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Live Set Extension Project
The goal of this project was to digitally recreate a scene from a black and white movie by creating the object(s) of the setting in a 3D software and placing it in front of a picture taken around our city, College Station.
Planning
I chose this image from the movie The Grapes of Wrath because of its simplistic setting that still contains so much character. I planned to work in the software Houdini, which meant I would be learning how to use it, so this simpler set seemed perfect.
Modeling
I began by importing my reference image into Houdini, matching my camera to its perspective, and beginning modeling, which had to be in NURBS. In a week, I managed to complete half of the front of the house by outlining the individual logs of wood in NURBS curves, planar filling, and sweeping to create a rectangular shape. This was a turtle-esque pace to me, so I made the executive decision to switch to Autodesk Maya, a software I am much more familiar with. I imported my image and matched my scene camera once again and completed the house base by outlining with curves, planar filling, and lofting to a duplicated curve I set further back to create the 3D object. For the roof, I split it into sections (top, middle, and bottom) based on the chunks of material where I could see a clear divide. I followed the zig-zag pattern of the material and duplicated the curve twice to use as end-point and middle-point guides for the NURBS surface I would create.
Unfortunately, at some point in the project, a NURBS surface must have saved corrupted data as Maya would instantly crash if I selected the front of the house. I dealt with this as long as I could, but when I reached the point of texturing, I needed Maya to stop crashing. After deleting all my objects' history countless time, I decided to export my mesh. This meant I had to convert my model to Polygons so I could export the mesh to an FBX file, since I was afraid creating another Maya file would carry over whatever corrupted data there was. I created a new file in Maya and imported my FBX file where I converted my mesh from Polygons to Subdivisions, then back to NURBS. This created some strange topology and split everything into small NURBS surface objects, but the overall shape still looked fine.
Texturing
On my first attempt of texturing, I decided to use some of RenderMan's preset procedural textures. I chose this because NURBS cannot be UV-unwrapped. Unfortunately, the UVs of my model were in the wrong direction, making the wood pattern vertical instead of horizontal. With no way to edit their UVs, I imported the FBX file of the house into Substance Painter. Here, if I could not rotate the mesh UVs, I could at least rotate the texture to create my desired look. With all the textures, I exported the files and hooked them into PxrSurface materials in Maya using RenderMan.
Lighting
I did my best to match the lighting in my scene to the original image. The original does not show much in terms of shadows, so I worked according to what looked brightest. When I would render, it looked fine against a black background but not when both images were side-by-side. I decided to pause lighting until I got my image so I could fix the lighting in context of how the two objects look with each other.
Compositing
For my live image, I figured a park would be ideal for a large area of empty land with a few hills. I looked up parks in my area, created a route to visit eight parks, and set off. The weather was not overcast, which would have been perfect, but the slight sun did not end up creating sharp shadows. Of the eight parks, I took pictures at three because the others either had too many trees or not a big enough area. The picture I ended up using I took at Wolf Pen Creek Park in the area outside the fence of the amphitheater. When it came to rendering, RenderMan would always add a solid black background that I could not get rid of, even when resetting my render settings. On the one instance where the alpha layer rendered correctly, opening it in Photoshop still created the background. I tried to render with a green NURBS plane in the background to edit in my image like a green screen, however not all the green got removed and stood out harshly against the black and white image. I next tried to quick select the background to delete, however I could not get it done cleanly and the tool often wanted to select the side of the house or the wires of the fence. I conferred with my roommate, who is more knowledgeable in Photoshop, who found a way to select everything that was absolute black and delete it. From there, I imported my image and placed it under my render, having already converted it to black and white in a previous file. I separated the fence into a separate layer from the house and applied a light Gaussian blur to make it appear more out of focus.
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