Final Breakdown
Now that I got some good notes on the grey ball, I began finding a round object to use. After some searching, I landed on the Pixar ball that I got from Renderhub. So I created a new render layer for the ball, shadow, and environment shadow. with all the same objects as the grey ball. Then I animated the ball to make it look like it is rolling instead of sliding.
Because the ball was rolling past the barrier, I had to go back into photoshop and extend the patterns. I spent quite some time cleaning it up the best that I could so that the shadow edges are not jaggy.
I ran into an issue with the edge projecting o to the ball. When I extended the border even further it would not align properly so the shadow looked incorrect. I took some time trying to tweak it but I needed to make a decision on spending more time on fixing this or moving the animation over.
I rendered out the different passes which was the shadow layer, environmental layer and the ball layer.
After taking it into Nuke I tweaked the color correction on the shadow plate to better match the reference and so there are no double shadows. After my first pass, I realized that the colors were extremely blown out and overexposed. I went back in Maya to find the issue and found that when I had copied my camera for the environmental shadow, I had accidentally placed that into the render ball layer.
This was my final Nuke tree. When importing the correct Maya render into the nuke tree, I blurred my environmental shadow plate using a dilate and then merging the same plate over the blurred alpha so that it does not loose the initial quality. Otherwise it will show the specular.
Then I put an edge blur on the ball to try to merge it a little better with the background plate.
After tweaking for a while, I made the breakdown that was at the beginning of the page and can be found here:
After submitting the videos and to up our morale, a couple really talented peers, Emma Schaberg and Nick Neff, and I went to the gas station (Fancy) Parkers to get a celebratory we all turned in our assignment on time sweet treat.
Their website can be found here
Emma Schaberg: https://emschaberg1.wixsite.com/portfolio
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