[The Mill X SANM560] Week 8

The main goals of this week was refining the environment of shot 3b - the modern environment in the transition shot.

I started off from refining the previous environment we had ( the vespa shot with three vespa in display glasses). That environment was created based to match the shape of the transition environment of the retro timeline, however, while refining I faced the problem that the angle is so close up and looks heavy, and also since we were using scanned models for the building, it was hard to get the details look good in the close up angle. Due to this reason, I throwed the opinion of pushing back all the buildings since we were no longer using the pillar for the transition shot, and we did not need to match the shape.

Since all the progress of the building was built procedurally, I generated two new row of buildings and made a angle to face the overall image of the entire building while the camera moves. This provided us a wider range to play around with the environment and lighting.

After generating the buildings for the moving angle, we figured out the earlier frames of the transition shot still had blank backgrounds, so to fill out the parts, added more row of buildings.

The angle of the building was referenced from this image

We also had the issue of the building being empty, so I brought in a curtain asset and covered all the windows in the visible angle, and added an image plane to make it look filled, and also a big area light to show the lights turned inside each shop.

For shot 1 and 2 since I was focusing on mainly changing the environment of shot 3b, I did not have a lot of time to refine different shots, but I refined the lighting a bit, and also we started to use the noise map to control the specularity of the cable stone in the street referring to Sam's idea.

This is the version with noise

And this is the version without noise. I figured out that the light is too dark with the specularity map, so will be fixing by adding more fill light in the following week.