Hi everyone, back to my real-time integration project blog! As the quarter draws to an end, it is time to wrap up this experimental project. For the past week I've been mostly focusing on fixing the compositing in Nuke while helping on the usual trouble shooting pipeline in Unreal.
After struggling with matching the color on the plates, my professor, Bridget Gaynor, gave me some tips in color correcting image by using color offset. This helps the mood match by a lot. My hardest struggle before was matching the contrast between the 2 plates, using grade, gamma and gain to no avail. By offsetting the shadow value by a small amount, I managed to match the color better. Here's the final nuke tree for the first shot:
The first 2 backdrops are for controlling the HDRI transition that I've showed in last week's blog update. With an addition of a zdepth pass for the final touch. Each passes are exported by my team mate, Antonio Gil, by hacking through Unreal Engine 4.
The second shot is more complicated, especially with the transition FX happening in this sequence. I've mostly worked on color correcting and reformatting the tree to make it look more pleasant, but my other team mate Haley Jones did most of the heavy lifting for this shot. She did a lot of roto for the shot which help me integrate it tremendously.
Last, but not least, the final shot Nuke tree. This one is more straight forward as it doesn't have much to comp. We just merge the color corrected beauty over the plate. I added a color constant to match the feel of the previous shots.
So, without further ado, here's the final integrated video of our real-time car:
And with this, I'll end the project blog here. It has been a long roller coaster ride trying to make a vfx pipeline in Unreal Engine 4 from scratch. I gave a huge shout out to my team members: Haley, Taizyd, and Antonio, for helping me making this project worthwhile. Do kindly check on their websites for their amazing portfolio!