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.