SCAD + THE MILL
Hero shot 1
This week, I worked hard on fixing the chest, the composite, and the camera angle. Despite the render farm being down, Jenson got me the elements for this composite on Saturday. All of this helped me have time to composite and focus on the mentors' and professors' feedback provided for me last week. First of all, I re-cropped the treasure chest so that it would look more centered on the plate, as you can see in the picture that shows the full composite.
Due to the 2-hour render kill limit on the render farm this week, Jenson decided to render all elements separately. For the composite, this means a couple of changes and re-linking of the videos and elements in the node tree. I also had to adjust the chest and get the lid front part in front of the coins and cans. In the beginning, I started by pulling a matte of the lid based on the crypto matte, but this did not work because the sprite, once it was open, would hide the middle sprite. So, at this point, I could have solved that by rotoing the sprite, but I decided to keep exploring the idea of how to fix it with the lid because once I could include the condensation, have this roto or alpha only for the frames needed could be a little more complicated. So I decided to do a roto, only the required frames from the lid; since this is a box, it will not take that long to rotoscope.
For the belts that surround the lid, I decided to pull out the alpha by using the crypto matte with a copy node and a merge over, so they look like they did before, and so it has the hole, and the smoke can keep working usually. If you want to check out, you can see this part in the images on the side and the node tree, which is the pink color-coded background picture. Then, I color-corrected all of the elements on the chest (separately and then as one element) to match the background plate. I tried to embrace the feedback, and now the treasure is less dark than suggested.
Then I worked on developing the oclussion for this shadow so that the treasure chest looks even more integrated with all of the elements for this I used the same technique that I used for the boat composite which is masking the shadow and color correcting it appropiately so that it matches with the chest and all of the elements around it.
