Here is my current process breakdown for Project 2.
So once I got the bunny into the plate and got the light set up, I began making the different layers needed. I had a volume layer that would act as the inside. The biggest issue with the volume was that it would break the model and if I tried to add another shader to it, it would disappear and not show up in the render at all. So in order for it to work, the volume needed its own model and everything else can be another model. Just making sure it has the same movement as one another to match up in comp.
The Vernell is used to create the mask for the glass like outside and the solid inside. Most of the rocks have that thin layer of glass before the color inside. I also wanted to add some subsurface so it was not as transparent on the inside. Before rendering each pass, I made sure to add the AOVs I needed to shuffle out, which is shown here. Fresnel is the first image in the quilt, but it is spelled wrong.
This was where I shuffled out the AOVs and got what I needed. I graded the specular indirect to have a less intense highlight.
Here I took the subsurface and volume and mixed them so it would not be 100 percent transparent but it would have that gradient in the middle. The subsurface contained a lot of noise in it so I degrained it a small amount, but if I were to go back I would rerender it with higher samples, but I worked with what I had.
I used the Fresnel method to add the glass shader on top of the subsurface by shuffling out the red and using that as a mask.
The original plate had a dirty window. I tried to reduce the dust on the window by taking the image of a plate into photoshop and using the Filter > Noise > dust and scratches to try to get some of it off. If I went too far, it would lose a lot of detail. So I tried to find the balance.
I rendered out a shadow pass in Maya and then used that to merge with the shadow plate.
The original shadow plate did not extend far enough so I had to take that into photoshop and manually expand it with the clone tool. It is not perfect and definitely needs to be redone, but it was a starting point.
All of the elements combined made this composite.
Some of the things I would like to have in my next iteration is the displacement or texture within the model so that it looks closer to my rock, grading the actual plate to make the colors look better, fixing the shadow by taking more time in photoshop with the shadow plate we took or just grading the shadow on the backplate itself, adding caustics, and fixing the lighting on the bottom foot of the bunny.