We started the week by presenting our progress to the mentors.
We received feedback saying the car shaders felt ambient and plastic because they weren't as reflective as they should be. With some help from Prof. Gaynor we realized the HDRI was combined incorrectly and we weren't getting the full range of information for the lighting and reflections. After realizing this I asked Joleen for the raw footage we shot, and once I received it I recombined the exposures properly. I also increased the IOR of the shaders on the car body and windshields.
After figuring out the HDRI issues, my main goal for the week was to get the basic lighting set up for all of our shots. My team decided since we felt we fell behind in our progress last week, this week we would focus the majority of our effort on making the final shot as polished as possible. With this in mind I started by setting up the final shot (shot 3) with the camera Bua tracked and the car with the rig I created. I then worked on the shot 3 animation, trying to match the reference footage we shot on location. When I finished I added the new HDRI to the scene and did a test render to see the animation on the clean plate.
Shot3 test beauty render over ungraded clean plate
After finalizing the animation I added the key light and a shadow layer to the scene. I also realized I needed to work on the license plate textures as it is so visible in the shot.
Render Base Color map Normal map
By this point Joleen had a particle test done in Houdini and handed it off to me to start testing the Houdini to Maya pipeline. She initially exported alembic (.abc) files for me, which allowed me to get the particles and their movements in the scene, but not the shader. For this first test, I added an aiStandardSurface with emissive to the particles and did a test render to hand off to Bua so she could start compositing tests in Nuke.
Shot 3 beauty and particles 01 over ungraded clean plates
First shot 3 compositing test- Bua
The first test render had the car and particles in the same render layer to lessen render time, but after receiving the second iteration of particle from Joleen I separated them to gave Bua more control in compositing. The second version of the particles was closer to the kind of movement we were going for, but we discussed scaling down the particle size based on earlier feedback. I passed the new renders off to Bua (Beauty, shadow, particles01, and particles02) for another test. For this second test Bua included both versions of the particles to give a better idea of the amount of particles we are going for.
Shot 3 beauty and particles 02 over ungraded clean plates
Second shot 3 compositing test- Bua
After these first couple of particle tests we knew the Houdini to Maya pipeline needed some work to get the shaders Joleen created in Houdini into the scene.

Particle shader in Houdini- Joleen
While Joleen researched the pipeline further I worked on getting our other two shots set up. Bua already animated the car for those shots, so I just had to set up the lighting. For shot 1, the only thing I changed about the animation was the speed of the wheel rotation to closer match our video reference. I did this by editing the multiplier of the expression used to link the tire rotation to the forward movement of the car. Once I had the lighting set up I rendered the beauty and shadow layers and passed them to Bua.
Shot 3 beauty render over ungraded clean plates
Shot 2 is completely CG, and Bua already had the camera set up and animation done. She also created a texture for the road. Additionally, since shot 2 is an immediate continuation of shot 1, I was able to import the lighting set up from shot 1 as a starting point and make small adjustments from there. I also worked on the textures for the Porsche logo, which is very visible in this overhead shot. As with shot 1, after finishing setting up the scene I rendered the beauty and shadow layers to pass off to Bua.
Base Color map Roughness map Height map
Road textures- Bua
Render Base Color map Opacity map Metalness map
While I worked on shots 1 and 2, Joleen found that using .ass files would allow us to get the Houdini shaders into Maya.

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