a good test for us. We're also going to be working through replicating the lighting size/positions on set, and sticking it all together with our test object & reference shot.
Class 6: Referencing and some minor pipeline automation Week six's big thing is working with Maya's referencing, how it goes wrong, why it goes wrong, and how we fix it. Due to the realities of our model we're going to want to use referencing, so its good to get to grips with how it likes to work. We're also going to be changing our ARBs as Comp has decided it should be done differently, so we're going to look at how we can automate that to make our lives a bit easier. On top of that, there will also be a look at what's coming up in week seven's shaders. This week's file upload is 18 CR2 files covering one angle from the main hanger fisheye, so you can try out other routes/software to making those HDRIs.
Class 7: Reflection rules and shaders: Week seven sees us start to lookdev our shaders, but also gets us up to speed on how real life material reflection values relate to what we can achieve in mental ray, how they are portrayed in optics and what we can do to mimic that (and also what we can't).
Class 8: We finish off our materials development phase by examining the difference between the possibilities we have for matching metals, and adapt our environment to deal with the noise. Its all about getting ready for the final assault on the machine model.
Class 9: Render time... Our modeller, Oliver Kane, has given us our giant machine, so this week we're going to render it - or at least start. We go through our referencing process to help manage file sizes and start our two lighting setups, all of which leads to the week ten finale...
Class 10: The End. Week ten finishes off everything. We cover the lighting decisions and why they've been chosen, reconstruction of the floor, a method for projecting her moving shadow, what texturing we need to do, render layers, utility passes and some quick comps to make sure everything's working. Its a long one.
http://www.fxphd.com/fxphd/courseInfo.php
Download File Size:4 GB
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