Week 2: Reference and Previs

We started the week by finalizing our previs and putting together our pitch to present to the mentors at The Mill. I passed the previs animation I created in Maya off to Riley who took it into Houdini. There he incorporated some particle effects tests, added shaders, and rendered it for the pitch.

Particles and render by Riley

With our initial previs done, we took everything we had so far and put it together in

our pitch.

After presenting to the mentors, our primary goals for the week were to refine our previs, start look development, and shoot our footage. While setting up the look development rig, Bua realized it would take a significant amount of work to use the car model we found, as it was made up of triangles and had unusable UVs. Luckily I was able to find us another model with much better topology on Sketchfab. Although it is not exactly the same car, it's still a Porsche (the Porsche 911 Carrera 4s) and looks very similar to our original model.

Model (Sketchfab) Wireframe (Sketchfab) Reference

I then started working on look development with the new model and a look dev rig Bua created. I used an outdoor sunset HDRI from Polyhaven as a placeholder until we shot out own HDRI. For the initial set up I used different colored placeholder materials to help me separate the different materials and see how many there were. Meanwhile Bua was collecting reference for all the different materials.

Found by Bua

Over the weekend we all met up at Skidaway park to shoot our footage. We shot both during the afternoon when it was overcast and at sunset. At night we used an LED light panel and handheld blue lights to shoot lighting reference for the glowing effects.

Shot by Joleen

Based on feedback on my initial look dev set up, I adjusted the key light distance and desaturated the HDRI. Then I started working on the car materials, focusing on those covering the most surface area on the car. I got the most work done on the car body paint, tires, and windshields. I also did some work on the front lights and logo detail.

I also updated our previs, implementing the suggestions the mentors had based on our pitch and new information about the site from the footage we shot. The biggest changes based on said feedback were in the first shot, where we plan to focus more on the foreground plant at first, then rack focus to the car driving in. We got rid of the 2nd shot, and I changed the 3rd shot to better match our storyboards.