Ocean (010-030)

The ocean has been one of the biggest challenges in this project because of our time crunch; this is the first time I have been able to get any renders of the Ocean full CGI shot. This is the progress I have made for this week on that shot and everything that needs to be done before next week. I first pulled up everything in a compo; Zach, the FX artist, sent me a nuke file with a simple slap comp of the ocean. In his script, he was merging everything and copying the alpha of the flip so he could have less transparency on the color of the sea and we could enhance this ocean look. 

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After that, I started working with a live-action plate with two viewers to match the colors of the sea and the sand that were rendered and match the boat to the next shot because everything has to be cohesive. One of the biggest problems is that this shot is rendered in USD in Houdini, and the rest of the CGI elements were rendered with Arnold inside Houdini, too. Still, the materials have different color spaces, so I tried to correct that with multiple color-correct nodes, but it still needs fixing because it looks too red compared to the boat on the CGI to live-action composite. I also worked on trying to de-noise the plate because most of the renders had a lot of noise and artifacts, so I used a denoiser. I learned how to denoise it, but I could not clean it all up because it still has a lot of noise problems. I don't know why this is happening, but I will ask to see if there is a possibility of reducing this noise. 

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I also added some of the original grain that the camera has and a little bit of depth that will need to be enhanced for next week. For color-correcting all of the elements inside this shot, I am using the crypto mattes provided by the effects artist. One thing missing this time on the renders was the shadow pass, so I asked the effects artist to send it to me for next week so I could match the shadows to the CGI live-action. Also, it would be interesting if we could get some textures on the sand because it still looks flat, which I will discuss with the look development artist to see if we can include all of these elements before the final presentation next week. 

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For 020-010, Jenson updated an animation that makes the boat look even more alive because now the ropes and flags are moving. This meant compositing and color-matching according to the animation to enhance it. 

I also worked with Z Depth to improve everything and set up grain to match the live-action footage. I also worked with re-timing because the CGI shots had a different time frame than our original footage because of the animation. 

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I used multiple layers on the shadows for the boat elements because we decided to use ambient occlusion to enhance the boat's realistic look. I color all of the aspects of the boat separately by dividing them with crytomattes and color correcting each of the elements. I did enhance what we have and change it a bit, but tried to match what we had last week because the mentors like the work on the composite on 020_010. I also worked on re-color correcting and getting the sky where it was on the first color correction attempt.