Digital Compositing: Week Seven

This week I experimented with the Rig Removal node and finally managed to get the costume I needed for my superhero.

I didn't have any undue issues with the Rig Removal node, so I don't have much to report here. It was a bit of a challenge removing the pigeon from the scene because of the extensive blurring on the bird's wings as it flew, as well as its somewhat non-linear path.

I also had some issues with it rendering out the red "warning" square when I wrote out my scene, but this was just because the bounding box of the Rig Removal node very slightly escaped the frame.




Embedded below are the "before" and "after" videos, with the pigeon automagically and properly removed from the scene.





Additionally, I have an image of the costume that I have; right now I am trying to reserve the camera and find a time where I can get the green screen room and also my primary actor (Dave) and a certain number of additional actors to play the thugs for the superhero to beat up.

Final Project Proposal: The Impossible Image

For my final project I wanted to stick to photography and not dabble heavily in Photoshop, as I've made any number of photo manipulations but only a few exceptional images thus far in my career. However, rather than make an extended sequence of images I would prefer to just make one excellent image that I could focus all of my time and attention on.

For this reason I decided to choose "The Impossible Image" as my project topic, and approach it in such a way as to produce an image that fit the bar of "impossible" without actually requiring much post-processing and manipulation.

I frequent a blog that posts up interesting do-it-your-own projects and tutorials, and recently said blog reminded me of the photographic manipulation technique "light painting" that a lot of photographers use for experimental but predominantly analog images.

Light Painting Overlay of Sony Camera

I researched a number of the light painting images and videos available on the Internet, and picked out several that served as a source of inspiration for me. My favorite light painting animation is below, and while it's not the most aesthetically perfect piece in terms of composition it definitely serves as a testament to how far this exposure trick can be taken, up to the point of full-fledged animations.



I had also recently read an article about a blind photographer, Pete Eckert, who has been making a name for himself recently. I took a look at his gallery, and the very first image there is particularly striking; almost every image makes use of extremely long exposure times to create fantastical images out of the blurs and twists of light, constructed patiently and with meticulous detail.

"Electroman" by Pete Eckert

Light paintings are not always quite as free-flowing and chaotic, however; the DIY Photography blog recently posted a guide to making structured light painting circles using some simple materials including LED lights and a paint roller.

Utility Light for Light Painting

Final Result

I might not go as far as to wire together an implement, but I can definitely draw from the principles at work here as far as stabilizing the light source I use goes.

So for my impossible image, I want to compose a scene similar to the final result from the DIY blog; that is to say, a person in a semi-fantastical environment with a magical aura wrapping around them in the form of light painting.

I culled through my backlog of images, and came up with one image from the portrait project of Digital Still Imaging I that captured an ethereal mood similar to what I'd like to produce; I'll need to choose a new staging environment and model, but I liked the composition of that shot even though it didn't make it into my final set for that project.

As an additional note, as this project will require a number of resources beyond just a camera and a tripod, I will be collaborating with Ian on the set-up of the project, as he also wants to make a light-painting for his final project.

Digital Compositing: Week Six

Good news, everyone! I've made headway on two of my pressing concerns; first and foremost, access to proper costumes to outfit my actors in for the green screen shooting I need to do imminently. My sister's in the drama department of her high school and works for a theater, so I should be able to get the costumes I need when I go home this weekend.

Additionally, Blaise tentatively agreed to play the butler in my piece, so I now have a distinguished older gentleman to draw upon. I'd have asked Ted Artz but I figured if I did a bad job on the green screening it'd be more of a personal affront.

Since this week was mostly planning and I more or less have a handle on how to handle green screening and some of the motion graphics work I'm going to need, I just focused on actually defining my superhero for this week. I have a persona worked out with a logo, which I'll show shortly.

In order to correctly capture the feeling of the original masterpiece I managed to hunt down and get a digital rip of an Adam West Batman VHS tape, and design my logo accordingly, as well as compile a bunch of reference pictures for transitions, shoddy animations, and narration.

Below is a comparison of the original Batman logo and the logo I came up with.

Original

Custom

I also took a look at, in no particular order: some of the goofy labeling of props; the sound FX cards; the 'Starring' card which I'm definitely going to reproduce with Dave smiling creepily at the camera; the scene transition image; the narrator's final words; and the end credits of the show.

Digital Compositing: Week Five

First, an update on the progress of my living room scene. This is only a rough version of it, but I have the lighting mapped out in my scene; I might change it up for next week when I start applying shaders to my objects, but for now it looks fine. I wanted a very warm light suffusing the scene similar to the living room I comped Morgan Freeman into last week, while still having some daylight bleed in from the side of the room.

This was rendered using 3Delight, which is a renderer very similar to Renderman; I was pleasantly surprised to find that 3Delight actually produced a much nicer image using simple Depth Map shadows, though I'll probably want to go back and use Deep Shadows and Renderman for my final lighting set-up.

For my still green screen mattes, I made things difficult on myself by shooting a fight scene with three different figures in it to worry about. The first image I chose was just completely unusable, as I found that when Girish fell backward from the mock blow Nate dealt him he wound up too far into the green light and thus it was almost impossible to matte correctly without taking chunks out of his too-green clothes.

I looked through my images and found a better one with Girish upright and on almost the same plane as Nate and Sonia, and thought it would work a lot better for my purposes. However, I wound up incredibly frustrated and thinking that my green screen shoot had just been unusably terrible, as Girish had a horrible green highlight no matter what settings I played with. Sonia's hair also looked terrible, and even Nate had a green outline around him I couldn't remove.

I'd downloaded the Keylight tutorial and looked through it, and it didn't look that much more complicated than the Primatte, so I figured I'd try it out to see if it made any difference. And boy, did it! I don't understand the math behind it, but all I know is the Keylight matting worked a million times better than the Primatte node. Success! No ugly green halo around my figures, and all three are matted out to satisfaction.

I tried one last time to get a usable Primatte matte with a different image, but this was the best I could do. In addition to Girish picking up a lot of green light, Sonia's shirt actually had some natural green color on the shoulder so that the best-looking overall image actually just cut a divot out of her shirt.

Using the full green-screened video didn't turn out very well, sadly. I followed the IBK tutorial closely but it didn't seem to produce very desirable results no matter what settings I used; I'm going to ask for extra help on that in class, since I'm going to need to green-screen video for this project.

Digital Compositing: Week Four

So this week I had two definite deliverables, a revised storyboard and a color correction test that had to be somehow relevant to my scene. Additionally, any progress that I made on other miscellaneous parts of the assignment should make their way onto this blog.

I'll start off with that, since I have less to say about it. I modeled more stuff for the room! Very exciting times. I still need to populate the bookshelf a little better and create some more random knicknacks, but I'm on my way to a semi-believable living room. Next week in Shader Writing we're learning how to use noise to make awesome wood textures and such, so my furniture should look much spiffier shortly. For now please enjoy the following image.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to hunt down an actual posh living room yet to take high-resolution photographs of, but I am going home this weekend so hopefully I can manage to find somewhere to point my camera while I'm there.

I want extremely warm lighting for the living room scene to give it a comfy air. So for my color correction test, I first found an opulent living room online with an extremely warm lighting situation.

I tried in vain to find a good image of an old-style butler, but Gerard Butler has literally consumed the entirety of any Google search that even incidentally includes the word "butler". I did manage to find a picture of Morgan Freeman, though, who makes everything better and coincidentally does know a version of Batman, which makes him relevant.

Furthermore, the image I found was of Morgan Freeman atop a building, bathed in some serious blue light; I thought the cooler color palette would work very nicely for an image to match to my living room.

Obviously the first thing I had to do in order to transplant Morgan Freeman into his new home was to cut him out in Photoshop. I painted the selection meticulously, zooming in close to capture as much of a fine edge as possible.

I got what looked to be a pretty darn good selection of Morgan Freeman, and when I switched out of the paint selection mode to take a look at it on a solid background everything seemed fine.

I saved Morgan Freeman out as a PNG file, created my Nuke scene, and brought both of my images in. I was then unpleasantly surprised to find an unexpected white outline around Morgan that showed up after premultiplying my PNG. It's not incredibly obtrusive at the size below, but it was glaring on my monitor.

Presumably this is some problem with the PNG file format, as when I exported as a Targa file the image disappeared. I wound up having to manually paint an Alpha channel for the Targa file before it would properly display, but at length it worked out and I got a selection that looked right. Lo and behold when I brought it into Nuke the mysterious white outline disappeared, though I did have to save it out as a 32-bit image.

Now for the color correction! I actually didn't have any trouble with this at all, which is great considering the issues I had in class when we were going over it. I made a color correct node, attached it to Morgan Freeman, and eyedropped-select areas of the living room along with some manual tweaking to give Morgan the same warm, inviting hue.

Since the light source on the original image of Morgan was coming from the left, I used a mirror node to get him facing the proper direction in comparison to the lighting scheme of the room.

There was one remaining flaw in the image that detracted heavily, even after color correcting Morgan to match the scene; namely, the lack of any visual shadow despite the light being cast pretty directly onto him in the new scene. I fired up Photoshop and manually painted in a translucent shadow around Morgan's feet, then brought it into Nuke and layered it over my composition.

And voila! Morgan Freeman is perfectly comfortable in his new habitat.

I was also asked to revise my storyboards for this project to some degree. I don't have a ton to say about this other than man am I bad at drawing, but I didn't have overmuch difficulty adding in a couple of extra camera angles as I was able to reposition the camera in my 3D scene, capture the desired angle, and trace over the objects to achieve the desired perspective in Photoshop. Here are a couple sample frames from the storyboard.

And that's about all for the week.