M.A. Digital Effects Final Project NCCA

This is my M.A. Digital Effects final project (NCCA, Bournemouth University). It is supposed to be primarily a lighting & compositing exercise. THE BOURNEMOUTH EXPRESS INTRODUCTION The scenes were lit in Maya using 2 spot lights and an area light. My aim in this project was to learn more about Mental Ray. Unfortunately, most of the project time was spent on research and investigation and the project had to be rushed, compromising a lot on the animation and compositing stages. HDRI lighting was used for reflection and global illumination+occlusion passes. Softwares used were Maya, Shake, HDRShop and Photoshop. Everything from concept, video shoot, modeling, lighting, texturing, compositing, photography for train textures and HDRI, and, sound recording and synch was done by me. SHOT BREAKDOWN SHOT 1 A virgin train was eye-matched as it pulled into the station. Having a train in the shot served as a good light reference. The back plate was colour corrected to produce the desired tone and atmosphere. The platform was cleaned up of the shadows from the roof as I was getting shadow within shadow as the CG train pulled in. Final gather and global illumination was used for indirect lighting as well as spot lights to further accentuate the model. Ambient occlusion with GI was used to match the colour of the shadow regions with the environment. Finally the colour space was changed from linear to log and composited. SHOT 2 The CG roofs were composited matched with the Virgin train carriages to make it look like an old train. The body of the train carriages was retained to get the exact reflections of the people on the platform. The carriages were painted over and then the reflections accentuated and composted on top.